Blaming it on bureaucracy wrongfully absolves the individuals.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think the point of calling it mindless bureaucracy is to emphasize that these systems themselves tend to reward this sort of behavior and punish deviation. Even if you punished all the individuals involved (which you should, because that's one of the reasons that these bureaucracies have these incentives), you might get a good organization for a while, but the natural entropy of things would push it back to something resembling the status quo unless you change the fundamental incentives.
Frankly, I imagine the bureaucrats in general would be happy to blame it on "a few bad apples" and just move things along.
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I agree with the sentiment, but I think the point of calling it mindless bureaucracy is to emphasize that these systems themselves tend to reward this sort of behavior and punish deviation. Even if you punished all the individuals involved (which you should, because that's one of the reasons that these bureaucracies have these incentives), you might get a good organization for a while, but the natural entropy of things would push it back to something resembling the status quo unless you change the fundamental incentives.
Frankly, I imagine the bureaucrats in general would be happy to blame it on "a few bad apples" and just move things along.