Analytical Management
Last night I note an Op-Ed piece on Robert McNamarra in the New Yawk Times. [Link] This grabbed my attention span for a couple of reasons, not the same as those of the author who sometimes gives the perception of having been ruined at an early age by the perversions of American politics.
A couple of pieces of the writing however, grabbed despite the Red Queen futility aspects:
“Robert McNamara went to the Pentagon to reform it, to rationalize its decision-making and systematize analysis. From the outset he was unpopular with many high-ranking officers who were more comfortable with the institutionalized cross-purposes of the defense establishment and the educated intuition of experienced military personnel”
and
“There are some who have recently expressed contempt for Robert McNamara.”
The first says more to me than the second, but the sentiment is strangely appropriate. I had occasion to deal with the progeny of Robert McNamarra, the operations researchers and the systems analysts of the ‘Five Sided Fool Farm of the Fatomic” as one of my colleagues described the edifice and its organizational disculture. My biggest complaints about them was that they were, all too often, toadying hacks pretending to being scientists while applying hackneyed, often irrelevant, methodologies to inadequate data to support preconceived answers of senior management. Categorical of this was an unassailable assumption that every time-dependent activity they might study was always at equilibrium, regardless of the characteristic time to reach equilibrium.
Of course what they were competing against was a hierarchial system that was probably in place before Mesopotamia had its first walled city, a group of senior military officers in a small room choked with the fumes of ethanol and other chemicals making decisions based on microscosmic combat experience and political maneuvering. Scant wonder that what McNamarra brought was an improvement; scant wonder that the system has returned to its original ways and form. Such things have the weight of centuries as well as a mystical distrust of the technical.
So no, I have no contempt for McNamarra. He did the best he could to make things better. No, I only have sympathy for the nation.
