The role of big companies is to turn great people into mediocre organizations.

A committee is a group of men who individually can do nothing, but as a group decide that nothing can be done.

Bureaucratic institutions in both the private and public sector break up knowledge and its components, storing and processing them in separate compartments, or ‘stovepipes'. Over time, these stovepipes multiply, as ever-more narrow specialization increases the number of uncrossable boundaries. This makes it extremely difficult to cope with fastchanging new problems requiring knowledge that falls beyond artificial departmental borders.To complicate matters, guarding each stovepipe is an executive whose power is enhanced by control over data, information and knowledge, and who has little incentive to share it. Yet as industrial-age boundaries break down, it is only by sharing that important problems can be solved.

The only thing harder than starting something new in a bureaucracy is stopping something old. So the trick is not to ask to start something new -- just start it. If you wait and ask for forgiveness for having done something you did not get permission for, you're much more likely to get away with it than if you go and say, "Can I do it?"

If the bureaucratic trap is like a cage that restricts the opportunities for people to contribute all they can, the entrepreneurial trap is a void, a black hole into which people disappear when they lack direction or accountability. The issue is balance: enough breadth in jobs and decentralization in decisions to allow initiative and creativity, but enough discipline and direction and controls to focus local initiative on the highest priority tasks from the standpoint of the entire corporation.

If you have a choice of sinning against God or the bureaucracy, sin against God, because He will forgive you, and the bureacracy will not.