Think Tank

Managing

You may have caught the news already in the Journal of Gastroenterology, but, if not, it seems the ulcer--that once protean symbol of corporate overstriving--is really not an executive ailment after all. Says there that doctors now believe stress is not a direct cause of ulcers and that businessmen are no more likely than construction workers to get one.

In a curious sort of way, this myth of the executive ulcer tends to confirm what Henry Mintzberg has been saying all along. Mintzberg, a 37-year-old professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, has been getting a lot of attention for his thesis that managers work--prefer to work--in a climate of "calculated chaos."

The way Mintzberg sees it, the classical view of managers as highly structured, reflective, regulated, science-oriented professionals who spend their days in some tower organizing, coordinating, planning and controlling is just so much baloney.

"Managers work pretty much the way they always have," Mintzberg says, "and this covers everybody from top corporate executives down to leaders of street gangs. It really comes down to hunches, gossip and gut instinct as the basis for making decisions."

Mintzberg's theories grew out of an Olympian study of the literature of management, plus his own experiences in shadowing the chief executive officers of five American companies. Many people say his research is thin and his conclusions vastly oversimplified, but it is clear that many others find his composite portrait of the modern manager reassuring. His article, "The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact," in the Harvard Business Review last year has drawn over 31,000 requests for reprints so far.

In the article, adapted from his book The Nature of Managerial Work, Mintzberg addresses himself to four myths he believes make up the folklore of managerial work:

The manager is a reflective, systematic planner: Not so, says Mintzberg. All the evidence is à contraire. Managers work at an unrelenting pace, doing a variety of tasks not necessarily related to one another. Most are disposed of in less than ten minutes.

The effective manager has no regular duties: In addition to handling things that just pop up, Mintzberg says, managers do perform a number of regular duties. They meet important clients, give out gold watches, fire the drunk in purchasing, and so on. They also spend a lot of time processing "soft" information--gossip--the kind of stuff that will keep them a jump ahead of their competitors.

The senior manager needs aggregated information, which a formal management information system best provides: Mintzberg discovered that his chief executives pay little attention to their mail, barely glance at all the computer-spun garbage that crosses their desks and dislike written reports. Managers, he says, prefer to do business by telephone or in face-to-face meetings.

Management is, or at least is quickly becoming, a science and a profession: No way, says Henry the M. Everything managers know about managing is locked away somewhere in their brains and comes under ambiguous labels such as Judgment or Intuition. It can't be analyzed, so it isn't a science, and it can't be learned, so it's not a profession.

Mintzberg's portrait of the manager of today is warmly humanistic in that it celebrates the little big man who uses his wits to control a world that is far too complex for rational analysis. That his theories fly in the face of the man-as-a-Brooks-Brothers-ape-chained-to-a-computer school of management doesn't bother him.

"I'm right," Mintzberg says. "And, besides that, I've never had an ulcer."

--Jerry Bowles

Up Your Mileage!

It remains the fond but flimsy hope of the citizenry that as Government becomes increasingly helpless to improve our lot, at least it will not mess around and make things worse. That simple aspiration is, unfortunately, in direct conflict with the cardinal rule of bureaucratic survival, which, roughly translated from Washington jargonese, reads, "Don't just sit there, do something." An example of this survival compulsion is the Environmental Protection Agency, which has mushroomed in less than a decade from a gleam in the eyes of Sierra Club members to a substantial Federal power. While its Congressionally mandated mission is supported by all but the most psychotic land rapers, it has been criticized for bumptiously overstepping its boundaries in a textbook case of Civil Service empire building. Much of the irritation centers on the EPA's policy of measuring gasoline mileage on all domestic passenger cars sold in America. These figures have been seized upon by auto manufacturers as valuable sales tools in a market place that is increasingly sensitive to gasoline price and supply. Practically all automotive advertisers now employ the EPA mileage figures. And well they should, because, according to experts, the EPA numbers are absurdly optimistic.

Hence, the assault on the EPA miles-per-gallon numbers comes in two forms: (1) The results are so removed from reality as to be a technological joke and (2) mileage comparisons aren't any of the EPA's damned business to begin with. Our Government worthies do acknowledge the second objection, admitting that no one asked them to produce any information regarding gasoline mileage. It was merely a simple urge to enlighten, they say, based on the fact that their tests used to measure exhaust emissions can also be made to determine gas consumption. (The EPA must certify, on the basis of laboratory examinations, that every car sold in America meets current Federal exhaust standards.) We have these cars hooked up to our dynamometers, under perfectly controlled conditions, so why not check the gas mileage along the way? ask our EPA buddies.

Why not, indeed? This appears to be another example of the "do something" syndrome whereby Government agencies embark on nitwit, make-work projects that, in turn, energize their bleating for more money, more authority and more bodies.

Perhaps critics would be less vocal about this whole business if the EPA results made more sense. Quite simply, the mileage figures being released by the EPA are 20 percent to 25 percent too high.

How come such botching of a simple job by our EPA technoids? Any idiot can figure gas mileage, simply by carefully dividing the miles traveled by the amount of gasoline consumed. It's not their calculations that are at fault (the Civil Service is very rigid about applicants' having a command of long division) but their methodology. As we said earlier, the mileage business is kind of a by-product of the emissions certification, and it is a challenge to industrious bureaucrats to put it to use, regardless of the sense it makes Here is how it works: In order to measure emissions, an example of each new model car to be sold in the U. S. market is taken to the EPA test labs. There it is hooked up to a dynamometer and computer-operated automatic controls and given "simulated" runs, as if the car were being operated on public streets. A so-called urban-driving cycle involves the car's being accelerated, braked, stopped, started, etc., for 23 minutes. This test, says the EPA, is "patterned on the conditions the average driver encounters going from home to work." Its average speed is 20 miles per hour. The highway test, which includes "simulated interstate-highway and rural driving," lasts 12 minutes and involves a burst of 60 mph. Its average speed is just under 49 mph. Most independent experts say this average is ludicrously low, but the EPA people assume a standard Government defense. It was the Big Daddy computer, not themselves, that digested all that data about average trip length, average stops per mile, maximum highway speeds, etc., and belched out numbers. The computer is right, the test procedures are right! Never mind that nobody can attain the EPA results in actual driving.

So we have Americans running around with batches of irrelevant numbers in their heads, spending money because of Government information that is wrong. (Lately, the EPA has tried to pawn off a composite figure, a combination of city and highway tests--weighted 55 percent in favor of the urban-cycle figures--which has produced a somewhat more realistic result but still too high.) In addition to deluding the public, there is a more insidious penalty for this EPA meddling. It has given automobile manufacturers additional ammunition to attack the entire credibility of the EPA in exhaust-emission regulation. Simply stated, manufacturers can argue: "Look, these fools can't even accurately compute gas mileage, so how can you expect them to make sensible judgments about something as complicated as exhaust emissions?" You'd be surprised how far such logic can carry one in the halls of Congress.

The fact that our quest for clean air is closely linked to reducing automotive pollutants produces this question: As war may be too serious a problem to leave to the generals, is exhaust-emission control too serious a problem to leave to the EPA? Based on its fumbling with gas mileage, the answer is yes. --Brock Yates

Growing Olympic Gold

For a sporting event that won't take place for another three years, the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow are already causing a fuss. One sportswriter, calling the Soviets "the most blatant cheaters in the history of sports," has already predicted the games will be a disaster. Coupled with the still unsettled dust from last year's games, which featured a Russian fencer being tossed out for rigging his épée and deep-voiced, broad-shouldered female swimmers from East Germany denying charges they took male-hormone shots, the two weeks of Olympic sports every four years are becoming an ongoing news story. The enormous success of the East German team (it won 40 gold medals in Montreal, second only to the Russians) and the attendant rumors of "superhuman" athletes recently prompted the country to allow Western newsmen to examine its sports system for the first time. What they saw was an entire society of 17,000,000 people hard at work developing Olympic champions in every sport. Youngsters are "discovered" at the age of eight or so and sent off to attend one of 21 sports clubs, where they are watched over by some 7000 paternalistic coaches and monitored for every physical response by the country's 360 "sports doctors." Kornelia Ender, the 18-year-old who won four gold medals at Montreal, trained for seven years before the games. She lived in a dormitory run by a sports club and did nothing but study and train. Such a system, claim the East Germans, lets them spot the best talent and develop it to its fullest potential. While the East Germans won't admit to using steroids or other drugs on athletes, reporters could find no one who would flatly deny it. "There are no secrets," one scientist told Craig Whitney of The New York Times. "Behind every Olympic gold medal there is an entire collective of doctors, technicians and coaches--just like mission control when an astronaut is sent up into space."

Meanwhile, no one has ever accused the United States of treating its Olympic athletes like it does its spacemen, and the President's Commission on Olympic Sports has urged a complete overhaul of our Olympic program. It recommended that a central organization be formed to coordinate athletic meets and fund-raising activities that currently are splintered among the Amateur Athletic Union, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the U. S. Olympic Committee. Further, it proposed a bill of rights for athletes and that fund raising be started on a nationwide basis. Naturally, the A.A.U., the N.C.A.A. and the U.S.O.C. haven't exactly jumped at the idea of giving up some of their control, so it remains to be seen whether or not our athletes will be able to measure up to the East German "supermen" in Moscow.

Four for the Money

You might say that it's like Mary Hartman giving birth to an entirely new network of television shows. That will be the effect if any of several independent television producers and ad-agency sponsors succeed in their plans to sell their own programs to stations not affiliated with CBS, NBC or ABC. What began with Norman Lear's Fernwood Follies' being turned down by the Big Three and then successfully marketed to the independent stations may become a "fourth network" of programs. Today, there are more advertisers who want to buy air time on the major networks than there is space available. With demand exceeding supply, prices for a minute of air time have soared. A quarter of a million dollars for 60 seconds is not uncommon (during a Super Bowl, for example) and a regular prime-time minute now runs upwards of $60,000. A fourth network would work like this: If an independent TV production company, such as Metromedia (which also owns four stations outright), could line up enough other stations to carry its production of Wuthering Heights so that a possible 50-60 percent of the market could tune in, then a large ad agency could sell the ad space on the shows to clients who had to reach a large audience. Metromedia and Ogilvy & Mather (the ad agency in this case) have worked together: The result is MetroNet, 30 minutes of programing five nights a week, just waiting to sop up those extra ad dollars. Station owners, eager for a percentage of the take that a smash such as Mary Hartman provides, will line up to carry a hit show, even if they currently carry only regular network programs. The Federal Communications Commission, which issues the all-important licenses that permit stations to operate, has recently announced an investigation to see if the big networks have too much influence on programing as a whole, so station owners may be particularly receptive to some fresh shows in their line-ups. If MetroNet doesn't succeed, alternatives are in the works. "Operation Prime Time," forged by MCA-TV and a line-up of independent stations, may be on the air this summer. And Norman Lear himself reportedly has plans to fill three hours of air time on Saturday nights with programs to compete with the Big Three. Nothing in the rulebook says you've got to play the game with only three teams; and with plenty of loose money around, chances are good someone else is going to join the big leagues.

Future Foggy

Nearly everyone is familiar with the year-end ritual of a well-known "psychic's" making predictions for the coming year while appearing on some late-night talk show. Perhaps you've even wondered what becomes of those predictions. Does anyone ever check up on them? Sociologist Dr. Gary Alan Fine of the University of Minnesota did and found that, when compared with a group of college students who also made predictions, the professional psychics did no better at all and, in fact, fared slightly worse. Dr. Fine was quick to point out that he did not test the possibility of someone's having psychic powers, only the statistical chances of professional psychics' doing a better job than ten Harvard and Radcliffe students. The professionals' predictions were taken from the National Enquirer, which each January asks ten "name" psychics to predict what will happen during the year. The study, Fine notes, "indicates that many self-described 'psychics' may not be psychics but perhaps entertainers, well-meaning believers in their own powers or frauds." Being a psychic, he adds, is a career, with all the attendant "tricks of the trade," but psychics are useful in society because they help us face the uncertain with increased confidence. Thanks; we needed that.

"A quarter of a million dollars for 60 seconds of air time is not uncommon."