THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 8, 1995 TAG: 9505060010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By JOHN T. BEEN
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
How ironic and fitting that in your April 20 editorial concerning Joe Montana, you speak disparagingly of managers and bosses who are wrapped up in statistics and are not familiar with the rudiments of their products, and on the same page you run a political cartoon concerning the greatest statistician of all time who most aptly fits this description; Robert Strange McNamara, the most successful failure in modern history.
McNamara was the embodiment of the steely eyed, cold, calculating statistician who firmly believed that all management problems could be reduced to the manipulation of numbers.
While at Ford, he and his ilk succeeded in moving from leadership positions the plant managers, production engineers, design engineers, mechanical engineers and other personnel who were intimately familiar with their product and substituting statisticians and accountants who were not concerned with the product or quality control but only with the bottom line of the quarterly financial report.
Everyone is familiar with the end result of this management style and the ruin it wrought is extensively documented in David Halberstam's book The Reckoning. A direct result of this debacle was the ascendancy of Deming's Total Quality Management style of leadership as a means of returning some sort of sanity to the management field.
Somehow, in spite of this spectacular failure, McNamara was tapped to bring these same ruinous principles into the Department of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. True to form, he ignored the experts who had successfully fought in World War II and Korea and forced his principles of statistics into a field where chaos reigns supreme - war.
Chaos is completely ignorant of the logic of statistics, and people who attempt to apply statistics to the conduct of war are doomed to failure. Statistics are a good planning tool but cannot be applied to the actual conduct of human behavior in times of extreme stress. Again, McNamara's principles were doomed to failure, at a horrible cost in deaths and suffering.
Now McNamara is trying to atone for his past sins by crying mea culpa and blaming his failure in Vietnam on political leadership, the supposition we should not have been involved in the first place and the reality that we did not know the enemy.
His book completely misses the point. The tragedy of Vietnam was not the question of whether we should have been involved there but rather the complete mismanagment of the war by McNamara and his ``Pentagon Whiz-Kids.''
The application of force in war should be a total and all-out effort, as opposed to the principle of escalation which only allows the enemy time to regroup and rearm in between losing battles.
In the tactical realm, the United States never lost a battle in Vietnam. The war was winnable, and McNamara's excuses are the excuses of the spoiled and arrogant individual who has been proved wrong. We battled Asians not too long before this and won a complete and absolute victory.
McNamara should be remembered not as a brilliant man but as an individual whose flawed reasoning and logic led to complete and total disaster. His book should be used as a text for negative examples of leadership and management. MEMO: Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Been lives in Virginia Beach.
by CNB