Peter Drucker would have LOVED Sarah Palin

The very down to earth common sensibilities of Sarah Palin was exactly what Peter Drucker meant to contrast the success of her ilk when he wrote of the failure of really smart people trying to solve complex problems. Obama is smart we think, at least he seems to be. He is surrounding himself with smart people, we hope.

I get the impression that they are like the Enron whiz kids that almost did us in and were written up in the book, "The Smartest People in the Room".

Once William F Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston Telephone book than by two thousand Harvard Professors. I agree with him. We have as a case in point, Robert Rubin, a smart guy, who got us into this mess by any measure. Yet he is being called on to scoop the poop he created. I don't think this is wise.

If you will read all that Peter Drucker wrote it will help you not trust smart people so easily. I have very smart people as friends who voted for Obama. I rest my case.

Chicago Boyz:

Among liberals, “progressives,” and especially academics, there is great joy at the prospect of an administration dominated by people who had very high SAT scores and who possess advanced degrees.

At the same point in time, we are experiencing a serious credit crisis, brought about to a substantial extent by naive and inadequate mathematical models–mostly developed by people with very high SAT scores and very often with advanced degrees.

About 20 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote a wonderful pseudo-autobiography, “Adventures of a Bystander.” It tells his own story only indirectly, via profiles of people he has known. These range from from his grandmother and his 4th-grade teacher in Austria to Henry Luce (Time-Life) and Alfred Sloan (GM).

In the chapter titled “Ernest Freedberg’s World,” Drucker writes about two old-line merchants. The first of these, called “Uncle Henry” by those who knew him, was the founder and owner of a large and successful department store. When Drucker met him, he was already in his eighties. Uncle Henry was a businessman who did things by intuition more than by formal analysis, and his own son Irving, a Harvard B-School graduate, was appalled at “the unsystematic and unscientific way the store was being run.”

Drucker remembers his conversations with Uncle Henry. “He would tell stories constantly, always to do with a late consignment of ladies’ hats, or a shipment of mismatched umbrellas, or the notions counter. His stories would drive me up the wall. But gradually I learned to listen, at least with one ear. For surprisingly enough he always leaped to a generalization from the farrago of anecdotes and stocking sizes and color promotions in lieu of markdowns for mismatched umbrellas.”

Reflecting many years later, Drucker observes: “There are lots of people with grasshopper minds who can only go from one specific to another–from stockings to buttons, for instance, or from one experiment to another–and never get to the generalization and the concept. They are to be found among scientists as often as among merchants. But I have learned that the mind of the good merchant, as also of the good artist or good scientist, works the way Uncle Henry’s mind worked. It starts out with the most specific, the most concrete, and then reaches for the generalization.”

Drucker also knew another leading merchant, Charles Kellstadt (who had once run Sears.) Kellstadt and Drucker served together on a Department of Defense advisory board (on procurement policy), and Kellstadt told “the same kind of stories Uncle Henry had told.” Drucker says that his fellow board members “suffered greatly from his interminable and apparently pointless anecdotes.”

On one occasion, a “whiz kid” (this was during the McNamara era) was presenting a proposal for a radically new approach to defense pricing policy. Kellstadt “began to tell a story of the bargain basement in the store in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had held his first managerial job, and of some problem there with the cup sizes of women’s bras. he would stop every few sentences and ask the bewildered Assistant Secretary a quesion about bras, then go on. Finally, the Assistant Secretary said, “You don’t understand Mr. Kellstadt; I’m talking about concepts.” “So am I,” said Charlie, quite indignant, and went on. Ten minutes later all of us on the board realized that he had demolished the entire proposal by showing us that it was far too complex, made far too many assumptions, and contains far too many ifs, buts, and whens.” After the meeting, another board member (dean of a major engineering school) said admiringly, “Charlie, that was a virtuoso performance. but why did you have to drag in the cup sizes of the bras in your bargain basement forty years ago?” Drucker reports that Charlie was surprised by the question: “How else can I see a problem in my mind’s eye?”

From these two encounters, Drucker draws this conclusion:

“Fifty years or more ago the Uncle Henry’s and the Charlie Kellstadts dominated; then it was necessary for Son Irvin to emphasize systems, principles, and abstractions. There was need to balance the overly perceptual with a little conceptual discipline. I still remember the sense of liberation during those years in London when I stumbled onto the then new Symbolical Logic (which I later taught a few times), with its safeguards against tautologies and false analogies, against generalizing from isolated events, that is, from anecdotes, and its tools of semantic rigor. But now we again need the Uncle Henrys and Charlie Kellstadts. We have gone much too far toward dependence on untested quantification, toward symmetrical and purely formal models, toward argument from postulates rather than from experience, and toward moving from abstraction to abstraction without once touching the solid ground of concreteness. We are in danger of forgetting what Plato taught at the very beginning of systematic analysis and thought in the West, in two of the most beautiful and moving of his Dialogoues, the Phaedrus and the Krito…They teach us that experience without the test of logic is not “rhetoric” but chitchat, and that logic without the test of experience is not “logic” but absurdity. Now we need to learn again what Charlie Kellstadt meant when he said, “How else can I see a problem in my mind’s eye?”" (emphasis added)

My intention is not to attack theory and abstraction. Without theory and abstraction, we couldn’t build and fly airliners. Without theory and abstraction, it wouldn’t be possible to run a business much bigger than a single store. But when theory is not based on observation and reasoning; when it becomes dogma, when it is used by people who don’t really understand what they are doing and confuse the map with the territory–then there can be malign consequences. Professor Drucker’s advice that “we again need the Uncle Henrys and Charlie Kellstadts” is, I believe, correct.