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About this quote

What does it mean?
The Circumlocution Office excels at bureaucratic inefficiency and avoiding action.
In plain terms
Government offices are good at knowing how not to do things.
What can you take from it?
Bureaucracy often hinders progress.

Where it applies

  • Public services
  • Corporate bureaucracy
  • Policy making

Putting it to work

  • Demand accountability
  • Streamline processes

Questions to consider

  • How do we fix bureaucratic waste?
  • Is inefficiency intentional?

Another view

It paints all institutions as useless.

More from Charles Dickens

  1. The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could poss…

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  2. A person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two woo…

    Permalink to quote #116
  3. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence.

    Permalink to quote #113

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