to do the work I want to do and not the work I have to do because I have to pay them or they have to eat. I'm a solo performer. I've never been interested in building a firm. I'm also not interested in managing people. It bores me stiff.
Q: Do clients come to you now?
A: With one exception I don't do any consulting elsewhere.
Q: Why are you interested in business? If your overarching interest is in organizations, why not study other kinds? Why not political organizations?
A: My consulting practice is now fifty/fifty profit-nonprofit. But I didn't come out of business. I came out of political journalism. In my second book, The Future of Industrial Man, I came to the conclusion that the integrating principle of modern society had become the large organization. At that time, however, there was only the business organization around. In this country, the business enterprise was the first of the modern institutions to emerge. I decided that I needed to be inside, to really study a big company from the inside: as a human, social, political organization—as an integrating mechanism. I tried to get inside, and I had met quite a few people as a journalist and as an investment banker. They all turned me down. The chairman of Westinghouse was very nice to me when I came to see him, but when I told him what I wanted he not only threw me out, he gave instructions to his staff not to allow me near the building because I was a Bolshevik. This was 1940.
By 1942, I was doing quite a bit of work for the government. I had given up looking for a company to study when one day the telephone rang and the fellow said, “My name is Paul Garrett, and I am vice-president of public relations for General Motors Corp. My vice-chairman has asked me to call you to ask whether you would be willing and available to make a study of our top management structure.” Since then, nobody at General Motors has ever admitted to having been responsible for this, but that is how I got into business.
Q: You look at business from a position that is unique. You're neither an academic…
A: Though I've been teaching for fifty years.
Q: But you don't consider yourself an academic. And you certainly don't write like an academic.
A: That is, you know, a slur on academics. It is only in the last twenty or thirty years that being incomprehensible has become a virtue in academia.
Q: Nor are you an operations person.
A: No, I'm no good at operations.
Q: So you don't get down there in the mud with your clients.
A: Oh yes, a little. Look, whatever problem a client has is my problem. Here is that mutual fund company that sees that the market is shifting from sales commissions to no front-end loads. A terrific problem, they said. I said, no, it's an opportunity. The salesman has to get his commission right away, and the customer has to pay it over five years. That's a tax shelter. Make it into something that, if you hold it for five years, you pay not income tax but capital gains tax on it. Then you'll have a new product. It's been the greatest success in the mutual fund industry. That's nitty-gritty enough, isn't it? I let him do all the work, and he consults the lawyers. I could do it, too, but he doesn't need me to sit down with his lawyers and write out the prospectus for the SEC.
Q: Do you read the new management books that come out?
A: I look at a great deal of them. Once in a while you get a book by a practitioner, like [Intel Corp. president] Andy Grove's book, High Output Management, on how one maintains the entrepreneurial spirit in a very big and rapidly growing company. I think that's a beautiful book and very important. But in order to get a book like that, I plow through a lot of zeros. Fortunately, the body processes cellulose very rapidly.
Q: It doesn't bother you that Tom Peters and Bob Waterman got rich and famous for a book built on ideas, Peters has said, that you had already written about?
A: No. The strength of the Peters book is that it forces you to look at the fundamentals. The book's great weakness—which is a strength from the point of view of its success—is that it makes managing sound so incredibly easy. All you have to do is put that book under your pillow, and it'll get done.
Q: What do you do with your leisure time?
A: What leisure time?
Q: Maybe I should have asked if you have any?
A: On my seventieth birthday, I gave myself two presents. One was finishing my first novel and the other was a second professorship, this one in Japanese art. For fifty years, I've been interested in Oriental art, and now I've reached a point where I'm considered, especially in Japan, to be the expert in certain narrow areas—advising museums, helping collectors. That takes a fair amount of time.
Also, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of people there are now all over the world who were either clients of mine or students and who take the telephone and call to hear themselves talk and for advice.
I swim a great deal and I walk a great deal. But leisure time in the sense of going bowling, no.
Q: How do you write?
A: Unsystematically. It's a compulsion neurosis. There's no pattern.
Q: Do you use a typewriter?
A: Sometimes. It depends. And I never know in advance how it's going to work.
Q: How long, for example, does it take you to write a Wall Street Journal column?
A: To write it, not very long—a day. To do it, much longer. They're only fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred words. I recently did a huge piece on the hostile takeover wave—six thousand, seven thousand words—for The Public Interest. I had to change quite a bit. It suddenly hit me that I know what a hostile takeover is, but how many readers do? That had to be explained. I totally changed the structure, and that takes a long time for me. Once I understand it, though, I can do it very fast. See, I've made my living as a journalist since I was twenty. My first job was on a paper that published almost as much copy as The Boston Globe. The Globe has 350 editorial employees; we were 14 employees fifty years ago, which is much healthier. On my first day—I was barely twenty—I was expected to write two editorials.
Q: If the business of America is business, and all that sort of thing, why don't businesspeople have a better popular image than they do?
A: The nice thing about this country is that nobody's popular except people who don't matter. This is very safe. Rock stars are popular, because no rock star has ever lasted for more than a few years. Rock stars are therefore harmless. The wonderful thing about this country is the universal persecution mania. Every group feels that it is being despised and persecuted. Have you ever heard the doctors talk about how nobody appreciates how much they bleed for the good of humanity? Everybody is persecuted. Everybody feels terribly sorry for himself. You sit down with university professors, and it is unbelievable how terrible their lot is. The businessman feels unloved, misunderstood, and neglected. And have you ever sat down with labor leaders?
They are all of them right. It's all true. This is not a country that has great respect, and this is one of its great safeguards against tyranny. We save our adulation for people who will never become a menace—for baseball players and rock stars and movie idols who are completely innocuous. We have respect for accomplishment, but not for status. There is no status in this country. There's respect for the office of the president, but no respect
