Business: America the Inefficient

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The informal office that serves as a "social circle" for employees, says Eric Larrabee, an administrator at the State University of New York at Buffalo, may look sloppy to outsiders but is usually quite efficient. Its employees, he reasons, develop a community spirit, learn one another's strengths and weaknesses, and "adopt a kind of rhythm" that enables them to produce work quickly with a minimum of fuss. This is not likely to be achieved in a business environment totally dominated by men. "Women," contends Larrabee, "are much more efficient in offices than men."

Nor is efficiency likely to develop best in big, rich corporations. The giant company tends to become a political structure in which executives invest considerable time campaigning for higher office and protecting their flanks by rigidly following fixed procedures. Many an executive, for example, is required to hand over all buying decisions to a purchasing department that will bury them in paper work, attend meetings at which he knows no one will say anything of any interest to him, and address memos to other managers on everything that he does. (The managers probably will not read them but must be given a chance to object.)

These corporate rules are designed to promote efficiency but actually work against innovation. In offices bound by stylized procedures, says Larrabee, followers of the Protestant Ethic who are more interested in getting work done than in obeying the rules are looked on as "sort of scabs." In self-defense, he adds, they often set up a kind of underground network. "They tend to conceal themselves, but they are in touch with one another, and they know whom they can trust." Such undergrounds also operate in government. Harlan Cleveland, an Assistant Secretary of State during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, once remarked that it was best to have an international crisis burst on a weekend. In order to prepare a plan of action, he said, "you could put together an ad hoc group composed entirely of the people you really wanted and get the damn thing done before the organization got back on Monday."

The Power of Complaint

Short of such ingenious innovations, some practical first steps could be taken toward reducing inefficiency in a number of areas:

CONSUMER ACTION: Consumers could help themselves—and society—by complaining more about shoddy goods and slapdash service. When it comes to complaining, most Americans are really members of the Silent Majority. Ari Kiev, head of Cornell Medical College's social psychiatry program, figures that the atmosphere of the faceless society conditions customers to put up with inefficiency. Many Americans, he says, "have been trained from early on that nothing can be done. So much is made of rules and regulations, of the idea that 'you had better check it out first.' We become very dependent on others to give us cues. This fosters a lack of self-confidence. We become afraid to act." As Ralph Nader, John Banzhaf and other consumer crusaders have proved, the determined complainer can do plenty. For their part, companies could respond by following the example of Avis, TWA and a few other firms. They assign executives to work briefly at service jobs—as counter clerks or even car washers and baggage handlers—to learn