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One of Robert McNamara’s controversial accomplishments was putting in place a rigorous strategic planning process in the Defense Department. Essentially, McNamara elevated strategic planning from the individual forces to the departmental level, and assigned it to a small group of people chosen in his image – brilliant young quantitatively-oriented civilians – and reporting directly to him.

His bright boys wanted to deliver the most bang for the buck and proposed options that integrated across the forces to achieve this goal. The forces bitterly resented this attack on their cherished autonomy. While McNamara unleashed this model of strategic planning on the Defense Department, over the years it has been applied to many other public sector organizations, generally under rubrics such as Program, Planning, and Budgeting Systems (PPBS) or Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB).

I applied this model of strategic planning against the eleven lessons from the life of Robert McNamara that are set out in Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War. Some of the lessons, such as “get the data” and “maximize efficiency,” are clearly consistent with his strategic planning model. But many of the others are not.

“Belief and seeing are often wrong” casts a skeptical eye on data-gathering, implying that the data are always filtered through the biases of the analyst.

“Empathize with your enemy” makes the point while organizations interact with other organizations, the interactions come down to relationships among people. Strategic planning often imagines the world in an abstract way that ignores the human element. One lesson McNamara ultimately learned from the Vietnam War was that the North Vietnamese weren’t governed by simplistic stimulus-response psychology, but were rather a proud people with a history, and this self-image drove their decisions.

McNamara’s deepest, and most skeptical, lessons for planners are that “you can’t change human nature” and that “rationality will not save us.” However rational your plan, it doesn’t take into account the frequent irrationality of human behavior.

A nuclear policy of mutually assured destruction depends on the critical assumption that all protagonists prefer life over death, but as McNamara discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis there were some, most notably the Cuban leadership and the American military, that were willing to countenance millions of deaths for ideological reasons.

In a speech given in 1966, McNamara himself clearly recognized the limits of our rationality:
“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never gets it quite built.”

Bearing in mind these limits on human rationality, the question that arises in my mind is whether any other strategic planning process would do better than McNamara’s quantitative and elitist approach. I tend to believe that a more populist approach, engaging both the people who will be implementing plans and will be affected by plans, would do better. They would provide greater empathy while demonstrating the limits of rationality, leading to conclusions that are likely less subtle and complicated than those that would result from an elitist process, but, conversely, more likely to win widespread approval.

I will be away next week, so my next post will be the first week in August.

I just read Winston Churchill CEO a new book by Alan Axelrod, who describes himself as a prolific author of business and popular history books. The book is a most recent example of the “lessons from …” genre of business books.

The book has several strengths. Axelrod is a lucid and eloquent writer, easy to read. He does a good job analyzing the effectiveness of Churchill’s greatest speeches, particularly those of 1940, which inspired the nation at the moment its future looked darkest.

Axelrod’s brief biography of Churchill made clear something I hadn’t quite realized, namely how much Churchill was a military man – indeed a warrior – all his life. He trained as a soldier and while serving as a war correspondent in South Africa, the Sudan, and India was also involved in military operations (i.e., he killed enemies and was himself captured). He was first Lord of the Admiralty and Minister of Munitions during World War I, and had a lifelong interest in military technology. He spent the thirties trying to persuade his countrymen to prepare for what he saw as an inevitable war with Germany, and was ultimately prime minister during that war. In both world wars, he was at the front as much as possible, and even while prime minister, frequently wore a uniform.

The surprising event that makes it evident that Churchill was primarily a wartime leader was his losing the 1945 election in a landslide, held just two months after his greatest moment of triumph. British voters listened to Churchill’s belligerent campaign rhetoric and, looking forward rather than backward, concluded that – despite his achievements in wartime – he was not the right person to lead in a time of economic reconstruction. Axelrod ignores this defeat because it speaks to the limitations of applicability from one context to another.

Axelrod fails to demonstrate the relevance of Churchill’s career as a leader of the public sector in crisis to the ongoing management of the private sector. The book jacket copy “we shall in the boardrooms” shows this incongruity. Axelrod’s approach is to scatter through the book in text boxes the learnings for private sector managers. Many of these are simplistically self-evident, such as “all business is people business,” or “make a sale, create a customer,” or “the goal of every enterprise is to win.”

The book also does not tell us who the implied reader is. Axelrod is writing for people in business but never attempts to show which functions and levels and which types of business. Had Axelrod taken his mission seriously, rather than scattering these bon mots throughout the text, he would have written a chapter or two in which he identified his audience, and then wrestled with the question of what one could learn from the career of an eminently successful wartime political leader that would be relevant to the sorts of careers and industries he was writing for.

Drawing lessons is ultimately a challenging task. What can be learned from an exemplar’s experience that is relevant to another person in a different time, place, and set of circumstances, particularly if the exemplar is as unique as was Churchill? Axelrod’s book unwittingly demonstrates just how challenging a task it is.

Two months ago I posted about my exam question asking for a hypothetical obit for Robert McNamara. With his actual passing two days ago, it’s fascinating to read reactions. He remains enormously controversial.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who himself served during the war in Vietnam, expressed “utter contempt” for McNamara’s retrospective admission that the war in Vietnam was wrong. According to Herbert, McNamara — who knew early on that the war was a lost cause – should have spoken up at the time.

My Harvard undergraduate class (1971) runs a list-serv, and the comments were equally divided between those who, like Herbert, condemned McNamara for keeping silent in the past, and those who admire him for later in life admitting his errors and attempting to learn from history.

In the exam question, I asked for a Canadian perspective on McNamara. Globe and Mail obituary-writer Sandra Martin interviewed former diplomat Alan Gotlieb, who opined that McNamara was a person of honesty and integrity who, like many of the American elite, carried through his long life the belief that the US should be the world’s policeman and its conscience.

What an insider perspective, with the subordinate clause only hinting at a critique. Had she interviewed one of the many former objectors to the Vietnam War who have made their lives in Canada, I’m sure she would have gotten a different, less subtle or generous, perspective.

Documentarist Errol Morris, on his eponymous website, posted a radio interview he did attempting to sum up his nuanced thoughts about this complex man. Morris called him a technocrat with a moral dimension, a man who was torn between his loyalty, as a public servant, to the commander-in-chief and his own sense of right and wrong. Morris observed that McNamara was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq, but never forthrightly condemned it. Morris hypothesized that, in his own mind, McNamara was secretary of defense for the rest of his life. He was always the loyal servant.

I think this interpretation is exactly right: McNamara was quintessentially an insider, and while he was willing to criticize the mistakes of the past, he could never go that one step farther. He could never criticize what he disagreed with while it was happening because that would put in jeopardy his cherished insider status.

I close with a related personal vignette. While an undergrad at Harvard in the early 1970s, I sat on the student advisory committee to the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. We had occasional meetings (and receptions) with the “visiting committee,” which included Kennedy administration luminaries like Mrs. Onassis and Robert McNamara.

The night before one such meeting I received a call from someone in SDS, to ask about the details of the meeting and reception, so that they could confront McNamara. I told the SDS’er nothing, reasoning that, at a time when Nixon had ordered the bombing of Cambodia, embarrassing the former secretary of defense would do little to advance the cause of peace.

McNamara ultimately did not show up, which was not surprising, given that on a visit to Harvard in 1966 he was treated roughly by protesters. But, when thinking back about it, I still wonder if I didn’t facilitate a potential protest because I thought it was counter-productive, or whether I just didn’t want SDS’ers to crash the party to which I was one of the fortunate few who had been invited.