Among the opinion writers I read more or less regularly, David Brooks stands out as one of the most annoying. Three times out of five (okay, that’s just a statistical guess), I find him patronizing, preachy and un-self-aware. But then, in those other two columns, he addresses real issues and does so perceptively.
The column that prompted today’s post is one of the latter. In it, Brooks considers what he calls the “growing bureaucratization of America.” His first paragraph sets out his thesis/observation:
Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
As regular readers of this blog know, a couple of years ago I retired from a position as a college professor, a cog in what has to be one of the most prominent examples of the trend Brooks is exploring–a university. I still recall a conversation with a colleague who had preceded me in the trip from “real life” job to the groves of academe. She warned me that what would drive me insane was the utter lack of urgency I would encounter. She was right–if an identified problem was considered really urgent, it might get addressed in a year or two. Universities are very bureaucratic.
Brooks proceeds to provide the requisite overview:
Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
He also acknowledges the pre-eminence of higher education in the bureaucratization of American life. The following paragraph didn’t surprise me:
This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.
The rest of the column is devoted to multiple examples of bureaucratic growth and a wide variety of mostly unfortunate and worrisome consequences.
Brooks doesn’t address what is impelling the growth of bureaucracy, or what steps we might take to reverse it. He also doesn’t address what I have long thought to be a glaringly selective response to the phenomenon: Americans are absolutely obsessed with the ways bureaucracy impedes and complicates the work of our various government agencies–but seem not to recognize that the same situation impedes the efficient operation of corporations, large nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.
Sociologists and anthropologists can probably shed light on the reasons for the nation’s increasing bureaucratization. My own hunch–and it’s only a hunch–is that it’s prompted in part by what Brooks calls a desire for “safety first,” a desire to avoid possible dangers. (I also have a sneaking suspicion that it represents a reaction to America’s very litigious society–an effort to avoid the threat of lawsuits by demonstrating the lengths a company or organization has gone to avoid various foreseeable harms.)
Brooks thinks that resentment of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of our society is one of the things motivating MAGA folks. Maybe–although most credible studies attribute pro-Trump MAGA sentiment primarily to racial grievance, not a more generalized impatience with bureaucracy. (MAGA attacks on universities and corporations are focused on that hated DEI, after all, not the number of administrators and managers.)
I tend to think that the growth of bureaucracy is a phase–something that will abate when, and if, civil society sorts itself out and Americans grow up. Think of today’s America as a teenager, needing rules and structure to balance out those raging hormones….
Why is anyone surprised at this? When you send your kid to college, you expect them to become part of the bureaucracy. After all, we can’t have Suzie Blue-eyes picking vegetables or sawing wood or fixing a pipe after we’ve spent $150,000 getting her properly educated. I mean what else were all those sorority connections supposed to do?
Sorry for the snark, but it’s kind of a self-fulfilling action when we revere formal, university education so much without connecting it to how things work. By the time those college graduates find out, they’re embedded in the “system”.
I’ve always advocated that every educator work in the real world for a time to get a feel for not just how bureaucracy works – or doesn’t – but to also pass on to their students what to expect and what is expected of them so they can make better choices in what they do for a living.
As a former paid bureaucrat, I do have some insight. I saw, at my job, a regular increase in management over a thirty year period. It started with an increase in line staff to be able to continue meeting clients needs. Naturally, those staff had to have a direct report. And after enough units were created, there was a director for that grouping. We had work deadlines and were required to meet them, by State and Federal law. We couldn’t just take our time. The problem I saw was an increase in the management at Central office. They added layers there for reasons I could not discern. And often giving jobs to people that had no idea of what we were doing. So, in order to “make their mark”, they instituted assinine rules that slowed our processing of work. As one of the people in the trenches at a government agency, there are too many middle and upper managers. Hire good ones in the first place and let line staff do their jobs. Stop hiring cohorts and college buddies. I’m not sure that the proliferation is related to fear of getting it wrong. If it were, you would think they would hire an expert in the area, not some guy that was making pies last week. At least that’s how it was at my agency.
Bureaucracy exists in all larger enterprises—-for profit, non-profit and governmental, and I’m always suspicious when a politician states that private business can provide government services at a lower cost. They claim businesses don’t have as much bureaucracy. Maybe, maybe not.
An anecdote: I remember meeting a professor of English at a Boston university on a hiking trip. Every night we would gather around the dinner table and talk. What did he like least? Faculty meetings—-the less important the topic, the more time they spent discussing it.
Vernon, you need to find the “real world” before one can work in it. Almost 50 years ago I walked into a GM building in Detroit. In the sea of desks you could tell everyone’s rank by the positions of their work space (corner office? Access to a window?) and the quality of their furnishings. The bureaucracy was alive and well in the private sector.
While there is plenty of deadwood in the ranks of the bureaucracy today, there is more importantly, whole new levels of management required for the increasing complications of manufacturing, the service industry and the regulation of our capitalist system.
The automobiles of today are like space ships compared to the cars of yesteryear. So too the telephones. Satellites have replaced telephone polls. Who needs a paper map when a unknown voice can tell you where to turn, and why have a savings passbook when your computer can be your bank?
All of the “advances” of the last decades require new levels of control and supervision. You want less bureaucracy? Get rid of your smart phone, smart TV, on-line shopping and home delivery. Get rid of your work from home, g-mail, and Facebook. I dare you.
Over my 29 years with a graduate school, I saw how every problem that arose was “addressed@ by hiring more staff. All along, I thought most of the problems were due to the erosion of trust. The more trust between people, the less need for rules and regs. When trust is lacking, the solution is not to bureaucratize, but to build trust by building an effective team.
So many Mission Statements in more than 50 years of teaching! The late cartoonist Randy Glasbergen sums it up:
https://glasbergen.b-cdn.net/wp-content/gallery/mission/toon-1264.gif
In my consulting days, the heavy bureaucracy in banks was due to not using the technology provided. Most regional banks used around 24-40% of the software. We spent seven weeks interviewing bank personnel on their jobs. They were shuffling papers from the frontline where they’d meet with customers to a teller and then back to an operations staff.
We eventually redesigned their workflow so they would input (utilize the software) to do their jobs while with the customer. Most of the frontline needed to be adequately trained to use the software. Once they started using the software, the operations or backroom shrunk drastically. Most staff were moved to the front while others were let go.
Just an observation: capitalism, more specifically, an oligarchy, has an inherent hierarchy. Organizational charts are convenient for a CEO to monitor bureaucratic growth. They can see which departments have grown too large and shift human resources or do without.
Libertarians would tell us that bureaucracy is the fault of too many government agencies and departments–too many regulations. That’s why they want to eliminate the IRS, Department of Education, etc.
What is bureaucracy? I am seriously asking.
Probably because the term has such an intensely negative connotation and because I spent most of my career working in the insurance industry, an entire industry that one might think about as nothing but bureaucracy. Who “makes” a life insurance policy? The agent that sold it to you? The actuary that calculated the premiums? The lawyer that wrote the contract? The CEO?
I suspect that most of us feel that bureaucracy amounts to the part of an organization or activity that fails to add value (or even robs value). If a bank has risk management systems and activities, they might seem disconnected from the business of lending money and taking deposits, but if you put your money in a bank that didn’t have them, you probably wouldn’t get it back, and then you would be dealing with the FDIC – a different bureaucracy than the one you meant to deal with.
I have an appointment with the local office of the Michigan Secretary of State tomorrow morning to register a vehicle and renew my drivers license. Isn’t that classic bureaucracy? Would you want to drive if requirements for driver and vehicle safety didn’t exist?
Our society, our world, is a complex organism, and we are still discovering all of the ways in which we are connected to it and to one another. If you wanted to run a meat packing plant in a laissez faire world, safety requirements for your workers and purity requirements for your products and environmental requirements for your neighbors would not exist. I’m glad we have gotten past that point.
Other requirements and prohibitions that we encounter have less obvious value, and I think that is when the dreaded “bureaucracy” occurs. Sometimes the person or the system that we deal with makes it very difficult to see the value. And sometimes we lack the patience to identify or weigh the value because we just need to get something done. I think often times, both might be true. The urgency we feel usually has an impact on both our curiosity and our patience.
TL:DR
The “bureaucracy” so evident in today’s USA is entirely to be expected due to the USA’s lengthy economic and political stability. And, barring creative destruction, it will only become more bureaucratic.
Capitalism prides itself as institutionalized “creative destruction”. But no institution sees its own demise as “creative”. So, each will seek to game the system to protect itself. Those which can do that (eg, non-technologically vulnerable service industries which can gain political clout) can become immune to “creative destruction”. Combining that stability with every institution’s “bigger/better” growth imperative, the inevitable long-term effect is its “bureaucratization”.
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I was a physics undergrad many decades ago. The university required us “Art & Sciences” majors to take electives in other subjects to give us a more rounded, “university” education. “Intro to Russian History” was one of my electives, and likely only an elective for most of my classmates.
In the waning days of the semester, our professor (Dr. Charles Halperin) was prepping us for the final exam with a summary review of the more noteworthy points over the whole of Russia’s history.
Now, I majored in physics in part to satisfy my itch to seek/understand fundamental forces and principles. So, while it was fascinating to see how Russia evolved over its 1,000 history, it seemed to me the only lasting value to the vast majority of us NOT wishing to specialize in Russian affairs would be to gain a deeper, more universal understanding of history itself.
So, during one of his pauses for questions, I asked Dr. Halperin, “What should we take away from this class? I mean, this review is interesting. But is there something even more general which unifies everything?”
I remember him looking at me a bit puzzled.
He thought for a few seconds.
He then said something like, “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say Russia’s historical constant is the growth in its bureaucracy. During its various stretches of stability, the one thing that seems to always occur is the growth and increasing complexity of Russia’s bureaucracy. The power of Russia’s elites come and go. But it’s bureaucracy always seems to keep going in one form or another and always growing.”
His reply has stuck with me for half a century. And as I’ve read other histories, I’ve looked for and found the same thing elsewhere – Harappa, Republican & Imperial Rome, Europe (both post-fall medieval and then Renaissance & Enlightenment), Imperial China, the rise and dominance of the Islamic Caliphates, the Maya, Incas, Aztecs, and Zulus.
“Bureaucratization” is endemic in religion. Look at the universal path of transformation from religions’ charismatic founders into massively bureaucratic organizations.
Interestingly, “bureaucratization” is true outside of traditional institutions.
“Bureaucratization” is true linguistically. An isolated language group will develop “bureaucratically” – increasing its efficiency by innovating structural complexity to convey nuances in place of “ad hoc”, less standard or precise descriptions. Languages only simplify (ie, their bureaucracy only wanes) with intense friction (creolization) of people speaking other, differently structured languages.
“Bureaucratization” is also evident in the natural world. Consider the difference between a chaotic mudslide and a more structurally nuanced and sustained waterfall or river draining water to lower levels in long, complex meandering, water-carved channels. Stability over time “bureaucratizes” energy flow – reducing water’s potential energy (“seeking its lowest levels” due to gravity) the most efficient way.
So, once again, the “bureaucracy” so evident in today’s USA is entirely to be expected due to the USA’s lengthy economic and political stability. And, barring creative destruction, it will only become more bureaucratic.
Capitalism prides itself as institutionalized “creative destruction”. But no institution sees its own demise as “creative”. So, each will seek to game the system to protect itself. Those which can do that (eg, non-technologically vulnerable service industries which can gain political clout) can become immune to “creative destruction”. Combining that stability with every institution’s “bigger/better” growth imperative, the inevitable long-term effect is its “bureaucratization”.
I am a retired bureaucrat and agree with Melinda. The longer I worked for the state the more supervision I got, increasing the time from answering a consumer’s (they were no longer clients) question from 5 minutes to a month while all those supervisors shoehorned above me double checked my work. Most of them knew a lot less than I did so it took a lot longer while they looked up the regs I had committed to memory. What a cluster.
I once read a science fiction book where the main character worked for a galactic agency, the BUSAB, or the Bureau of Sabotage. The main premise of the book was that when a government got too efficient it would force conformance and squash creativity and would eventually endanger the stability of the government and increase civil unrest. His job was to influence things in such a way that inefficiency was forced back in to the system. So maybe there is some debate if there is room for bureaucracy.
Also, the comment about “safety” was interesting. Take this in light of the recent meltdown at ATT. I used to work in IT at a local utility as a network engineer. Working on the network is kind of like working on a motorcycle engine when it’s still running and has to stay running. My job got to the point where I was lucky to get two productive hours in the day. This was mainly because of our change control process. A five minute change would take me hours to document and sometimes days to get approved. While it was entirely possible that any change I made on the network could take down the whole thing and if the communication is not happening, none of that wonderful automation works. I’m thinking that change was forced on to the company by company auditors and because we were a publicly traded company, our auditors were making sure the business was using “industry best practices”. I’m not sure the change control process improved the quality of the work. I think the real result was it gave managment somebody to blame and have it documented ahead of time, when things went sideways. I suspect some technician at ATT is getting raked over the coals while the manager that didn’t understand the details of the work avoids the blame but has even more reason to enforce the bureaucracy.
As an Autistic, Jewish, “aging”, retired after 31 years – Federal Employee – I’d like to suggest several things: 1. Read – (Nobel Laureate in Economics/ Professor etc.) – Joseph Stiglitz – https://www.georgemarx.org/2019/06/people-power-and-profits-joseph.html – re: the two types of Capitalism we live in, 2. How corporations – “exist”- required to seek profit for stockholders – the “long-term” is often 3-12 months – highly inefficient, 3. Increased Concentration of power – in the 1%/other elites – and how they – tied to the “Right” – play on our Fears- historically and currently, 4. How most of us – Upper-Middle Class – white people (my partner is Female, Jewish, Black, Queer Identified – which makes things a little different for me) – have natural disincentives – from “risking losing” – what “power” we have – and We have the most potential (unused) power to confront The Elites, 5. Schools/ Employers – etc. don’t “teach” us to – be curious – to reach beyond our comfort zones – AND – to Cooperate – to Build – Allyship – 6. and More – As a Federal Employee – LOYALTY – **s-kissing – was valued – not quantity and quality of my work 99% of the time – etc. etc. – we don’t learn – from the Black, often Queer Women/Trans Folk – who of necessity – “do the work” – really provided the margin for Joe (*en*cid*) B (re: Gaza) – Gaza/Israel/Ukraine Wars – serve the PROFITS – of big corporations – and their “worth” to “us” – is rarely considered!
Mark B, I agree. “Bureaucracy” is one of those undefinable abstractions (words) we use that’s handy for complaining without thinking. It’s like complaining about the weather.
That being said, when I was working for a living, we went through a cultural belief stage (religion?) that suggested the biggest problem in manufacturing (variability between parts (are they each and always within Six Sigma tolerance of the specification)) also applies to people. People are too variable.
The solution relies on process control of people and conformance to written expectations instead of creativity and knowledgeable judgment.
Of course, we all were insulted by the mere thought that our complex individual judgment could be replaced by notebooks full of rules.
Was that “religion” worth the cost it extracted? My considered judgment is that the belief was overapplied. We, like always, overextended a grain of truth into an overall blanket of job security.
We apparently feel we need more managers to manage more managers but I have always told anyone listening that this added expense is a result of a more litigious society and that the fear of litigation as well as market share drives the attention of those in the boardrooms, but not to worry > at some point (perhaps soon) AI may supplant the need for such human management in the corporate world, assuming would be consumers of their goods and services and the corporate culture as we know them continue to exist (speaking of Brave New Worlds in economics).
It would be interesting to somehow know the curricula of the business schools embedded in our colleges and universities twenty five years from now, again assuming the existence of such institutions and what is then taught. My guess is that such quaint notions as supply and demand, Adam Smith, the Chicago School and other such Neanderthal economics will have long since been discarded in academia in favor of a system I can’t even imagine at my pay grade and must leave to the Pikettys and Krugmans of today to identify and discuss.
As a long time member of the deep state, I frequently had to find workarounds to get what was needed done. It’s not easy to do, because it requires extensive knowledge of the regulations and frequently friendships with others who can help when shown the regs that allow it. I always was short staffed, but 9 out of 10 times we got to where we needed to be. Nobody likes bureaucracy. It’s a necessary thing, though. The people who worked in my departments were exceptional. They were picked for their concerns about service to the people who needed our help. That’s the real key.
The needs for “real bureaucracy” are ignored: planning and writing laws and regulations that consider, up front, unintended consequences; writing and laws and regulations that consider, up front, any/all the ways that grifters can use them for their own advantage.
What a Great Discussion and related Offerings today. Thank you all.
I have had a great intellectual feast reading Sheila and ALL the comments so far.
How many feel as I do (I have been hanging around these pages for a couple of decades) that the arc of understanding here among posters has trended towards deeper and more nuanced?
I am reminded of what happens in classroom conversations from the beginning to the ending of successful teaching of challenging subjects.
David Brooks seems to be assuming that *this* is a bad thing:
———According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”———
Perhaps he can also calculate for us the total of lost productivity when supervisors and co-workers are allowed to harass their colleagues sexually or verbally or otherwise. MIssion statements? Isn’t it much more productive to allow each employee to decide where to prioritize their efforts? Ah, “collecting data”! How useless! Corporations can operate much more efficiently if their managers just use their mighty instincts instead. And “managing systems”? How about we just let the concrete subcontractors and the steel suppliers and the electrical contractors and the drywall hangers just decide themselves when to show up for the job?
All of these “bureaucratic” jobs are necessary to make complex systems operate.
As many previous commenters have said, this is part of living in a complex stable society.
Yes, Americans spend far too much of their “health care” expenses on layers of administration. That’s capitalism at work, multiple players all trying to extract maximum profit from the system. The insurers need an army of bureaucrats to keep the providers from larding on layers of unnecessary charges. And the providers need an army of administrators to grab every bit of compensation they can get from insurers and consumers. A single payer system would eliminate much of that overhead, but the political power invested in the profit-driven sysem seems unsurmountable right now. In the meantime, I want Medicare and Medicaid to have all the bureaucrats they need to root out the scammy providers who bill for unneeded products and services. And I want the NIH and CDC and FDA to fund all those people sitting behind desks and “gathering data” and “issuing guidelines” and devising “best practices” which help both the medical workers and the patients get the best results.
There’s plenty of room in capitalist America for “initiative, discretion, creativity and drive” — but allowing those values to take precedence and run unchecked ultimately gives us a dog-eat-dog society.
Too much bureaucracy kills the ability of job applicants to meet the requirements being set for a career position. Therefore a person only has 2 choices, rise to meet the qualifications (shell out more money on education and certifications) or change course. I’m tired of people saying that education helps you to move up the ladder because in my case it didn’t. It was a huge waste of money for me to go to college. If I had it to do over again I would have worked my way up the ladder in a business so I could help other people like myself that just want some stability in their career life and not endlessly be dealing with applying to jobs where snooty fortunate people look down on anyone that doesn’t meet their desired education/qualifications.
“Emily the Criminal” is a movie that really hits home with me. If your tired of the BS from people UP the Ladder.
Another great movie is “Office Space”. It shows that the character “Peter” and his friends were grinding it out in the wrong job. At the end, he’s happier with a construction job free from the crap of an office setting.
When fellow students in a graduate class in rehabilitation complained about all the paper work in the Indiana vocational rehabilitation system the assistant professor responded with: “Think about how many people have jobs because of that paperwork.”
When I was teaching school, we were required to write curriculum guides. One of our assistant superintendents was in charge of this. We had multiple meetings, and eventually turned in the guides. The idea was that the supervisor would review them and return them to us. We never saw them again and did not miss them. Had we gotten them back, we would not have used them anyway.
We always laughed about this as a good example of useless bureaucracy that took us away from our actual mission: teaching. Not so funny, really.
As a former member of the staff at MIT, I counseled around 1500 undergraduate and graduate students on academic requirements, policies, and procedures, which of course meant a lot of more personal counseling and triage. I also took over administering various requirements and student programs and serving on student-oriented committees because I believed I could do better than it was being done. Over the 40 years I worked there, MIT moved from not wanting to “handhold” students to being eager to ensure their well-being. This meant increasing staff in various student services. We offered students new opportunities, like work and study abroad, that required staff. But a major reason MIT has so many staff is non-faculty researchers working in faculty research groups.
I have a cartoon in my humor file that a friend who worked in State Government gave me. She told me that it was about the computerization of a manual system (yes, it was probably 35 years ago). The image was of this gnomish looking guy with a rack across his shoulders, and a steaming bucket on either end of the rack. The caption said,
“In the olden days we used to have to carry the lava down the mountain in buckets and throw it on the sleeping villagers”.
When computers first came around we were first told that they were going to make things much easier, automating a lot of the existing manual processes. Then, probably some data processing guy started pushing all of the other things that could be tracked, and then “managed”. This eventually created the Harvard MBA, who’s whole purpose in life is to manipulate numbers that are being “tracked” in order to maximize profits in whatever corporation has been fool enough to hire them. I’ve worked for two major corporations where even the store manager couldn’t communicate a problem with a product to the corporate office. If you manage by the numbers rather than by the people, you always think more numbers is better control. It reminds me of a recent Facebook Post by Neil deGrasse Tyson where he talked about how different our scientific understanding of, I believe it was the electromagnetic spectrum, is compared to what we can ship. implying that because the sensory understanding was so incomplete, the scientific understanding was better. This is a bit like the difference between looking at the equations of motion for the balls, the bats, and the players in a baseball gave versus watching the game in person. The physics may be more complete, but the the live game is a visceral not an intellectual experience.
Getting a college education is not about getting a job. The education I got in the 60+ hours I managed to get in around working and raising family was never about getting a job. It enriched my life in more ways than I can count. Being exposed to ideas, science, the arts, a diverse community and different ideas from a whole range of people made me a better citizen and a better person (I hope) able to think for myself. It also taught me that I did not need to know everything, I just had to know where to find the information or someone who understood thing much better than I did myself. Most of those people were teachers, formally or informally. I try to pass that experience along to future generation.
Bureaucrats come in very handy, especially when you are filled with emotion and floundering as you seek to move on with life. I shudder to think how my life would be without them.
I’d guess the general loathing of bureaucratization is related to the distrust, dislike, and disdain for “big government”. (Probably, “disgust” belonged in the adjective list, too. Lots of dis’ing.) I doubt people think in terms of bureaucracy, instead relating most (if not all) inefficiencies, hindrances, and hypocrisies to the government they dislike. It’s never corporations, after all, because _they_ are the saviour entities made to fix those governmental problems! (That is, of course, absolutely untrue.)
By the way, I’m not surprised at all by the university ratio. Large universities become essentially towns in their own right, often with police departments, fire departments, cleaning staff, maintenance departments, food staff, and much, much more. There are almost certainly too many bureaucrats, but that’s not the real reason for the high ratio.
I think bureaucracy is like public health measures and drainage infrastructure. You only notice the inconvenience. The horrors they protect you from are forgotten and go unnoticed.
I would suggest bureaucracy increases as a way for people to make a living wage. Ask almost anyone and they’ll tell you that teachers and nurses don’t make a lot of money. But, if you switch to the managerial/bureaucracy side – suddenly there are “titles” and you get pay raises based on how you “move up”. You’re not a section head, a section manager, a department head, a department manager, a senior department manager, etc etc. Each new title gets you a defined pay increase.
Hence, nurses jump ship from patient care to paperwork. Teachers jump from student learning to administration. Fewer work hours for more money and influence. Can’t blame them, really. Fix the money side and it all works itself out. It’s the economy stupid wasn’t just a clever plan in the 90s.
Maybe 20 years ago a new policy arrived at my husband’s company (and I think many others) that a manager could be trained to manage anyone–including people in jobs about which he/she knew nothing. When such a manager was hired to supervise my husband, he stopped liking his job. That was bureaucracy at its worst.