

The manager and the moron (1967) - prostoalex
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/Organization/The_manager_and_the_moron?cid=other-eml-cls-mip-mck-oth-1409

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BWStearns
Aside from the debate over the MIT has/has-not a computer in 1967 or will in
1987, I think the more interesting aspect of the piece is the normative
suggestions it has in terms of thinking about how computers should be used in
organizations.

The notion that it eliminates the instinctual and actually introduces
information is actually an incredible insight to have at the dawn of
available(ish) computing.

    
    
      One developed, if one had any sense, a reasonably good instinct for what
      invention was plausible and likely to fly, and what wasn’t. But real 
      information just wasn’t to be had. Now, for the first time, it’s beginning to be 
      available—and the overall impact on society is bound to be very great
    
    

Looking at the behavior of large organizations it's clear to see that many of
them have not internalized this insight. In terms of exploiting what computers
can mean for non-technically oriented organizations we haven't gotten much
farther than the payrolls he mentions, " I’m not saying we shouldn’t be using
the computer for payrolls, but that’s beside the point. If payrolls were all
it could do, we wouldn’t be interested in it."

It's always nice to chew on some good old thoughts that are still relevant.

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floppydisk
I thought his comments on management were quite interesting regarding how
management would have to change.

""" Our greatest managerial failure rate comes in the step from middle to top
management. Most middle managers are doing essentially the same things they
did on their entrance jobs: controlling operations and fighting fires. In
contrast, the top manager’s primary function is to think. The criteria for
success at the top level bear little resemblance to the criteria for promotion
from middle management.

The new top manager, typically, has been promoted on the basis of his ability
to adapt successfully. But suddenly he’s so far away from the firing line that
he doesn’t know what to adapt to—so he fails. He may be an able man, but
nothing in his work experience has prepared him to think. He hasn't the
foggiest notion how one goes about making entrepreneurial or policy decisions.
That’s why the failure rate at the senior-management level is so high. In my
experience, two out of three men promoted to top management don’t make it;
they stay middle management. They aren’t necessarily fired. Instead, they get
put on the Executive Committee with a bigger office, a bigger title, a bigger
salary—and a higher nuisance value because they have had no exposure to
thinking. This is a situation we are going to eliminate.

From experience, I think this is still somewhat apt today in that we push
people to go through the grunt -> middle manager -> upper management chain
with a detour through an MBA program possibly tossed in for good measure
rather than grooming people to think and develop a different kind of
leadership. It's an interesting thought.

I'm not sure how applicable it is to entrepreneurship as to small to mid-size
companies, but I think it's worth nothing.

Interesting stuff!

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bernardlunn
Great comment. I think it explains why the "topple rate" is increasing ie more
big old companies getting toppled by startups led by entrepreneurs who think.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Is that actually the case now? (that the rate is increasing).

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mdda
This is a great article for the corporate titans of yesteryear, which puts
today's 'innovation malaise' into perspective (as well as putting the IT boom
in a historical context). For instance :

""" Perhaps the greatest shock to our Rip Van Winkle economist, however, would
be the fact that, with the exception of the plastics industry, the main
engines of growth in the past 50 years were already mature or rapidly maturing
industries, based on well-known technologies, back in 1913. """

and

""" Within the next ten years, information will become very much cheaper. An
hour of computer time today costs several hundred dollars at a minimum; I have
seen figures that put the cost at about a dollar an hour in 1973 or so. Maybe
it won’t come down that steeply, but come down it will. """

Overall, a very interesting read.

~~~
VLM
"as well as putting the IT boom in a historical context"

From

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product)

The gross world domestic product in 2012, using 2012 value dollars, was a bit
under 72 trillion dollars.

Gross facebook revenue per google in 2013 was 7.9 billion dollars.

Some arithmetic done in my head and to one sig fig facebooks revenue is about
one ten thousandth of the worlds GDP.

Fortunes can be made in tech, but its always going to be a rounding error
compared to food, shelter, etc. There's just too many people eating, for
example.

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Aardwolf
Some pretty funny gems in there, e.g.:

"To be sure, the computer has created something that had never existed in the
history the world—namely, paying jobs for mathematicians."

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dredmorbius
"But the real impact will come with the big freight jets, which will make
every airstrip in the world a deep-water port. In a few years, they may make
the ocean-going freighter, man’s oldest efficient transportation, look roughly
the way the railroads began to look around 1950."

And yet, it's rather the reverse. Air cargos exist, but they're low weight,
high volume.

From the US DOT "Freight Transporation, Global Highlights 2010", total world
ocean freight exports were 8,032 million short tons in 2007.

Total _air_ freight handled by the top 25 world airports was 34.535 million
tons.

That's 234 tons of ocean cargo per ton of air cargo.

The real revolution was in containerization, not air freight.

The leading seaport (Shanghai) handled 561.446 _million_ tons of freight.

The leading airport (Hong Kong), only 1.462 million.

The energy cost of air travel per ton mile is roughly 250 times that of ocean
cargo -- about 5.9 ton miles per gallon for a Boeing 777 (I don't have 747
numbers handy), vs. about 1500 ton miles/gallon for a large container ship.

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markbnj
His comments about the perishable nature of knowledge are spot on.

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mark-r
This is really impressive, it shows a clarity of thought and awareness of the
impact that trends of the day would have on the future. Most people predicting
the future don't do it nearly as well.

But even with all that, Peter Drucker couldn't predict Moore's Law.

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michaelochurch
An exponential function, if you zoom in to your local spot, looks linear. This
got Malthus. (Actually, Malthus's model was wrong but his conclusion wasn't
far off. The world had been continually experiencing Malthusian catastrophes
until about 1850, when the rate of economic growth overtook population growth.
Colonialism was, to a large degree, Europe outsourcing its Malthusian
catastrophes. For an intra-continental example, see: Irish potato famine.) He
thought economic growth was linear, not exponential.

OP's claim that 1913 to 1967 was an era of minimal (linear) change couldn't
have been more wrong. While many nations returned to economic "trend line"
there was a lot of, um, painful stuff in between. Even if you downplay World
War I and II, you've still got the 1918 flu, the Great Depression, etc. Also,
the US went from a regional power to a superpower in about 30 years, while
Europe dealt with poverty (and lingering remnants of fascism) into the 1960s.
That's a change. Only Americans (excluding those who served in the wars) had
the privilege of saying that 1913 to 1967 was a smooth ride.

Oddly enough, this time period (in which he understates progress) was written
when world GDP growth was at its all-time (unmatched, even now) peak of 5.7%
per year (we're around 4.5% now, which is better than we've been). The R&D
efforts that didn't seem to be delivering (because flying cars and AI hadn't
been invented yet) were _already_ pushing the economy to grow faster than it
ever has (and will have, as of 2014). It got a bad rap ("people in those cushy
R&D labs aren't earning their keep") because it underperformed relative to
unreasonable expectations, not because it wasn't working. (Oh, and there was
that perceptron thing; the bit of high-school geometry needed to show that a
_single_ perceptron can't do XOR became "neural networks don't work" became
"AI is a dud".) So we have a lot to learn from the 1960s, and as a society, we
should consider dumping the Snapchat nonsense in order to some real R&D.

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tgflynn
It's amusing and amazing that anyone with so many very wrong notions could
have been taken seriously in 1967. I'm not saying he was wrong about
everything, just almost everything.

Here are a couple of gems:

 _Twenty years hence, an institution that’s the equivalent of a steel mill in
terms of mental work—MIT, for example—might well have its own computer._

 _Technically there is no reason why Sears, Roebuck could not offer tomorrow,
for the price of a television set, a plug-in appliance that would put us in
direct contact with all the information needed for schoolwork from
kindergarten through college._

So there were no computers at MIT in 1967 (So what was that Whirlwind thing
back in 1948) but Sears and Roebuck could have invented the Internet that
year.

I think by far the most twisted notion in the article is the idea that little
changed between 1913 and 1967. I'm pretty sure technological change during
that period had more impact on the average Westerner's life than any other 54
year time span in history. It takes a very peculiar world view to completely
ignore the invention of television or to consider a biplane as being basically
equivalent to a jumbo jet.

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gd1
Strange, I read it and had the opposite reaction. With the exception of the
'steel mill' quote you mentioned, I think he got it mostly right. Even that
can be argued to be right to a degree, for a time the mainframe model was in
vogue and now we're moving towards the 'cloud'. The little change mentioned
between 1913 and 1967 was with reference to the overall trajectory of
industrial economies, not technological innovation.

The main thrust was about the increasing importance of knowledge and
information, where he was spot on.

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bewo001
If you replace 'steel mill' with 'data center', he was not so far off. At
least if you don't count phones, tablets, laptops as computers.

