This continues my reading of Anthony Downs’ 1967 book, Inside Bureaucracy.1
I have put some thought into how personalities differ within organizations. You may recall that I think that proceduralists defend bureaucratic rules and roles, while rebels value specific outcomes.
Downs suggests that workers in a bureaucracy differ in how they are motivated. He says that there are two self-interested types: a climber strives for personal power, income, and prestige; a conserver strives for security.
At the Fed, I saw lots of climber behavior, because that organization selects for people of that type. Job titles are numerous. But the Fed is fundamentally a conserver institution.
At Freddie Mac, by 1994 I felt that I was the victim of climbers, who would elbow me out of the way as they rose through the organization. Leaving to start my own business was my escape.
I would say that both climbers and conservers are comfortable with the system as it exists in an organization. Both will be proceduralists in my typology. The difference is that climbers are alert for opportunities to advance, while conservers are more alert to threats to stability.
In addition to self-interested individuals, Downs sketches three personalities that operate from a mixture of self-interested and goal-oriented motives. Think of someone working at the Federal Trade Commission who, in addition to caring about his own status, genuinely believes in the mission to protect consumers from predatory corporations.
One type of these mixed-motive individuals is termed by Downs a zealot. This is someone who becomes passionately committed to a particular project or policy. Zealots are the rebels in my typology. At Freddie Mac, I became a zealot for the use of credit scoring and statistical appraisal models in mortgage underwriting. Zealotry is resisted within large organizations. But venture capitalists positively select for it.2
What Downs terms an advocate takes a broader interest in the goals of the organization. I had friends at Freddie Mac who were very committed to defending the corporate line on capital policy to Congress or regulators.
Zealotry within a large organization always threatens some important interests there. In contrast, advocates are rarely considered threatening.
Finally, Downs terms a statesman someone who takes an outside view of the organization, concerned with its overall role in society. At Freddie Mac, the statesmen focused on the corporation’s role in the housing market, making mortgage credit accessible and stable. A colleague referred to these statesman, with a mixture of respect and soft derision, as “housers.”
A decade after I had left, Freddie Mac dove into mortgage lending that was considerably riskier than had been its niche. Internally, this arose from a bootlegger/baptist combination of climbers who saw opportunity for personal advancement in leading new initiatives and statesmen who thought that Freddie was helping “under-served” segments of the home-buying market.3 The ultimate results were bad for the borrowers, for Freddie Mac, and for the country.
How useful is this typology of personality types? One use that Downs makes of it is to describe the bureaucratic aging process. Think of an organization growing along an S curve. At the steep part of the curve, it attracts and retains many climbers—this was Freddie Mac when I first joined it. But as an organization’s growth slows, for a variety of reasons it becomes less climber-oriented and becomes dominated by conservers.
These days, Washington’s conserver mindset is being confronted by zealots like Elon Musk and RFK, Jr. It was never going to be pretty.
Recall that, reacting against Downs, I refrain from drawing a definitional line between “a bureaucracy” and “not a bureaucracy.” Instead, I think in terms of a continuum between “more bureaucratic” and “less bureaucratic.” On the more side are organizations that rely heavily on formal roles, procedures, and rules, as codified in organization charts and written employee manuals.
This is actually a quirk, and in some respects a weakness, of the venture capital model. The rest of us have the good sense to resist propositions that sound too good to be true. VC’s look for them.
See my book review essay, Present at the Destruction
It's interesting to compare this categorization to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle) which I have found to be fairly accurate. Most of the categorizations above are people who aren't interested in the mission or goals of the organization but in either their own personal goals or promoting the organization.
“How useful is this typology of personality types?” Not very. Some people who work in large organizations/bureaucracies are risk-averse (and interested in security), some are not (and thus more interested in career advancement), and some are more interested in ideas and advancing new policies and approaches (and are not cut out for a life in a rule-driven bureaucracy). An under appreciated aspect of “life in a bureaucracy” is how many members are first generation college graduates and are from humble backgrounds. Thus, job security is often important; also, they often lack an appreciation for and understanding of the intense political nature of life in a large organization.