[Mb-civic] The Good Fight, Done Badly By DAVID BROOKS

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Good Fight, Done Badly
By DAVID BROOKS

In 1955 Sloan Wilson published "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," and in
1956 William H. Whyte published "The Organization Man." Both books captured
the spirit of the times, when young men graduated from college and were
absorbed into large, anonymous corporate organizations.

Whyte described the bland conformism that prevailed in these bureaucracies.
The young men, he wrote, don't see the system "as something to be bucked,
but as something to be cooperated with." The Organization Men, he said, are
technicians, not innovators; conformists, not rebels. They are "obtrusive in
no particular, excessive in no zeal."

At about this time, smarter and more daring young men were also entering the
work force. But these renegades rebelled against the organizational
mediocrity they saw around them. They may have looked and dressed like all
the other corporate cogs, and they tended to go into business like the
others. But inside they were hostile to stultifying organizations, and
contemptuous of protective, slow-moving bureaucracies. They saw themselves
as anti-Organization Men, as bureaucratic barbarians who would crash through
the comfy old routines and wipe out corporate sloth.

Donald Rumsfeld, who graduated from Princeton in 1954, was of this type.
Athletic, heroic, he never met an organization he didn't try to upend. He
made it to Congress in the early 1960's and challenged the existing order.
He was hired by Richard Nixon and quickly reorganized the Office of Economic
Opportunity, slashing jobs and focusing the organization. He wrote to Nixon
that he would upset the education bureaucrats and destroy "their comfortable
world."

As his career went on, he took his streamlining zeal to the Pentagon, and
then to G. D. Searle & Company, where he dismissed hundreds of executives,
spun off losing businesses and streamlined the bureaucracy.

Rumsfeld's style appealed to political leaders who were allied with the
corporate world, but hostile to self-satisfied corporate fat cats. Nixon
loved Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush, the rebel in chief, quickly hired him.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumsfeld held a town meeting in the Pentagon that almost
perfectly summarizes his career. There is an organization that threatens the
security of the United States, he warned. "With brutal consistency, it
stifles free thought and crushes new ideas." The adversary is close to home,
he concluded: "It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."

Anti-Organization Men like Rumsfeld value the traits needed to mount frontal
assaults on vast bureaucracies: first, unshakable self-confidence; second, a
willingness to stir up opposition and to be unmoved in the face of it (on
the contrary, to see it as the inevitable byproduct of success).

Anti-Organization Men tend to love fast-moving technology for the way it
renders old structures obsolete. They tend to see themselves as event-making
characters who exist above their organizations, or in a tightly organized
renegade band. Rumsfeld wrote his own rules, and many of them sing the
glories of disruption: "You can't cut a swath through the henhouse without
ruffling some feathers."

These anti-Organization Men did a lot of good. If you look at the
corporations that reinvented themselves in the 1980's ‹ G.E., Chrysler,
Citibank, I.B.M., Xerox ‹ you see they were led by men who were viscerally
hostile to organizational inertia and willing to take gigantic risks to
shake things up.

Unfortunately, we've learned that though Rumsfeld is a perfect warrior for
peaceful times, his virtues turn into vices during wartime. War is nothing
but a catalog of errors, and in fluid, unpredictable circumstances, the
redundancies of the World War II style of organization actually make sense.
When you don't know what you will need, sometimes it is best just to throw
gigantic resources at a problem. You can adapt later on.

Rumsfeld the reformer never adjusted to the circumstances of wartime. Once
the initiator of new ideas, he now strangles ideas. Once the modernizer,
he's now the dinosaur. Amid the war on terror, he has unleashed a reign of
terror on his subordinates.

If you just looked at his résumé, you might think he was the best person to
lead the Pentagon in time of war, but in reality he was the worst because
his whole life had misprepared him for what was to come. He was prepared to
fight organizations. He was not prepared to fight enemies.

Now the bureaucracy he assaulted is rising up against him. In other times
their enmity would be a mark of accomplishment, but now it's a symptom of
failure. He has become a past-tense man.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company