Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t
I was talking on the phone with Hayagreeva (aka “Huggy”) Rao today about a project we are working on, and he said something wonderful “Smart organizations make difficult things simple.”
One corollary being that smart organizations, even those with lots of smart people, make simple things difficult. Accessing health insurance and getting innovative ideas approved are just two examples that come to mind in organizations that have high internal transaction costs relative to the value they create. Perhaps the IRS would also fit that corollary.
Sutton and Rao probably have some good examples in mind to illustrate this observation. Progressive Insurance strikes me as one such organization. Any other illustrative examples?
To defend the IRS…it is not their fault ‘they’ make thinks difficult. Blame congress for the insanity that is the IRS. All the exemptions, exceptions, loopholes, etc, that make paying taxes difficult are (almost) all the result of legislative action, not bureaucratic action.
Though that may point at Congress as a group of “smart” (using the word loosely) that make simple things difficult… but then again that is probably more an issue of democracy rather than anything else.
Fair point. Although the IRS acts out complexities bequeathed by Congress, it is not solely responsible for those complexities. It is, however, terminally bureaucratic in the way it interacts with the public, though e-filing shows that it can simplify.
To your observation, though, when people complain about gridlock and bureaucracy in DC, it’s important to recognize that the system is designed to produce that very result.