Putting Yourself on the Line

...Another reason people stay in the government bureaucracies is money...

...Yet while there is plenty of evidence that worker participation can succeed in small and medium-sized companies,* there is no such evidence as to the industrial giants...

...As this is written, federal government unions are threatening rebellion if they don’t get an expected 5.5-percent pay increase this fall, and the militants among them are demanding a $1 0,000 minimum salary with a 30-hour week...

...What is important is overcoming the fear of failure...

...Twenty-one of the 28 acquired companies showed declining performance as measured by at least two of the three barometers...

...How can they be made to count more...

...Honest evaluation of ourselves and our organizations is what we need...

...Duane Thomas’ Trump Card Of course there are practical obstacles to going out on your own which can’t be overlooked...

...A man we discussed in one of our recent issues, Bill Moyers, has demonstrated through his successesgovernment, publishing, and public TV-the range of options talent can provide...

...By 1977 they will be making over $36,000...

...If you’re a lawyer, you win four cases in a row so you get sloppy in the fifth...

...Will where he spoke with total contempt of the people who came for the Hearst free food...

...The reason is that he is one of the two or three best running backs in professional football...

...Their silence can only mean that the companies don’t really mind so much what is going on because they are in collusion with the unions in many cases...

...A recent example is the case of Duane Thomas, a running back with the Washington Redskins...

...The average salary of all employees at the Atomic Energy Commission is just under $20,000 a year...

...Here is the way most Foreign Service days are spent: The first priority, as with any branch office, is the traditional bureaucratic effort to maintain good relations with the home office-in this case, Washington...

...Perhaps most to blame is the culture of liberal idealism which automatically characterizes someone who goes into an urban planning consultantship as idealistic and classifies the person who decides to be a building contractor as comparatively base...

...But if she felt ready to leave if necessary, and felt able, then having decided to stay, she could face the problems with confidence and work fearlessly to make something constructive out of the relationship...

...That is why development of the art of evaluationboth of organizations and individualsis so important...

...It has a lot to do with the way the Russian wheat deal was handled and with the other causes for our inflated grocery costs today...

...Fear of failure is what will make you self-conscious every time you go into that courtroom, worrying about yourself instead of focusing on the judge and the jury and the message you’re trying to get across to them...

...When your focus is on doing the job, failure today simply means you try again tomorrow...

...They almost never become surgeons or trial lawyers, where evaluation by result is an everyday matter...

...The badges confer a special sense of class, almost a touch of aristocracy...

...They all have their coneference centers...

...In fact the evidence is accumulating to show that “wife and kids” is beginning to rank only slightly below “separate but equal” on the list of great phony excuses...

...The same applies to a job...

...But money is far from the whole story...

...Putting Yourself on the Line by Charles Peters Yesterday Penn Central...

...You’ve seen these faces-men gifted at good-humored blandness who go from Arden to Airlie to Aspen with one eye on the next martini and the other on protecting their organization’s interests...

...General Motors and the Post Office each has over 700,000 employees...

...If, unafraid of being fired, you work courageously, with conscience and commitment, then the job is far more rewarding-worth staying in-than if cowed by the fear of dismissal, you yielded to all pressures in the effort to keep it...

...From the conservative must come the liberal’s humanitarian concern for income security and medical care...

...The unions help them with all sorts of things, so they don’t mind the union excesses, and of course, the public is paying the bill anyway...

...Take education...

...We’ve got to get out of these ruts if we’re to restore the health of this country...

...Even if 90 per cent of the work done in your office is bureaucratic confetti, your competence to do the ten per cent of real work is a compelling card to hold...

...It used to be very different at the small-town party where everyone knew everyone else’s life story and could relax and stop trying to impress each other...

...The other loses packages...

...And even the jobs that count can stand a .hard look...

...The first two-thirds of an FSO’s career may be described as a prolonged period of warming up, getting ready for the duties ahead...

...Powerful forces in the unions, the corpora- 4 tions, the foundations, the great universities, and in the government itself will resist real evaluation...

...Seventy-three per cent of California vegetables are produced on farms that are much larger than optimum size...

...The most tangible holding power of tenure is fear that you won't be able to compete in the "outside" world, that if you leave your cozy little niche your real lack of qualification will be exposed...

...Economies of scale are proving illusory...

...Organizations need to be evaluated, not by computers, as Robert McNamara and his disciples tried to do, but by human evaluators, who combine investigative, analytical, and literary skills, so that they can find out what the organization is actually doing, figure out whether it’s worth doing, or could be done better, and report in a way that can be read and understood...

...We could pay these controllers more and fire the analysts...

...Sometimes he is just that...

...Real incompetence in the Department of Agriculture isn’t just a bureaucratic curiosity...

...Recently I read a column by George Will saying we should all try to understand the legitimate law-and-order concerns that underlie the popularity of the vigilante film, Death . Wish...

...mittee was able to force four of the largest conglomerates-ITT, Litton Indus tries, Ling-Temco-Vought, and Gulf and Western Industries-to provide data on how the acquired companies performed both before and after their takeover...

...Tenure then exerts its seductive force even in an organization like the Foreign Service, which has a fairly tough selection -ou t pro cess...

...It can, in fact, lead to arrogance...

...A worker is a lot more likely to see the results of his extra effort in a larger profit-sharing bonus if he works in a 500-man plant than if he's part of General Motors...

...Second is coordination within the embassy itself...

...Big labor and big business have, of course, already achieved an accommodation which passes the cost along to the rest of us.* In Nelson Rockefeller President Ford has found the perfect symbol for bringing all the big organizations together in a kind of state socialism in which each agrees not to expose the other’s special privileges...

...All of us have seen the catastrophic results produced by friends who went into law or medicine not because they cared about law or medicine but because they wanted to be called lawyer or doctor...

...A good place for newspaperj to start would be their hometown schools and hospitals...

...A subtler force is reliance on structure...

...The answer was...

...The classic example of the identity problem is the New York cocktail party where you’re lucky if you know one person in ten...

...Does our job really count...

...The assumption that businessmen who reduce pollution partially in the interest of profit must be the same creatures who polluted the air in order to make profit in effect tells the entrepreneur that he can’t take normal satisfaction in being part of an accomplishment because the accomplishment would ,only be morally praiseworthy if the Ford Foundation were responsible for it...

...Does our organization do a good job of producing a needed product or service...

...But it should be emphasized that many of these apparent practical obstacles to independence are really psychological ploys by which the imprisoned fool others and even themselves...

...What we need, in short, is a rebirth of entrepreneurship...

...A few years ago Taylor Branch wrote an article for this magazine called “We’re All Working for the Penn Central...

...While our conservatives have been busy suppressing antitrust suits against ITT and bailing out every inefficient giant from Lockheed to the Franklin National Bank, the liberals have kept busy protecting their sinecures in government, the unions, and the wonderful world of non-profit institutions where tenure is king and everescalating salary without regard to performance the rule...

...We have begun to honor those courageous risk-takers who have blown the whistle in government...

...More than 73,000 civilian government employees draw base salaries of over $24,000 a year...

...When that beautiful girl turns to you for a moment, you feel you have to flash your identity badges fast and you want them to be instantly recognizable and instantly impressive...

...Together they can produce a climate that will encourage men to want to see themselves and their organizations evaluated, to want to change from phony jobs to jobs that count, to want to reform their organization, and failing in that attempt, to form new organizations that will do the job better, to want to do well without having to kick the shit out of the other guy, to have the fun of waking up in the morning and say I know I’m going to try to do what I want to do, not what someone else thinks I should do, not what will earn me social position or paper credentials but what fenjoy doing and do well...

...Thomas climaxed a career of eccentricity by physically attacking a Redskins coach and calling him a “white-racist motherfucker...

...A recent study by the Department of Agriculture reported that the optimum size for a California vegetable farm was 440 acres...

...But the interesting question to me is where are all the Republican senators who used to speak out for the companies and attack the unions...

...One obvious answer to the problem is encouraging entrepreneurship 4 by workers-a share in ownership that will give them a stake in making a new business out of a failing one by increasing its productivity...

...Last year, Engineering News-Records, a respected engineering journal, came out with an extensive survey of the union work rules in the construction industry...

...One suspects that we are close to a merger between our conservatives and liberals...

...From the liberal must come the old conservative respect for entrepreneurship...

...The old organizations-public or privatesimply aren’t doing the job...

...This means we need people who like to start new enterprises and make old ones come alive again...

...But the most powerful force may be the subtle bondage of the seniority system, in which the very emptiness of the early jobs binds the employees all the tighter...

...Many people simply don’t have the option...

...But far more have the option than are using it...

...Often the man who says he’s staying in a job he hates for the sake of the kids is really pinning a martyr’s badge on himself which will be paid for in the guilt of his children, who would be much better off with the mental health that comes from a happy home...

...This is why organizational evaluation is just as dependent as individual evaluation on the individual’s willingness to face losing his job...

...The entrepreneur has become linked in the liberal mind with the robber baron who delights in destroying his competition...

...You need some kind of financial cushion and a reasonable amount of encouragement and protection from the government...

...Of course, most of us do not have a real prince to have faith in...

...Talent is probably the most unrecognized source of power today...

...Admittedly this has its significance: at cocktail parties and receptions in Poland, American diplomats were able to brush shoulders with the Chinese...

...In 1959, there were 55,685 individual estate tax returns filed...

...It concluded that 40 per cent of every construction payroll dollar is wasted because of the union’ rules...

...The highly skilled tax lawyer, for example, is so much in demand by the big firms, that he has real power to influence the firms’ policies...

...Big business, big labor, big education, and big foundations love conferences...

...Mmagers and workers are more concerned with preserving their positions and expanding their benefits than with doing their work...

...The little secret that no one lets out is that what one does after putting on the badge is not all that exciting...

...One result of job evaluation could be a reversal of present compensation patterns in which the action jobs are paid lower salaries and given less respect than the planning analyst...

...Even before they actually acquire the estate, the knowledge that it is coming gives them a degree of independence...

...The crunch of the tenure system is that people in it find it very hard to leave...

...We simply can’t afford to pay the bill for this kind of ineptitude any longer...

...The teachers we have screwed so long in salary may now screw us with their resistance to evaluation of classroom performance...

...To give one example, during the mid-sixties, the American “country team” in the Cameroonsthe leaders of the Peace Corps, the Foreign Service, the U. S. Information Service, the CIA, and AID, presided over by the American ambassadordevoted one of its meetings to working out a fair allotment of Skippy peanut butter among the various American groups in the country...

...In too many ways, the Foreign Service is a kind of lifelong Rhodes scholarship, a badge of status more important for the identity it gives the wearer than for what it requires him to accomplish...

...Real reform of our institutions can’t happen with such attitudes...

...checking the latest policy and gossip...

...If you have published for an organ of widely acknowledged distinction, such as Harper’s, things will bounce back quickly and the conversation can proceed...

...But that is not to say that this is not a scary time, and it’s going to take courage to face our problems...

...Albert Speer was able to blur away Hitler’s final solution for the Jews as he focused on his own job performance...

...Are we doing it well...

...Every one of these reports-as well as a study conducted by the New York Stock Exchange -concluded that companies were generallv less efficient after acauisition...

...We also propose a system of payment for higher education that will put an end to the trap which a college education for their children means to most parents...

...What you have is a union elite which is perpetuating itself,” says Ralph Nader...

...Many of those too timid to blow the whistle are as likely to end up on the breadline as Ross Perot...

...Like congressmen who stop fighting the seniority system after theit third or fourth term, few FSOs seriously consider leaving the Service after 19 years...

...While the higher quality professional would put it less bluntly, they really seem to be thinking, “I’m pro, I do my work well, whatever it is...

...The results were clear...

...They lack the money or the talent-or the youth in a-society that scorns the aged...

...They require regeneration or replacement...

...If he wants 15 per cent of the firm’s work to be pro bono, so it’s likely to be...

...But for too long it has been forgotten as our attitudes have been molded by a conservatism dedicated to the defense Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...

...The solution is a form of work rationing in which Foreign Service Officers queue up, often for 15 or 20 years, to wait their turn for a challenging, significant job...

...The kind of evaluation that’s needed could raise journalism to a new art form in which the conventional expose would be deepened by the intellect and understanding needed to explain why things went wrong at General Motors and why they’re going right at Lincoln Electric...

...Most amazing, Lincoln's welding machines and electrodes are still sold at 1934 prices-the year when the first profit-sharing bonus was paid-while labor, copper, steel, and other inputs have risen by 200 to 600 per cent over the same period...

...The motives for staying are complex and hard to separate...

...Confidence, in the sense of having had a series of successful experiences, is irrelevant...

...A neat example of how liberals suppress criticism of their favored institutions is the United @ States Information Agency, which does nothing of value but offers empioyment for lots of journalists...

...On the other hand, people truly in love with what they’re doing care about doing it well and don’t fear intelligent evaluation...

...They even have regular conference attenders on their staffs...

...Paradoxically, by being willing to dump the marriage, she would make it worth saving...

...It means keeping up a steady cable traffic so that State will know the boys down in Rio are performing...

...They deserve thorough .examination...

...One turns out lemons...

...This generates most of the excitement and consumes about 50 per cent of the time...

...Yet, the average size of the corporate farms that dominate vegetable production in California is 3,206 acres-eight times larger than efficiency warrants...

...More and more people are inheriting enough money to allow them to overcome the “wife and kids” concern in choosing their jobs and determining values...

...A Gallup poll shows that 56 per cent of workers admit they could produce more, while a Harris survey reveals that a majority of Americans see no reason for increasing productivity, since it would only mean more money for greedy stockholders...

...Some are held back by greed, they don’t want to give up the special little angle they have now...

...The influence of the Foreign Service promotion system, the importance of titles rather than work, and the sharing of a small amount of work among a large staff all illustrate in exaggerated fashion the problems of our public and private bureaucracies...

...In recent years, $16.5 million was divided among Lincoln's 1,900 workers, distributing approximately $8,000 to each employee...

...The reason is that the phony jobs are part of our basic problem...

...Like fxemen and air traffic controllers...

...Lincoln's prices have been held steady by the extraordinary efforts of its employees both to produce more individually and to find ways to improve the manufacturing process so that overall costs have not risen...

...Another perfect symbol of what this merger would do for us is the conference...

...The sole product of these conferences is usually a statement or press release...

...uYree t hiat vise ahna erdvleyr mboereen peoxwaemrfiunle df aactt of life in the civil service, in schools and universities, and increasingly in the great corporations, where an unofficial kind of tenure is more and more common...

...We have evolved something like a princesubstitute, however, in the governmental and corporate bureaucracies, the universities, organized labor, foundations, with which so many of us are so unhappily familiar...

...Real evaluation of the State Department could take Foreign Service Officers out of the Skippy peanut butter debate and put them to mediating and defusing those tribal hatreds that increasingly threaten us with their terrorism and possible involvement of the major powers, and to negotiating the countless international agreements needed to protect us from inflation and nuclear disaster...

...If you didn’t happen to inherit one of them, there’s another kind of capital that can set you free...

...Such a marriage would limp along, slowly wearing down the partners...

...But that willingness might also lead to infinitely more interesting work...

...The problem is a fundamental imbalance between the supply of responsible, significant work, and the demand for that work from the legions of capable FSOs...

...You can’t slice too many arteries before you’re caught...

...To go from football to the white-collar professional world, once you have had a chance to demonstrate your talent in such a way that a reasonable number of people know about it, you can go wherever you want...

...Evaluation is a word that has been debased by the psychologists and bureaucrats...

...Why can Mr...

...What are the jobs that count...

...It takes a fair measure of inner sufficiency to let the Eurailpass lie unused, because it represents an order, a guideline...

...Ironically, failure is most likely when you are focused not on doing your job, but on the identity it gives you...

...Another recent Gallup Poll shows that the number of persons opposed to a federal law barring featherbedding has risen by 40 percent since 1962...

...Now they are examined for neither and licensed to practice both...

...this is the same reason that so few Rhodes scholars come home earlv...

...There is a certain critical level, surpassed in most Latin American and many African countries, above which the American contingent can generate all its own work...

...Of course, if it’s 100 per cent confetti, you have no power because no one is essential to the office...

...But the governments that must subsidize these activities are probably right in suspecting that the diplomats are operating one of the great con jobs of all timecomparable, in fact, to the way corporate officials hustle their stockholders into believing that there is more than an occasional legitimate business purpose in expense account entertaining and convention junke ting...

...I often ask myself what I would have done if I had recognized Hitler’s real face and the true nature of the regime he had established,” Speer said...

...But he can be something else...

...For others, it means measurement of the irrelevant...

...The money is, of course, even better in the big corporations and foundations...

...These are the people who most resist being judged by the actual success or failure of what they do...

...One is certainly the prestige of the Service, the reluctance to give up that institutional badge...

...my position as Hitler’s architect had become indispensable...

...But others who could go out on their own are paralyzed by the fear of failure...

...The trouble with the pro is that he sees the prostitute in the man who does second-rate work for money but not in the man who does first-rate work on a project for which he has no love...

...by 1970, the number had more than doubled to 133,944...

...After spending decades in jobs in the cellar, FSOs naturally want to take their turn upstairs...

...One may differ with some of the winners’ values-for example, their commitment to carry out the foreign policy of whatever President happens to be in office-but there is no denying that this is as bright and talented a group as any to be found in government...

...Will understand the vigilante and not the hungry...

...The adventure of creating something new, whether it be factory or school or clinic, has stirred the American soul in the past...

...The Badge of Status The Department of State, which by the way has excellent conference facilities on its own premises, is an extreme example of what’s wrong with most of the places where we work...

...This, I am told, is communication...

...This is finally what is most depressing of all: the compulsion of men to seek their identities in the gaudier identity of someone they perceive to be greater than they...

...Free-lance writer Paul Dickson has described his identity problem this way : “You become extremely nervous about meeting new people because of 4 the ever-present question, “Who are you with...

...Lockheed’s employees don’t want their company’s incompetence exposed because their own jobs would be threatened...

...Then he had a meeting with the Undersecretary on operations until 10:30...

...For example, police could be taken off victimless crimes so that they could concentrate on effective action against crimes of violence...

...Unless we do something about our inefficient corporations and government agencies, we aren’t going to defeat the other problems they help create...

...The third priority is a similar form of communication within the Ameri- 4 can community in the country...

...But even Moyers has failed to realize just how much freedom his talent could give him, and so he has avoided taking some of the big risks that might have allowed him to do even more...

...and shepherding visiting congressmen and Department officials...

...This was by far the largest collection of data on conglomerate performance ever made public...

...Washington is full of planning analysts making $36,000 a ‘year while the average air traffic controller receives only $12,000...

...T could not help but recall another column by Mr...

...We can’t afford the cost of featherbedding any longer...

...An important part of that process would be evaluating specific jobs...

...of established big business and by a liberalism too closely allied to big government and big labor, with branch offices in the foundations and the universities, where profit is a bad word...

...You have to take responsibility for what your organization is doing, whether it’s producing the best or worst product or service it’s capable of producing, whether it’s competing fairly or 4 unfairly, whether it’s polluting or not polluting...

...I was in accord with the system SO long I as it permitted me to function effectively?’ But the need to function is not the whole story, either...

...Fear of failure if you try something else and a reluctance to give up your investment in time compels people year after year to throw good time after bad, to hold on to the scrawny, irksome bird in the hand rather than drop it to go after one of the plump gorgeous creatures in the bush...

...Ritual Thinking ~ ~~~ When another depression may be on its way, some readers will wonder why on earth we’re talking about getting rid of jobs-even phony ones...

...Not everyone can, of course...

...So if your partner is William 0. Bittman collecting fees from the phone booth downstairs, it’s none of your business...

...One veteran had the courage to ask “What was I doing hustling votes for Moise Tshombe and hauling these pamphlets across the Sahara...

...Note that Speer did not say “my position as architect,” but rather, “my position as Hitler’s architect...

...In order to work well, particularly at something which demands imagination, intellectual energy, and dedicationin other words, something other than plain labor-people have to feel free to leave: they stay only because they choose to stay, not because they are afraid to leave...

...Doctor Doolittle One begins to overcome that fear of failure with the realization that failure hurts most those who are aiming at success...

...Another factor is the need to function...

...We should do the same for those who try to reform their company or start a new one...

...Instead of counting the number of “education’’ credits teachers have accumulated, we should evaluate them stricly on the basis of their subject knowledge and their ability to communicate that knowledge in a classroom...

...But it is compelling only if you are willing to withdraw it, willing to refuse to compromise it...

...He is in fact a creator equally deserving of praise or blame in terms of the quality of what he produces as are the creators in the arts upon whom the liberal lavishes so much attention...

...The spirit, like the body, if constantly given a substitute for its own strength, will lose its strength...

...Having bought the pass, you are perfectly free to stop riding the train, but if you come upon a town which promises an unprecedented good time if you would only stop over, chanqes are you will be simply incapable of staying there, or if you do stay, you will dance on thorns, knowing your pass is expiring, unused...

...Even if that figure turns out to be inexact, it indicates the trend...

...If you have developed enough skill so that the boss knows you’re not just good but very good, you have considerable power to bring about reform because he doesn’t want to lose you...

...But once inside the Service, young officers find that there is less to do than they had imagined...

...The fourth priority is .taking part in the life of the “diplomatic community...

...Skippy Peanut Butter Debate The fear of organizational evaluation is a natural outgrowth of the fear of individual evaluation...

...This doubled many workers' yearly earnings...

...Not only can talent help you improve your present situation, but if the boss happens to be stupid enough to let you go, it will help you get another job or raise the capital for a new enterprise of your own...

...Their economic security may be based on a spouse’s income or the extra cushion provided by inherited capital...

...There is some secondechelon hope for you as, say, a writer, in the recovery question, “Well, who do you write for...

...We need people who are willing to shed their institutional cocoons and stand or fall on the basis of their actual performance...

...If not, we should be ready to find a new job or start a new organization...

...They would say, “I haven’t got the self-confidence to do that...

...It is the religious impulse perverted so that one’s allegiance is to LBJ rather than to an idea of what the President should be...

...But with the mobility of the American people-one in three of us moves each year-we’re becoming a nation of strangers who need badges that will confer instant identity...

...Afraid to Get Off Because- of the conspiracy of silence by the liberals, the perils of D taelln...

...It called a conference...

...What are the phony jobs, where vague titles like planning analyst conceal hours of newspaper reading...

...Lawyers should be evaluated by their bar examiners for trial ability if they want to practice in the courtroom, for knowledge of the internal revenue code if they want to practice tax law...

...Another element is the i) “ career-in-the-Service” orientation, clear from the start, which discourages short-term diplomats...

...After a few days’ suspension, the Redskins management perceived the true triviality of the offense and reinstated him...

...The management consultants and social scientists could turn evaluation into a comedy of academese and numbers that would tell just about the same amount of truth as the body counts from Vietnam...

...So like a selffulfilling prophecy, it creates the dependence it presupposes...

...Once they become a lawyer or doctor, they want to have arrived, to have made it in a way that can’t be taken away from them...

...What they do fear is inept criticism...

...And, surprisingly enough, more and more people who say they can’t break away from General Motors because of the wife and kids really have enough capital to thumb their noses at the boss...

...That’s why elsewhere in this issue we discuss the need for a guaranteed annual income, for tax incentives for new businesses, and for enforcement of antitrust laws...

...Then he took until 11:30 to inform his staff of what went on at the earlier meeting...

...After deductions for taxes, reserves, and stockholder divjdends of six per cent, all the remaining profits are, distributed to the employees...

...Faced with the frightening possibility of inflation combined with depression, the Ford-Rocke feller Administration did what...

...The national magazines could do federal agencies and major companies...

...The Pro and the Prostitute For most of us, our bargaining card is our competence-sheer technical ability...

...But, done right, it is an essential tool for digging ourselves out of our present predicament...

...That is why you have to care about something beyond technical proficiency...

...But it’s there...

...When you’re preoccupied with success in the sense of making it rather than doing your work, the appearance of success is everything...

...The process that John Kenneth Galbraith described as operating in the State Department also prevails in embassies of any size: “When I went back [to State] this time one of my assistant secretary friends attended the Secretary’s staff meeting from 9:15 until 1O:OO a.m...

...There is no better statement of the problem...

...There have been eight different government investigations of the large conglomerates...

...The trouble is he usually doesn’t ‘realize he has the power...

...I’m not responsible for what my organization does...

...When your answer fails to attach you to a recognized organization like The New York Times, or Nader’s Raiders, or the Department of Labor, both parties to the conversation often become embarrassed by your obscurity...

...It is talent...

...Why can the liberal understand the hungry and not the vigilante...

...Exposure of the phony jobs could do much to eliminate the fat in the economy...

...This suggests that we need organizations not only that are new but that are also small enough to stay new or be renewable...

...In fact, they are often heads of families, whose greatest worry is likely to be how deeply inflation will cut into their purchasing power on the next trip to Europe...

...Nobody knows whether that charity really deserves the contributions it’s getting any more than they know whether HUD is really doing what it is supposed to be doing or whether what it is supposed to be doing really needs doing...

...Whereupon they adjourned to pass on the news to their staffs...

...Journalism could find a new role in evaluating government agencies and private organizations...

...fhe House Antitrust kubcom*The Lincon Electric Company in Cleveland, Ohio, instituted a system of worker participation and profit-sharing nearly 40 years ago...

...Organizations need to be evaluated from the inside-by employees whose independence should be guaranteed both by their own talent and by a three- or four-year limit on how long tney can work for the organizationand from the outside by newspapers and magazines...

...For many it suggests gobbledegook designed not to identify failure but to cover it up...

...What they don’t realize is that a lack of confidence is not their problembut a fear of failure is...

...The shortage of significant work, combined with- the reluctance of old FSOs to quit (the annual resignation rate is about seven per cent-very low), means that people must wait a long time before they can move from one of the make-work jobs into one of the few with challenging duties...

...Probably the greatest roadblock is the ritual thinking of liberals and conservatives...

...Many of its members are not only skillful and intelligent, but also determined to do some good...

...The longer an officer stays in, the harder it becomes to tear him away from the system of rewards: his investment grows larger, and the time until payoff diminishes...

...Featherbedding is Popular Right now there is very little honor-or even self-respect-in the free-enterprise system...

...You have to care enough about your organization and what it should be doing to use your card if your organization is doing the wrong things...

...From both must come a new respect for free criticism of institutions, including their own...

...It's rather like a troubled marriage in which the wife to leave or stay, but because she is so terrified of being alone, stays, never discovering that in the absence of terror she would have decided for positive reasons to stay...

...Tenure is like a Eurailpass...

...This means that in just one year there were 133,944 estates of at least $60,000, with most of them over $1 20,000...

...The trouble is that structures like tenure, like any job which arranges your life for you, insuring against risk, providing a neat little stepladder on which to mark your progress, will tend to weaken inner direction and sufficiency...