Number of words: 751

Mesmerised managers have fallen for their own con-devices. They have been persuaded that new computer models, like new cars, or new soaps, or new cigarettes, represent some major advance on the previous ones. So they may- but not in terms of practical use. A few of the first computers ever built are still chugging away so effectively that nobody can make a case for putting in the hotted-up, third generation wonder. The only catch with these veterans is that their service men are gradually dying out: and replacement parts have to be cannibalised. Such are the results of planned obsolescence.

Managers can with some justice protest that they are not complete suckers – they are also victims of the computer’s handmaidens, their own technical staff, who have been liable to desert any employer unwilling to provide the very latest toys for them to play with. So long as computer men enjoyed all the pleasures of scarcity – sharply rising salaries and total job mobility – managers caved in all along the line. Only in 1970-71’s recession, when programmers and higher breeds of experts got lost in the unfamiliar wilderness of unemployment, was the manager able to regain the control he should never have abdicated.

But the stones which managers can cast at computer experts are no sharper than those which can be hurled back. Being logical, computers can only handle systems which are logical. The typical corporate system sprawls all over the place, working only because those in charge have got familiar with its mysteries, like travellers on the New York subway. Even though it functions, after a fashion, the established system (no matter for what purpose) is certain not to be the simplest and clearest way of organising the flow. Therefore, the first step in computerising is to simplify and clarify the system: and very often the main economic benefit of the computer lies in doing just that. Many customers would have been well advised to leave it there, and not to bother about the computer: but many users didn’t get the system right, and still installed a computer on top.

Never forget the late Lord Marks. That genius one day saw a sales girl filling in a form, and wondered if it was necessary. From that observation, Marks began a paper chase all over Marks & Spencer finding, for instance, that it was costing more to check shipments from suppliers than was saved by catching their errors; and that not allowing the girls to draw stock from the stockroom them- selves involved quite unreasonable expense. The drive for efficiency and ‘simplification’ enabled Marks to stay un-computerised long after another British retail king had bought his first computer, as he freely admitted, because everybody else had one.

The computer will never eliminate the manager’s need to think for his living – in some respects, it makes his task harder, by introducing a new area of anxiety. For one day the computer may revolutionise management; phrases like ‘real time’ and ‘on-line’ will be more than sales talk; one day managements will get usable information about what is happening as and when it happens. One day computers will graduate from book-keeping, now about half their use, to running the basic routines of the business and pitching in at the rarefied level of planning and decisions.

The parallel is with management consultants: the latter graduated from walking around with stop-watches timing production workers, to (much more profitably) advising giant corporations on their future. The difference, however, is that the consultants did the advising. The computer will only act in the capacity of millions of slide-rules, filing cabinets and message centres. The information capability any big company already has will be multiplied enormously, but the function will be unaltered to be used or misused by the human managers who now handle the slide-rules, flick through the files and accumulate memos as squirrels do nuts.

Since managers already ignore warnings of failure expressed in equations little tougher than two plus two, they will have no trouble in riding roughshod over reams of computer print-out. The computer, anyway, can only issue the warnings it has been programmed to give – and as Lockheed found with its Marietta monster, a dog that can’t bark, or whose barking is deliberately ignored, is not much protection. The computer terminals in Georgia doubtless spewed out reams of information on the Galaxy C5A. All the same, Lockheed itself says, ‘the impact of late specification changes was underestimated’.

Excerpted from pages 200-201 of ‘The Naked Manager by Robert Heller