EDITOR’S PAGE

I’M ALWAYS STARTLED when the language and modus operandi of the corporation invade the exquisite chaos of creative people. (Actually, it only looks like chaos. In truth, it’s single-minded order that crowds out the extraneous to concentrate on one thing at a time.)

It happened here at Southwest Media Corp. recently when some consultants showed up to try to show D and Texas Homes how we could get our magazines to the printer on time. Heaven knows we can stand improvement in meeting our deadlines, but the consultants’ concern with “support systems” and “organization charts” puzzled me-even though I know that we need both. They were equally dumbfounded, I imagine, by my lengthy peroration on the mystery of ideas and how they can’t be programmed.

Of course, we were acting out an old conflict between analytical and intuitive kinds of people. (Carl Jung identified these psychological types in 1921, and they’ve been at war ever since. But the sniping started long before the Twenties. Wordsworth and Wellington probably chafed in each other’s company but didn’t understand why.)

It’s probably just as well that there are a lot more of them than there are of us. According to one source, only 25 percent of the population is intuitive. The potential problem suggested by this statistic is that too many of our companies, agencies and governments may be running themselves on flow charts, spread sheets, fancy presentations and all the necessary apparatus of modern management systems-but without insight or inspiration. Some are running themselves right into the ground.

Peter Drucker, who, in my opinion, is still the best of the management writers, said in Managing in Turbulent Times that we are working our way through extremely treacherous years, when lunges and lurches in unexpected directions can be called commonplace. Projections based on past experience will no longer suffice for planning the future. It seems to me that this means we must depend on lucky intuitions to guide us. Those organizations that have systematically screened out creative people or destroyed the ones they have by inundating them with busywork may find themselves analyzing red ink.

Not that everything Drucker says actually works. I find his notion of spending long hours with a staff member trying to impart what you want accomplished over the next several months tedious and often confusing -certainly for the person on the receiving end of that conversation, and very likely for the one dishing out the orders as well. Frequent, brief base-touching seems to me for more satisfactory.

But Drucker was certainly correct in his often-quoted notions of phasing out yesterday’s success and reaching for tomorrow’s opportunity. The danger lies in misunderstanding both the past and the future, and the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we rely on systems instead of people to make those critical decisions. (Sometimes the reverse is true: Leaps of intuition unsupported by adequate analysis and detail work also can lead to calamity.)

More goes wrong, I think, the farther we get from our fundamental purposes. There’s something invigorating about working close to an inventory, a product or a service.

A hamburger operator learned this when he found out that his customers wanted him to deliver what he promised-burgers-and skip the veal parmigiana sandwiches. (I wonder what marketing whiz kid thought of veal parmigiana sandwiches in the first place? Probably somebody who never eats fast food but who produces brilliant presentations.) When the hamburger business went back to basics, it started booming again.

Today, even non-business enterprises (whose purposes are different from manufacturing and marketing a product) are embracing the jargon and methods of management. Public-service agencies, whose work is truly on the side of the angels, go forth to raise money with sales pitches so cold and detached that they make IBM sound like a woodworkers’ cooperative. These public-spirited people underestimate the humanity of the corporate executives upon whom they’re calling. I suspect that many executives yearn for relief from the constraints of the MBA way of thinking.

Now it seems that all the world must have a five-year plan. Channel 13 is working on one; so are the Dallas Mavericks, according to media sources. I heard a friend who’s an advertising man and a writer once say that this made no sense to him. “If you meet today’s challenge today,” he said, “tomorrow will take care of itself.” He isn’t the first to make this observation; the New Testament and Shakespeare expressed the same idea. But are we paying attention? Of course not.

We’re too busy with Management by Objective (MBO). When I first read about this concept, it seemed like a wonderful way to eliminate distractions and keep our minds on making money-the bottom line, as they say-and it’s not a bad phrase for galvanizing the energies of thousands of people who must somehow work in concert. Nonetheless, I’m concerned about some of those discarded distractions. Might there be a few important babies in that bath water? Are trends being overlooked and opportunities missed because nobody thought to put them in the five-year plan? It’s fine to have a few objectives, as long as we remember that they are nothing more than the practical implementation of our vision.

Management by Objective, it seems to me, springs from a deep passion to control people and events. Therein lies its gallant tragedy-as if we could control anything, really. The hubris of MBO concentrates its hopes on re-creating men and women as machines-above human emotion-as technological marvels equipped with quartz crystals and silicon chips that never vary, never wear out and never die.

But, as I said, there are a lot more of them than there are of us. And we need them to put order in our world and our work. Chances are that they need something from us, too. So it’s important that we bear the tensions generated by our differences and find a way to build organizations that are managerially sound and creatively vital.