EVOLVE | CATEGORIES
22
BUREAUCRACY LITERARY AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES
When was bureaucracy created? Napoleon signed the law that instituted prefects (local government representatives), on 17 February, 1800. The state system, with its army of bureaucratic and administrative officials, was born.
Which writer invented the literary genre called the “White Collar Novel”? In 1844 Honoré de Balzac published Les Employés, a long story that was run on the pages of La Presse in which he describes the nature of the white-collar employee and sustains that “Bureaucracy is a gigantic mechanism moved by Pygmies.”
Speaking of turnaround and the need to redefine corporate culture, which book invites managers not to be afraid of eliminating “obsolete trappings”? Who says elephants can’t dance? by Luis V. Gerstner Jr., the man who helped rebuild IBM, bringing it back from the edge of the abyss to be, once again, leaders in their market.
Why is bureaucracy often referred to as being “kafkaesque”? Writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), born in Prague, is the author of The Process. It is the distressing novel about a bank official named Josef K. who is overwhelmed by the excesses of bureaucracy. That is why today the word kafkaesque is synonymous with paradoxical, shocking, absurd.
What does “Writing with a human voice” mean? It means writing text with a clear sentence structure and not “clinging to gerunds like bureaucrats”. Conceived of by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger (professionals, economists and pioneers of the web) in 1999, the Cluetrain Manifest is a 95-point essay that anticipates the impact of the internet on markets and organizations. The first six theories are eloquent: 1. Markets are conversations. 2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors. 3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. 4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. 5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice. 6. The internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
N° 5 - APRIL 2020
