Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog

Here’s the deal: to achieve results, you’ve got to do something. If you do something, you’ll make mistakes. Mistakes are, by definition, a process violation. So the only way to reverence process at all costs is to do nothing or, at the very least, proceed with the utmost caution. You’ve probably wondered why government service is so slow. This is the reason why: people are being very careful. They have to be, because any misstep can be deadly.

My father spent most of his professional life in the public sector, trying to get things done. Among other things, he and a colleague built a non-profit that serviced government guaranteed student loans in the early 80’s when the governement opened up that program, and he wrote and managed the grants to build a new sewage treatment plant for a growing western city.

He observed, more than once, that “in a perfect bureacracy, nothing gets done.”