Stupidity in Organizations
Large organizations seem to be very good at finding stupid tasks for themselves, or finding a worthwhile task and doing it in a stupid way. Examples abound.
When I was in the military, I heard a few stories….
Colonel Custer led a couple of hundred troops to attack thousands of Sioux under Crazy Horse, who was a gifted war leader.
In an earlier battle, Colonel Fetterman, who had once boasted, “Give me 80 men and I will ride through the whole Sioux nation.”, led 80 men against Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. The result was an American body count of 81 dead.
In the VietNam war, the VC told their men to watch who got saluted so they could shoot American officers. The Americans soon dropped the custom of saluting officers when near the enemy. One day a new lieutenant, just arrived from the States, inspected the defense perimeter around a base. He did not get saluted, so he preferred charges for this failure of military discipline. The next time he went to inspect the perimeter, he found a new sign: “Salute All Officers! Charley may be watching.”
Throughout military history, we can see stupid mistakes, many of which are paid for in the blood of soldiers.
At Sebastopol, an order was given to a cavalry brigade to charge against artillery. Tennyson wrote a poem to describe this mistake:
“Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.”
In WWI we hear of the battle of the Somme. As it began, the British unleashed the largest artillery barrage in history in order to cripple the German defenses before the advance of the army. The Germans were well fortified, and did not suffer too much. However, they felt that the heavy barrage was preparation for a British advance, so they brought in extra machine guns. On the first of July in 1916, around 100,000 British advanced across no-man’s land. The greatest artillery barrage in history, they found, had torn up the terrain so badly that the tanks got stuck in the mud, so the infantry had to go on alone.
As the troops walked into a wall of machine-gun fire, casualty reports were telegraphed back to headquarters. Custom dictated that if casualties were unacceptably high, the attack should be called off. That day, the casualty reports were unbelievably high, so they were not believed, and the assault went on. The British lost perhaps 50,000 dead in that single day.
There are whole books about military fiascos throughout history. Governments have always been good at dumb things.
The United States government still continues in its “War on Drugs”, an operation that has proved immensely expensive, ineffectual, and perhaps even capable of destabilizing our society.
In electrical engineering, there is a formula for the effective resistance of resistors in parallel:
Re = 1 / [ 1/ R1 + 1/R2 + 1/R3 + ….]
It has become a joke that the same formula applies to the effective IQ of a committee. Yes, it’s a joke, but something to think about.
Not only governments but civilian organizations do a lot of dumb things. To seek an example, I could look at an organization that was set up to do something stupid, but that would be a poor illustration because an outfit that set out to do dumb things would just succeed. Better to look at a group that had a real good reasonable cause to serve.
The Civil Rights Movement was organized to right real long-standing wrongs. It was fortunate to get a great man, Martin Luther King, to lead it. It has indeed made great progress against injustices. Did the CRM, even with a good clear cause and good support and a charismatic leader, also manage to do dumb stuff? Consider the CRM’s approach to literature.
There was a demand to ban a book called “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” because inside one can find the “N-word”. The N-word was part of common speech at the time and place of the story; it was not written into the book as an insult. Further, Huckleberry Finn is not only perhaps the number one classic of American literature, but it is also the best anti-slavery and anti-discrimination book in American literature.
There was also a demand to ban a book named “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. This book was quite influential in giving strength to abolitionist sentiment in America. Indeed, during the Civil War, the author visited President Lincoln, whose remark on introduction was, “So you’re the little lady who made the big war!” Somehow, many members of the African-American culture somehow got the idea that being “Uncle Tom” is something to be ashamed of. Call an African-American “Uncle Tom” if you want to pick a fight. [I remember a cartoon where a young black man says to a small black boy, “Hey, just because you are my nephew and my name is Thomas doesn’t mean you can call me that! ] Read the book and you will find that Uncle Tom was a slave sold to a particularly evil master named Simon Legree. One of the other slaves ran away. Tom knew where she was hiding, and Simon knew that he knew. Tom refused to tell, so Simon decided to beat it out of him. As the beating proceeded, it became clear that Tom would be beaten to death before he would talk. Finally Simon stopped the beating because a slave was valuable property, unless he were dead. Why does it seem to me that being called “Uncle Tom” is no insult?
And there is “Little Black Sambo”. Don’t call an African-American man Sambo. What is bad about Sambo? Little Black Sambo is a children’s story, and thus has some cutesy details. If I leave out the details, the story is very short:
Little Black Sambo went for a walk in the jungle. He met FOUR hungry tigers. Sambo was nobody’s fool; he had those tigers for breakfast.
Is being called “Sambo” something to be ashamed of? Why is ”Sambo” an insult?
If even the noblest of organizations can do dumb things, is there any reason to expect so large a thing as a government to get things right? Is it not more surprising that occasionally a government does get something right?
It is notable that large corporations also tend to do dumb things. Because there are projects too large for a small business, we still need big corporations, but….
For example, once I worked for a small corporation in Austin named “Zycor”, which prospered fairly well, selling its flagship product, a computer program called “ZMap”, plus a few others.
Then Zycor was acquired by a larger outfit called “Landmark”, centered in Houston. Zycor owned its own building, with a large lot next door in case it should ever need to expand. Landmark decided that Zycor’s building was not prestigious enough, and that the Austin office should grow. So they signed a long lease on a large expensive space in a “better” location, and sold the old office. Then they decided not to grow the Austin office, so they now had a long lease on much more expensive space than they were using.
Then Landmark was acquired by a bigger company, called “Halliburton”. Halliburton looked at the books and saw that the cost of the Austin office, per employee, was way high, so they looked for a way to cut the spending. They started a new office in India, where programmers work cheaper and office space is cheaper. Before closing down the Austin office, they brought in several sharp young programmers from India to get trained on ZMap. Much of ZMap was written in ForTran, and none of the Indians knew any ForTran. After about six weeks of orientation, the new programmers went back to India to make the next release of ZMap. After almost three years, the next release came out, and it contained no new functionality other than a few items that were already under development in Austin at the time of the acquisition. At least, Halliburton was big enough that losses by a little thing like Landmark would not threaten to destroy it. Finally, Halliburton/Landmark gave up on India and brought ZMap to its Houston office.
Anybody who has worked inside the bureaucracy of any large corporation can probably tell such stories.
There is a strong argument in favor of what we call the Free Enterprise System. Let people be free to do their business with minimal government intrusion, and things will go better. If a business is not efficient, a competitor will get its customers and it will fail. Thus, in the private business world, natural selection keeps the work fairly efficient. In any enterprise run by the government, there is no competition to require efficiency.
A government should only take on projects that meet three criteria:
- It is absolutely necessary that this should be done.
- It is something that ONLY a government could do.
- It is something that can be done successfully, without fatal side-effects.
“That government is best which governs least.” – Attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau.
We don’t seem to be very good at learning such lessons.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the first, and so far only, subspecies to make cultural evolution the center of its development. Perhaps because we are beginners we don’t do it very well?
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