The link below is to a slideshow (stay with me here) describing Netflix's corporate culture strategy. Whoever put this together has a great grasp on how inflexible bureaucracies are created. Slides 44-77 are relevant.
http://www.slideshar...0&startSlide=44
There are a lot of points that parallel observations recently made about the USAF:
Company starts out with focus and high performance High performance creates growth which leads to complexity and chaos Complexity is fought with procedures and regulations Too many procedures and regulations drive away talented people Everything still seems fine until the market (battlefield) changes The company is now filled with process followers that cannot adapt quickly enough to change And the best line: "Company generally grinds painfully into irrelevance"
Their solution is to focus on what they're good at and continually hire better people. Better people don't need as many procedures to do their jobs well. Netflix doesn't get distracted by additional duties (my words) and they let mediocre people go. They analogize their model to that of a pro sports team constantly looking for new talent.
I'm not saying the USAF should be run just like Netflix. It's a very laissez-faire company, to the extreme of not even having a vacation policy. You just leave whenever you feel like it. They've also made some pretty buffoonerous high-profile decisions lately that seem to show a lack of temperament at the top. Also, a few slides later they specifically state that their management culture is more suited to a creative company than organizations primarily concerned with preventing catastrophic error (such as crashing airplanes). We crashed a lot of jets in the past which begat today's voluminous rulebooks.
That said, I think we sure as hell could at least a learn something from this kind of thinking. It seems to say that inflexible, ineffective bureaucracy is inevitable and the best way to fix it is by raising the Lowest Common Denominator. The AF may be trying to do this with the RIF but unfortunately the stratification seems to be based on who's the best at following the damn processes.
Thoughts? Can we ever get out of this downward spiral of bureaucracy?