Bureaucracies create and sustain a moral perspective.
“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.”

— Hyman Rickover–
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By Walter V. Wendler

Effective bureaucracies — vision directed guidelines and processes — are flywheels reducing vibration in an organization by tempering irregularity and providing consistency and rhythm. They are exceedingly rare.  Typically, and unfortunately, bureaucracies do little of value to focus on first purpose.  Inevitably they become twisted first purpose and live outside the watch, like a wicked watchmaker.  Any human organization that aspires to purpose and excellence via regularity of process alone cannot do so.  It is lost.

Max Weber, a German sociologist whose ideas flourished in the 1930’s and 40’s, identified key principles of good government: 1) formal structure, 2) management by rules, 3)  fixed division of labor, 4) equity based treatment of employees and customers, 5) success determined by technical qualifications, 6) all knotted together by a propensity to enlarge.  Number six, added by C. Northcott Parkinson as a criticism, became known as “Parkinson’s Law.”

Douglas J. Amy, a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, argues that bureaucracy is government and therefore it’s good in a stunningly simplistic story called “Government Is Good.”   He tries to break myths such as bureaucracies are wasteful, government should be a business, bureaucracies cause government growth, and bureaucracies provide poor service. Visit the Department of Motor Vehicles in New York or California to see how far out in left field Amy is.  Although intricately woven, Amy’s and Weber’s “bureaucracies-are-good” or create “good” are still nonsense, whether caring for the sick, educating the young, or selling nuts and bolts.

Robert Jackall’s “Moral Mazes: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work”, in the Harvard Business Review, 1983, suggests that managers create a morality in an organization by day-to-day actions — habit.  My friend used to have a sign in his office, “Make order and cleanliness a habit.”  Process becomes all and it’s hard to argue against fair processes.  But vital opportunity is leadership-driven through predictable behavior. If “Weber’s Web” takes over rules govern, not people. And this road to nowhere is paved with good intentions. This visionless path spawned by rationality and procedural perfection, guided by management processes rather than ideas and passion, is full of potholes.

The real work of any organization of two or more people, public or private, should be excellence through the attainment of a vision guided mission.  However, bureaucracies are sanitized from any guiding perspective working under the assumption that because different moralities exist in pluralistic organizations, it is preferred that the organization have no perspective at all, moral or otherwise.

Teamwork and thoughtful mission directed processes shouldn’t be confused with bureaucracy.  Teamwork is essential, bureaucracy is crippling.   But fair processes are vital:  Don’t choke this idea for its seemingly autocratic tendencies.  Kevin Williamson in National Review Online argued last week that damning autocracy exists in bureaucracies upheld by rules established by committees.  Worse yet, nobody, not even leadership, appears responsible…just good managers following democratically determined processes and rules.  That should be Mr. Weber’s first law, make everyone responsible for nothing.  Such organizations claim to embrace “Management Morality” as a means to equity and fairness.

Managerial plebiscites are disingenuous and rudderless.  Indeed, the best ideas frequently well-up from the ground, not dribbling down from on-high.  Bureaucracies bent on a rule-driven aversion to risk create listlessness.  Organizational morality hates intelligence apart from process.  The morality of the bureaucracy is not wedded to the functional goal of excellence but procedural machination elevated to a perverse art-form of jots and tittles.

Initiative is replaced by the caprice of mindless obedience. Willful compliance based on a commitment to cause beyond process is invaluable, but mindless conformity to anything is worthless and suffocating.  This, for many organizations, is the operational morality paralyzing human initiative, commitment to high purpose, and progress that provides for liberty and achievement.
Our universities are too frequently bedeviled by the seemingly benevolent belief that procedural rationality creates quality.  Sorry, it won’t.  Bureaucracy birthed moral perspective should be checked at the front door:  It devastates everything a university, or any human organization, should strive for.

 By J. Larry Miller

The weather this past week has been nothing short of wonderful with cool temperatures, heavy morning dew and soils damp with moisture. Crops are certainly looking very good with the possibility of corn yields being the best ever on some farms. Soybeans are looking very good also but it will be another 30 days before the outcome will be more certain. In the next couple of weeks we will be having our annual Corn Yield Tour which will give us a better handle on the yields in Franklin County.

Larry Miller, executive director Franklin County Farm Bureau

All of these are only predictions at this point but as farmers we know it is not certain until it is in the bin.

On Tuesday, I attended a conference at Rend Lake College concerning hydraulic fracturing of oil wells. As most of you know the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation regulating this practice and the governor recently signed it into law which experts say is the most restrictive in the nation. This conference provided information about the law, the process of fracturing, the possible development of new oil exploration and economic boom that could result. There were 300 people that attend which indicates the interest that this project has generated.

This exploration has resulted in an economic boom in North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Because of this new technology the U.S. has surpassed Russia in natural gas production and could well be the leader in oil production by 2017!

I have believed that this technology and the economic development that would follow is very real. With this being said, we have sold several plat books to oil groups that have been doing work at the courthouse for the last couple of years that were involved in the developments in other states.

There is a website www.energyindepth.org that provides a lot of good information about energy development in this country. Information such as our CO2 emissions are now the lowest since 1992. This was an excellent conference provided by our own Rend Lake College.

This July has marked the 20^th anniversary of the Great Flood of 1993. There were catastrophic damages throughout much of the Upper Mississippi River Basin with 47 deaths, flood impacts over $15 billion, 72,000 homes were damages and one 200 mile section of the Mississippi River was left without a bridge crossing.

On Monday and Tuesday the Illinois Farm Bureau co-sponsored breakfast meetings to discuss Policy Development issues with local farmers. We discussed fracking, animal rights, farmer image and EPA regulations. Those in attendance not only left the meeting with a full stomach but became better informed on these issues.

Remember we are farmers working together. If we can help let us know.