progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
the records of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked
backward.
Let me introduce an example.
When I was at NYNEX, now Verizon, in 1989 we had a strike. One of my management
people went to strike duty in a customer service bureau. In that bureau, true to Taylor like
management, there was a clock and you were timed for every customer contact and you
were pressured to make them as short as possible. This manager went there and since he
outranked the manager of the bureau he decided to try another tactic. He recognized that
people call customer service because they have a problem.
Thus this customer contact was an opportunity to solve the problem, create a happy
customer, get customer loyalty, get a word of mouth positive word about the company
and even possibly sell more services. He reasoned that the longer the customer service
call the better and the primary objective was to make a happy customer. A novel thought
especially for a utility. He tried it and surprise it worked. Except for one thing, the system
rejected it. The antibodies of the old telephone company attacked and said, "We do not do
it this way." Well you know the result.
What is the relationship between this and Brandeis, well Brandeis accepted the
"scientific" evidence without and justification, something he would never have done in
court. Why did he do this, Lepore seems to believe it was an effect of the times. I would
agree but it was also that Brandeis like so many well educated people believe that they
can extend well beyond their ken with impunity.
The Lepore article is a review of a book, for which she writes:
"In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton;
$27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his
colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients,
and inflated the record of his success. As it happens, Stewart did the same things during
his seven years as a management consultant; fudging, lying, and inflating, he says, are
the profession’s stock-in-trade. Stewart had just finished a D.Phil. at Oxford in
philosophy when he took a job rigging spreadsheets to tell companies whose business he
barely understood how to trim costs, and he feels sullied by it."
This statement clearly shows that Brandeis was easily fooled by the Taylor forces, and
that furthermore the consultants that flow to industry from our "best" business schools are
oftentimes ignorant of what they opine upon and even worse they are conjurers of
falsehoods created to meet certain expectations, perhaps on the part of the client. I have
seen many of the top consulting firms send in twenty year old who I had to educate, if
such was even possible, and then get them to write in English, all for $500 per hour or
more.
Lepore then jumps to the present and she states:
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