More on McNamara As a Manager

Canadian academic Jeet Heer, an occasional correspondent of mine, has a really fantastic analysis of Robert McNamara's career as an example of a romance with management philosophy. McNamara, Heer writes, once said that management is "the most creative of all arts, for its medium is human talent itself." McNamara was a scientific manager, using statistical methods to plan firebombing campaigns in Japan during World War II and to dramatically reshape Ford after the war. But Jeet says there were limitations to the effectiveness of these techniques:

McNamara didn't understand his own soldiers any better than he understood the Vietnamese. Ordinary troops, many of them conscripted from the ghettos and barrios of America, hated being the foot soldiers of an ill-conceived imperialist adventure. The morale of the American army collapsed as drug use and fragging (the killing of officers) became common. McNamara's computers couldn't measure such intangibles as esprit de corps.

The top-down management style of modern business doesn't really lend itself to developing cultural empathy. McNamara would have better off if he had listened to some historians, psychologists, and anthropologists rather than relying a horde of computer programmers.

To an extent, this sounds less like a failure of management as something to emphasize, and more like a failure of McNamara as a manager. A manager who can't tell that his employees hate him or his policies is not a good manager. They may be right or wrong to hate him, but being able to suss out that hatred and why is a pretty basic thing for leaders to figure out. There are reasons so many agencies, including the Defense Department, do employee satisfaction surveys. What they do with that data is an entirely different matter.

And there's no question that McNamara may have relied on the wrong kind of managers during the Vietnam war, but that doesn't mean that relying on the knowledge of experts is wrong. You just need someone who knows how to manage a counterinsurgency, rather than someone who knows how to target aerial strikes.