As organizations grew from small small offices and shops into large corporations and government agencies, the disciplined hierarchies and unambiguous functional assignments of bureaucracy evolved as the ideal structural form. It allowed for pervasive control from the top of an organizational pyramid. but tight control is a good news/bad news story.The good news is that it is possible to centrally monitor and regulate the behavior of the employees. The bad news is that there are high costs involved with excessive control and the line between tight control and excessive control is a thin one. employees in organizational straitjackets are unlikely to exercise initiative. Like automatons-human robots-they perform their prescribed duties until appropriate bureaucratic authority tells them otherwise. A properly designed bureaucratic organization can be impressively efficient even though none of its individual bureaucrats are in any way exceptional individuals. This is why Herman Wouk, in his 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, called the U.S. Navy "a machine invented by geniuses, to be run by idiots." These machines, whether governmental or industrial, can be extraordinarily impressive in performance even when run by mediocre people. Thus the French novelist Honore de Balzac called bureaucracy "the giant power wielded by pygmies." In this sense bureaucracy, far from being incompetent, is a bastion of super-competence-its overall performance far exceeding the quality that could otherwise be expected from its miscellaneous human parts.