The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy

Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler

By: Mark Schwartz

Narrated by: Erick Jason Martin

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy.

Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.

For anyone frustrated by roadblocks, irritated the business can't move fast enough, or suffering under the weight of crushing procedures, this book is for you. No matter your role, you need a playbook for bureaucracy. This is it. With this playbook, you can wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Mark Schwartz (P)2020 Mark Schwartz

Good content, but annoying footnotes

I found the constant audio of reading editor and author footnotes annoying and counter productive to the natural flow of the story. Wish I could turn them off as they did not add anything, but got in the way. Glad I completed it as Part III is the most useful part.

Insightful and hope-inspiring

Quit letting our secrets out before they invent a better beuacracy! I can't actually spell burueqcracy is one problem I guess I still have to work on.

What Schwartz describes is like a living organism. Buracrcacy self-organizes similarly at different organizations and contexts. It reacts similarly to certain stimuli, as Schwartz points out, and creates more of itself if left unchallenged. It's also vulnerable to adjustment if you know what knobs to turn. Interesting, Mr. Schwartz!

This book is useful to have in your toolbox if you are working to promote a culture of DevOps at your organization. It's true. Bureeacracy can be agile, as Schwartz points out.

Anyway, my only gripe is the audiobook format. There are some amusing exchanges and excerpts between the author and editor. This is fun except it often interrupts mid-page or mid-thought. It could be distracting or hard to follow at times, but I got used to it. The written version I would probably skip it and keep reading until after finishing the thought.

motivante, entretenido

excelente narrador. un libro cuya lógica es aplicable a casi cualquier país. motiva a generar cambios

Sir Terry Pratchett of Process Improvement

Hillarious, erudite, insightful, and practical guide to building lean, learning, enabling bureaucracies - a necessary foundation for consistent outcomes.

Light on Content, Heavy on Length

This book has about an hour of actually really good content. Unfortunately, it's buried under hours and hours of annoying footnotes by the author and editor, cutesy jokes about those footnotes between the editor and author (it was funny the first time, annoying on the 20th), references that are overly footnoted, references to those references, repeated references to the author's own previous work, ego stroking, and repetitive padding. Considering that it proposes it can help you cut through red tape and razor off the blubber from the Great White Whale (Moby Dick, Herman Melville; The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, Mark Schwartz), this is somewhat maddening. The nuggets that are good are really good, but they're not worth the book's length. This needs to be trimmed down and made lean.