whiz Kids : Percepts and Concepts

Recent appointment of Nandan Nilekani as head of UID project brought back the old clamoring of “Bring the professionals to Govt” which filled the pages of pink papers during the recent election run of Capt. Gopinath and Meera Sanyal. With due respect to one of the most celebrated Indian businessman of this generation, I would urge the reader to not to rush in taking sides and read the following passage.
In this context, it was quite interesting to read the havoc created by the foremost whiz kid in govt. of this era, Robert McNamara who died recently. McNamara was criticized for applying his abstract thinking to management of the Vietnam War, ignoring the human and moral elements of the conflict. It was said, "McNamara treated everybody like they were a spare part on a Ford".
In his later years McNamara sought to atone for his role, and advocated a rethinking of the US and UK nuclear posture, advocating nuclear disarmament. But it was too little too late. His grudging mea culpa was just not good enough for a generation who had known him as Bomber Bob whose great abilities in statistics just ensured more Japanese and Vietnamese deaths and maiming.
When William F Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston Telephone directory than by two thousand Harvard Professors, he did have valid point.
As De Bono rightly said “Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven. One has to watch the movie Enron: the smartest people in the room to see this opinion at its extreme.
In much more moderated view a high powered IQ without the ability of empathetic perception is a sure recipe to disaster. High powered IQ will just take us faster to the brink. If the reams of papers have to be believed Nandan is someone who was blessed with equal amount of EQ to match his famed IQ.
I end my case with a great passage from Peter Drucker’s semi-autobiographical account “Adventures of a bystander”.
In the chapter titled “Ernest Freedberg’s World,” Drucker writes about two old-line merchants. The first of these, called “Uncle Henry” by those who knew him, was the founder and owner of a large and successful department store. When Drucker met him, he was already in his eighties. Uncle Henry was a businessman who did things by intuition more than by formal analysis, and his own son Irving, a Harvard B-School graduate, was appalled at “the unsystematic and unscientific way the store was being run.”
Drucker remembers his conversations with Uncle Henry. “He would tell stories constantly, always to do with a late consignment of ladies’ hats, or a shipment of mismatched umbrellas, or the notions counter. His stories would drive me up the wall. But gradually I learned to listen, at least with one ear. For surprisingly enough he always leaped to a generalization from the farrago of anecdotes and stocking sizes and color promotions in lieu of markdowns for mismatched umbrellas.”


Reflecting many years later, Drucker observes: “There are lots of people with grasshopper minds who can only go from one specific to another–from stockings to buttons, for instance, or from one experiment to another–and never get to the generalization and the concept. They are to be found among scientists as often as among merchants. But I have learned that the mind of the good merchant, as also of the good artist or good scientist, works the way Uncle Henry’s mind worked. It starts out with the most specific, the most concrete, and then reaches for the generalization.” Drucker also knew another leading merchant, Charles Kellstadt (who had once run Sears.) Kellstadt and Drucker served together on a Department of Defense advisory board (on procurement policy), and Kellstadt told “the same kind of stories Uncle Henry had told.” Drucker says that his fellow board members “suffered greatly from his interminable and apparently pointless anecdotes.”
On one occasion, a “whiz kid” (this was during the McNamara era) was presenting a proposal for a radically new approach to defense pricing policy. Kellstadt “began to tell a story of the bargain basement in the store in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had held his first managerial job, and of some problem there with the cup sizes of women’s bras. He would stop every few sentences and ask the bewildered Assistant Secretary a question about bras, then goes on. Finally, the Assistant Secretary said, “You don’t understand Mr. Kellstadt; I’m talking about concepts.” “So am I,” said Charlie, quite indignant, and went on. Ten minutes later all of us on the board realized that he had demolished the entire proposal by showing us that it was far too complex, made far too many assumptions, and contains far too many ifs, buts, and whens.” After the meeting, another board member (dean of a major engineering school) said admiringly, “Charlie that was a virtuoso performance. But why did you have to drag in the cup sizes of the bras in your bargain basement forty years ago?” Drucker reports that Charlie was surprised by the question: “How else can I see a problem in my mind’s eye?”
From these two encounters, Drucker draws this conclusion:“Fifty years or more ago the Uncle Henry’s and the Charlie Kellstadts dominated; then it was necessary for Son Irvin to emphasize systems, principles, and abstractions. There was need to balance the overly perceptual with a little conceptual discipline. I still remember the sense of liberation during those years in London when I stumbled onto the then new Symbolical Logic (which I later taught a few times), with its safeguards against tautologies and false analogies, against generalizing from isolated events, that is, from anecdotes, and its tools of semantic rigor. But now we again need the Uncle Henrys and Charlie Kellstadts. We have gone much too far toward dependence on untested quantification, toward symmetrical and purely formal models, toward argument from postulates rather than from experience, and toward moving from abstraction to abstraction without once touching the solid ground of concreteness. We are in danger of forgetting what Plato taught at the very beginning of systematic analysis and thought in the West, in two of the most beautiful and moving of his Dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Krito…They teach us that experience without the test of logic is not “rhetoric” but chitchat, and that logic without the test of experience is not “logic” but absurdity. Now we need to learn again what Charlie Kellstadt meant when he said, “How else can I see a problem in my mind’s eye?””