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: Robert McNamara attended Harvard Business School. He was the president of Ford Motors at a young age. He was US secretary of defence in charge of the most powerful military machine in human history. He was president of the World Bank—this institution’s grandiose name speaks for itself. His parents must have been very proud of their son Bob. The list of achievements in terms of credentials and positions held must be any parent’s dream for their offspring. And yet, McNamara will go down as a failure. It seems most ungracious to say so. Despite Mark Antony’s claim to the contrary, it is considered impolite to speak ill of the dead.
The problem with McNamara is not that he was a bad person—he may or may not have been—in the conventional sense. But it is important to record that the ideas he represented were quite simply wrong, bordering on the disastrous.
McNamara’s background, training, approach and professional career were based on the business school, MBA-driven assumption that all human problems are fundamentally managerial and can be solved by applying management precepts in some kind of rational analytical manner. It was based on a ‘central planning’ approach that if persons at the top had the right data in the right format they could play God. History and culture were both bunk; passions had no place in cloud-capped boardrooms; the very basis of economic thought that little actors individually make decisions that affect final outcomes in ways that the mandarins can never expect was ignored. The standard MBA syllabus has no place for history and less space for economic philosophy.
Consider McNamara’s stint at Ford Motors. There is no evidence at all that he liked cars. And yet, as David Halberstam argues in his book The Reckoning, for the naive non-MBA it seems obvious that the leader of an automobile company should be passionate about cars.
McNamara and his colleagues were interested in numbers and numbers only. The numbers could have been about cars or underpants or perfumes—the underlying product was irrelevant. As long as you had neat tabular columns, pie-charts and graphs, you had everything. In fact, the ubiquitous MIS reports became the reality. Contrast McNamara with Lee Iacocca who had no MBA. Iacocca, to use his own words, simply ‘loved’ making and selling cars. He loved to schmooze with car-dealers. The intellectual McNamara probably avoided car-dealers like plague because an evening drinking...
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