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• W20587075 abstract "The New Yorker depicts him in a pin-stripe suit, holding a handkerchief to his face, his eyes leaking crocodiles, and a cartoon in my local paper shows him as the grim reaper. (1) His biographer asks why has waited so long to publish his account and concludes that he seems to still fight discordant facts that do not suit his present purpose, still seems to want to brush off doubt. (2) Yet the world owes at least a small thank-you to Robert Strange McNamara for his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. (3) No recent book more tellingly reveals the dangers of a mathematical approach to decision making. It's a lesson that might just help save us from even worse disasters as we race ahead. The lesson must, of course, be extracted by someone who knows what to look for. It doesn't just lie there on the surface. One must dig beneath McNamara's platitudinous explanations of what went wrong and shed the human desire for a human scapegoat. One must seek the kind of systematic causes that would make McNamara's basic error predictable. It probably helps the search if one is interested in both math and decision making. But it helps even more if one is interested in mathsemantics, in how meanings and math interact, and particularly in how a mathematical outlook might affect decision making. Such odd interests, as readers of this series probably know, just happen to be among the qualifications of your mathsemantic monitor. (4) McNamara's Math Outlook McNamara's mathematical outlook is of great and unusual extent for a man of practical affairs, as can easily be demonstrated from his own words. He tells us promptly (In Retrospect, p. 6) that in college at the University of California at Berkeley chose economics as his major, and philosophy and mathematics as his minors. His mathematics professors, writes McNamara, taught me to see math as a process of thought - a language in which to express much, but certainly not all, of human activity. It was a revelation. To this day I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world. (P. 6) In 1939 McNamara graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, which he'd attended to soak up the nuts-and-bolts skills figured he'd need to land a job. (P. 7) He soon married and returned to Cambridge. At first taught there in an army air corps statistical control program as part of the team put together by Charles B. Tex Thornton, then became in 1943 a civilian consultant to the War Department, and then a commissioned officer, leaving the service in 1946 as a much-traveled lieutenant colonel. (Pp. 8-9) At the war's end Thornton assembled a team of veterans from his statistical control office to work together in civilian life. (P. 10) In 1946, says McNamara, they went to work for the Ford Motor Company, where ...[b]ecause of our cerebral approach to making decisions and our youth, we became known as the Whiz Kids. (Pp. 11-12) The Whiz Kids either lucked out or performed well. The company grew rapidly, increased its market share, and the value of its stock increased dramatically. McNamara became head of the Ford Division, the company's biggest unit, in the early 1950s and then in 1960 the youngest (at 44 years) and first non-Ford-family president of Ford. (Pp. 12-13) However, it's to his wartime experience in statistical control that McNamara refers when commenting on his appointment as secretary of defense in 1961: President Kennedy knew I would bring to the military[,] techniques of management from the business world, much as my Harvard colleagues and I had done as statistical control officers in the war. (P. 3) These events have a certain immediacy, if only from a worm's-eye view, for the mathsemantic monitor. He was also at Harvard in 1943, though as a college undergraduate. After serving in the antiaircraft artillery during the war and getting a master's in planning from the University of Chicago, began a career as an aviation consultant in 1951. …" @default.
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• W20587075 date "1995-09-22" @default.
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• W20587075 title "Looking Ahead: Why the Real Lesson of Vietnam Eludes Robert McNamara" @default.
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