I heard of the following rules from Dorothy Bowman who was my HR director years ago. Dorothy had experience in the federal bureaucratic wars (Navy if I recall correctly), but the rules work almost anywhere:

1. If it doesn’t say you can’t, you can.


2. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.


3. Proceed until apprehended!

The rules work beautifully, but there may be hell to pay if (when??) you get caught. So, good luck!

Let’s be careful out there!

“Once a company gets really big, they are always second-guessing themselves. Only very ordinary ideas survive that process.”— Dave Winer.

Second-guessing (and worse) happens at almost all established organizations. Once you get to a certain level, a certain age, things are expected to be done a certain way. It’s damn-near impossible to break the cycle, even if you’re in what a good friend calls the “death spiral.”

The good news is companies die and new ones are invented to replace them. There’s constant, but messy, fermentation. But what about public enterprises (got water?), that can’t go out of business (got security?), but face incredible barriers to change? Got Katrina??

Dave’s right when he suggests young entrepreneurs go find a hill to camp out on. Highly unlikely to create change walking through the front door. Unless you’re the rare CEO…

In Bureaucracy = Death, Seth Godin talks about bureaucracy related to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and presents a nice, but unworkable, idea to bust bureacuracy.

Seth’s Analysis: “Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk.”

Seth’s Idea: “Appoint a CNO—chief no officer. No longer can someone say no to an idea and leave it at that. If you want to turn something down, you’ve got to pass it on to your boss. Then either he says yes or gives it to his boss. For a ‘no’ to be official, it’s got to be approved by the chief no officer and countersigned by every manager along the way.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to bust bureaucracy with more, umm, bureaucracy. Better to empower people with ideas to “just do it!” Encourage them. Back them up. Eliminate approvals. Create many Chief Yes Officers!