The advices Business

It is to be expected, therefore that today's most ardent advocates of creativity in business tend to be professional writers, consultants, professors and often advertising agency executives  Not surprisingly, few of them have any continuing , day to day responsibility for the difficult task of implementing powerful new business ideas of a complex nature in the ordinary type of business organization. Few of them have ever had any responsibility for doing work in the conventional kind of complex operating organization. They are not really practicing businessmen in the usual sense. They are literary businessman. They are the doctors who say "Do as I say, no as I do," reminiscent of the classic injunction of the boxer's manager, "Get in there and fight. They can't hurt us."

The fact that these individuals are also so often outspoken about the alleged virulence of conformity in modern business is not surprising. They can talk way because they themselves have seldom had the nerve to expose themselves for any substantial length of time too rigorous discipline of an organization whose principal task is not talk about action, not ideas but work.

Impressive sermons are delivered gravely proclaiming the virtues of creativity and the vices of conformity. But so often the authors of these sermons, too are "outsiders" to the central sector of the business community  The best known asserters that American industry is some sort of vast quagmire of quivering conformity the men who have turned the claim into s tire some cliche are people like William H. Whyte, Jt,. authr of The Organization Man, " Who is a professional writer, Sloan Wilson, author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who was  college English professor when he wrote the book, and C. Northcote Parkinson (more on him later). also a professor.

It is of course inevitable that it is writers, and not business practitioners, who write mostly about business. My purpose is not to condemn them, or to condemn consultants or professors. American business appears generally to benefit from their existence  But it is harmful when the abused executive fails to consider that the very role of these men absolves them from managerial responsibility. Still, it is hard to accept uncritically the doleful prophesy that so many United States companies are hypnotically following one another in a deadly march of confining conformity. It is hard to accept the tantalizing suggestion offered by outsiders that business's salvation lies a massive infusion of creativity and that from this will follow an automatic flow of profit building innovation  Perhaps the source of these suggestion should occasionally be kept in mind.