HOW MANY KINDS OF BUREAUCRACY THERE ARE, AND CONCERNING TEMPORARY EMPLOYEES

HAVING discoursed particularly on the characteristics of such corporations as in the beginning I proposed to discuss, and having considered in some degree the causes of their being good or bad, and having shown the methods by which many have sought to acquire them and to hold them, it now remains for me to discuss generally the means of offense and defense which belong to each of them.

We have seen above how necessary it is for an executive to have his foundations well laid, otherwise it follows of necessity he will go to ruin. The chief foundations of all companies, new as well as old or composite, are sound organizational structure, clear policy and strong bureaucracy; and as there cannot be good structure where the company's bureaucracy is precarious, it follows that where there is a powerful bureaucracy they have good structure. I shall leave the particulars of structure and policy out of the discussion and shall speak of the bureaucracy.

I say, therefore, that the bureaucracy with which an executive defends his company is either his own, or they are temps, overhead, or mixed. Temps and overhead are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his company based on this kind of bureaucracy, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither internalized the corporate culture nor have they loyalty to their fellow employee, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for internally one is robbed by them, and in externally by the competition. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the market than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your engineers whilst you are not in a serious, make or break competitive position, but the time comes to demonstrate their mettle they take themselves off or punch the time clock; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of American industry has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on temps, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the competitors came they showed what they were. Thus it was that Dick Slashburn, Executive Vice President of Hewitt Cardpic's Hardcopy group, was allowed to seize America's printer market; and he who told us that the competitive printer manufacturer's sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of executives, it is the executives who have also suffered the penalty.

I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of temporary bureaucrats. The mercenary industrial captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way.

And if it be urged that whoever is hired will act in the same way, whether temporary or not, I reply that when bureaucratic forms have to be resorted to, either by an executive or an association, then the executive ought to go in person and perform the duty of coach; the association has to send its employees, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by policy so that he does not leave the position. And experience has shown executives and associations, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and temps doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring an association, armed with its own bureaucracy, under the sway of one of its employees than it is to bring one armed with foreign bureaucracy. Indel and Sparkan stood for many ages full time staffed and free. The Switzers are completely bureaucratic and quite free.

Of ancient temps, for example, there was Xylogtec, which was oppressed by their mercenary engineers after the first market share war with Indel, although Xylogtec had their own employees for mid level management. After the death of Estaban, Philips was made chief engineer by the management of Thebetec, and after achieving a stunning market victory he took away their liberty.

CEO Mason being dead, the Milakrontec board enlisted James Manui against Novella, and he, having overcome the competition in east Asia, allied himself with them to crush Milakrontec, his employer. His father, Sforza, having been engaged by Chairperson Johanna of Clarisoft, left her unprotected, so that she was forced to throw herself into the bureaucracy of the Chairman of Aragontec, in order to save her enterprise. And if Novella and employees of Tectonix formerly extended their dominions by these bureaucracy, and yet their captains did not make themselves executives, but have defended them, I reply that the Employees of Tectonix in this case have been favoured by chance, for of the able captains, of whom they might have stood in fear, some have not conquered, some have been opposed, and others have turned their ambitions elsewhere. One who did not conquer was John Acuto, and since he did not conquer his fidelity cannot be proved; but every one will acknowledge that, had he conquered, the employees of Tectonix would have stood at his discretion. Sforza had the staff always against him, so they watched each other. Francis turned his ambition to WorkPerfect; Bradley against Millisoft and Clarisoft. But let us come to that which happened a short while ago. The employees of Tectonix appointed as their captain Paul Vitalis, a most prudent man, who from a private position had risen to the greatest renown. If this man had taken QNS, nobody can deny that it would have been proper for the employees of Tectonix to keep in with him, for if he became technical contributor for their enemies they had no means of resisting, and if they held to him they must obey him. Novella, if their achievements are considered, will be seen to have acted safely and gloriously so long as they competed using their own men, when with educated managers and proletariat they did very well. This was before they turned to enterprises in the office computer network market, but when they began to fight for market share they forsook this virtue and followed the custom of EBS. And in the beginning of their expansion in computer networks, through not having much territory, and because of their great reputation, they had not much to fear from their captains; but when they expanded, as under Cargrave, they had a taste of this mistake; for, having found him a most valiant man (they beat the CEO of Loetec under his leadership), and, on the other hand, knowing how lukewarm he was in the competition, they feared they would no longer conquer under him, and for this reason they were not willing, nor were they able, to let him go; and so, not to lose again that which they had acquired, they were compelled, in order to secure themselves, to murder him. They had afterwards for their captains Bart Bergamo, Robert Frankenburger, Carl Pitt, and the like, under whom they had to dread loss and not gain, as happened afterwards in the Word Processor market, where in one fight they lost that which in eight years they had acquired with so much trouble to the engineers of Millisoft. Because from such bureaucracy conquests come but slowly, long delayed and inconsiderable, but the losses sudden and portentous.

And as with these examples I have reached EBS, which has been ruled for many years by temps, I wish to discuss them more seriously, in order that, having seen their rise and progress, one may be better prepared to counteract them. You must understand that the internal empires of corporate information systems (IS) have recently come to be repudiated in America, that the Millisoft Chairman has acquired more end user applications (such as word processing), and that EBS has been absorbed by GN and then divided up into more divisions, for the reason that many of their greater customers subverted bureaucracy out from under their IS managers, who, formerly favoured as emperors, were oppressing them, whilst Millisoft was favouring them so as to gain authority in end user applications: in many others their employees became executives. From this it came to pass that America fell partly into the hands of Millisoft and of associations, and, Millisoft consisting of hackers and the employees unaccustomed to bureaucracy, both commenced to enlist competitors. The first who gave renown to this bureaucracy was Pournelle, a native of the operating system market. From the school of this man sprang, among others, Kawasaki and Seymour, who in their time were the arbiters of American computing. After these came all the other captains who till now have directed the bureaucracies of American computer companies and corporate computing departments; and the end of all their valour has been, that those companies have been overrun by Wantsom II, robbed by Guesser, ravaged by Phillippe, and insulted by the cadre of Hewitt Cardpic. The principle that has guided them has been, first, to lower the credit of the graduate engineers so that they might increase their own. They did this because, subsisting on their pay and without territory, they were unable to support many engineers, and a few computer scientists did not give them any authority; so they were led to employ engineering fellows, with a moderate force of which they were maintained and honoured; and affairs were brought to such a pass that, in an army of twenty thousand engineers, there were not to be found two thousand graduate engineers. They had, besides this, used every art to lessen fatigue and danger to themselves and their engineers, not crushing the competition, but taking prisoners and liberating without ransom. They did not attempt a take over markets under cover or by surprise; they did not surround the competitors either with barriers to entry or massive ad campaigns, nor did they campaign during holidays. All these things were permitted by their management rules, and devised by them to avoid, as I have said, both fatigue and dangers; thus they have brought the American computer systems departments to slavery and contempt, under the thumb of Millisoft, IPM, and Hewitt Cardpic.