Blasts from the Past on the Art of Managment

Posted on 15 July 2009

There must be something about mid-July that triggers looking back.

A year ago July may turn out to be the date of “Peak Oil” although it will be many more years before we know for sure.

40 years ago on July 20, 1969 was the first manned lunar landing.  (And NASA is announcing plans to return to the moon in the 2020’s and go to Mars in the 2030’s.)  It is frequently cited as an example of the power of a leader (JFK) to set a target and inspire others to achieve it.

30 years ago on July 15, 1979 was Carter’s “Malaise” or MEOW (moral equivalent of war) speech in which he announced the creation of the Department of Energy and called for the development of alternative fuels.  As an effort to repeat JFK’s feat, it fell flat.

“Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this Nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never.”

Gordon Stewart, a speechwriter present at Camp David, writes an interesting article on today’s NY Times Op-Ed page about what was happening behind the scenes.  The effort was premature as Carter assumed Peak Oil would come much sooner, in the 1980’s.  And his message of sacrifice could not compete with Reagan’s message of optimism.  One wonders if Obama will be judged by historians to have struck the right balance between sacrifice and optimism.  The problem of Peak Oil seems to be more real today, caused by bumping into real supply limitations, rather than artificial supply limits of 1979.  Leadership in the political sphere will be very important.

Leadership and management approaches from the past were highlighted in the Financial Times by John Kay in a column today about the “Whiz Kids.”  Tex Thornton built the original group in the Air Force after Pearl Harbor.  He sold it to Henry Ford II in 1946, Thornton went on to develop Litton Industries and the art of the conglomerate.  Robert McNamara went on to head Ford and then was plucked out by JFK to head the Defense Department.  Vietnam showed the shortcomings of the management by numbers.  McNamara went on to spend many years at the World Bank.  The column recounts some of the insights of  McNamara’s “In Retrospect” memoir.

Finally, and by no means of the same level of significance,  there were a few insights into the management behind Ormat Technologies,  Haaretz, a newspaper in Israel, picked a few outstanding Israel-based managers based on criteria that did not include public visibility, but did include long-term success.   Dita Bronicki, CEO of Ormat, was one of these, and the paper includes an interview with her.  We know much less about Ormat management than about Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, McNamara, and Thornton.  Remarkably, she has been at the company since its founding in 1965.