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The Rational Model
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10014 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1986 |
20,297 Words |
| Author
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Lewis Austin is research analyst for the Beacon Hill
Multicultural Psychological Association. He is the author of
Japan: The Paradox of Progress and Saints and Samurai: The
Politics and Culture of the Japanese and American Elite. He
has worked in Japan as a banker and a social scientist, and
has taught at Yale and the University of California. |
Professionalism in management is regularly equated with hardheaded rationality. We saw it surface at ITT in Harold Geneen's search for the "unshakable facts." It flourished in Vietnam, where success was measured by body counts. Its wizards were the Ford Motor Company's whiz kids, and its grand panjandrum was Robert McNamara. The numerative, rationalist approach to management dominates the business schools. It teaches us that well-trained professional managers can manage anything. It seeks detached, analytical justification for all decisions. It is right enough to be dangerously wrong, and it has arguably led us seriously astray. It doesn't tell us what the excellent companies have apparently learned. It doesn't teach us to love the customers. It doesn't instruct our leaders in the rock-bottom importance of making the average Joe a hero and a consistent winner. It doesn't show how strongly workers can identify with the work they do if we give them a little say-so. It doesn't tell us why self-generated quality control is so much more effective than inspector-generated quality control. It doesn't tell us to nourish product champions like the first buds in spring time. It doesn't impel us to allow--even encourage, as P&G does--in-house product-line competition, duplication, and even product-to-product cannibalization. It doesn't command that we overspend on quality, overkill on customer service, and make products that last and work. It doesn't show, as Anthony Athos puts it, that "good managers make meanings for people, as well as money." The rational approach to management misses a lot. When the two of us went to business school, the strongest department was finance, a majority of the students had engineering degrees (including ourselves), courses in quantitative methods flourished, and the only facts that many of us considered "real data" were the ones we could put numbers on. Those were the old days, but the situation hasn't changed much. At least when we went to graduate business school in the 1960s, a few students could slip through the system with relative distinction on their innate talents as fine bullshitters. Now they approach class at their peril if they haven't "run the numbers" (translation: done some kind--ay kind--of quantitative analysis). Many graduate business students so dread the prospect of a calculator battery failing during the final exam that they take spares, spare batteries, an extra calculator, or both. The word "strategy," which used to mean a damn god idea for knocking the socks off the competition, has often come to be synonymous with the quantitative breakthrough, the analytic coup, market share numbers, learning curve theory, positioning business on a 4- or 9- or 24-box matrix (the matrix idea, straight from mathematics) and putting all of it on a
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