In cases where bureaucracy is inefficient, such as in the Soviet Union, costs were miscalculated and those errors became unmanageable when everyone lost faith in the bureaucracy. In Capitalist systems an inefficient bureaucracy will mean lower profits and a slowness to react to a changing market place, leading to a take over or bankruptcy. In government services an inefficient bureaucracy creates multi-layers of staff covering their own backs against the truth and that leads to gross breakdowns in delivery of services and performance.

The alternative to bureaucracy would be an anarchic system of organization, which would inevitably lead to organizational failure. All organizations need clearly delineated chains of command, skill specialization, hierarchy, and a system of rules in order to function. They can be looser or stricter depending upon the specifics of the organization (looser in a more creative organization, stricter in more conservative businesses). But the underlying structure needs to be present, or else there is no "organization" at all.