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I am delighted to participate in a program which appears to be based on the proposition that representatives of the business world and the academic fraternity can find an interesting and rewarding experience together in an exchange of views. All too often, I fear, the pressures of the modern world confine us to our own habitat and we might find, like birds, that a certain amount of migratory flight toward a new and different intellectual climate is mutually beneficial.
One of the classic functions of a university is to appraise and assess the life and times of the society which it serves. It is in this way that intellectual leadership is directed toward broad problems which must be weighed in objective detachment. One might even say that it is the university's role to worry about those social trends which seem at a particular time to give cause for alarm.
Necessarily such concerns change with the times—there are fashions in worry, it seems, just as there are fashions in dress and deportment. Judging from the sheer volume of bibliographical material, it is clear that one question near the top of the worry list is that which surrounds the place of the individual in a world committed irrevocably to organizational procedures.
Everyone, it appears, recognizes the fact that the individual's role in modern society has undergone change. It is fashionable now to say that the transformation is of recent origin, but I suspect it is more a matter of gradual development than a condition which is wholly new. I suppose there may have been a time when men were completely independent agents, accountable to no one but themselves. If such a circumstance ever did exist, it has long since vanished into the limbo of prehistory. In the earliest records of civilization we find the roots of a tribal structure and the congregation of human beings into groups for purposes of defense, of cooperative effort, or perhaps because of simple gregariousness. As an economic entity, it is reasonable to suppose that man the hunter could once have existed alone; as a social animal, which Aristotle tells us is the normal condition, he has for many centuries been dependent upon his fellows.
We have observed in recent generations the increasing complexity of society and the fact that life and learning have become too diffuse for any of us to live in isolation from our fellows. Sir Francis Bacon was reputed to have known, personally, all there was to know of science as it was in his day. In contrast, we now have a body of scientific knowledge so vast that it is impossible for any individual, no matter how learned, to comprehend more than that small fraction contained within the narrow boundaries of a single discipline.
Society has become so intricate in its structure that specialization is borne in upon us both as individuals and as members of a vocation. We grow increasingly dependent and interrelated if only because we no longer have the time—or the inclination for that matter—to master the simple skills that once made man his own cobbler, his own tailor, and his own barber. The teaching of the young, which once took place at mother's knee, is now a profession, just as her spinning of yarn is now an industry and her bread-making an involved system of baking, packaging, and distribution.
So society itself has become an organization operating by the subdivision of labor and effort. Under this premise some of us teach, some of us manufacture, some of us govern, some of us defend, some meditate upon the state of our virtue and the sanctity of our souls.
It is to organizations that we look today as the responsible instruments of human achievement. The national conviction seems to be, in fact, that nothing whatever can be accomplished without organization of some sort. In addition to our hundreds of colleges, our thousands of governmental units, and our tens of thousands of commercial establishments, we have our leagues, our committees for and against, our councils, lodges, and clubs dedicated in one way or another to uplift and improvement, even in areas which so far as I can see need neither.
In scale as well as in scope our organizations have grown mightily. Government has become an enormous complex which actually employs a larger share of our population than does agriculture. Our national labor groups count their members and their treasure in the millions. We have universities today with enrollments which a few generations ago would have represented the entire college population. The 500 largest industrial firms employ nearly 10,000,000 workers.
The problem of our present society, a problem which is common to each of its many elements, is how best to preserve the creative power of the individual in the face of organizational necessity. The problem exists whatever the purpose toward which the organization is directed, whether it is the Du Pont Company, Princeton University, the U. S. Marine Corps, the Church of Latter Day Saints, or Tammany Hall.
Neither the nature nor the fundamental requirements of organizations differ with their field of activity. All are concerned, of necessity, with safeguarding equities, with delineating a common purpose, with the maintenance of standards and the preservation of an environment conducive to the best effort of their members. All must, if they are to survive, hold a certain measure of social justification—they must pay their way. Being humanistic institutions composed of human beings, the problems each must face are in the broad sense common to all.
Recent commentaries on the depersonalization of our organizations seem, however, to center their fire most bitterly upon the commercial institution, as though it had some peculiar characteristics not applicable to others. Much of our difficulty in assessing the matter dispassionately arises from our stereotyped notions, most of which grow out of accepting as fact what is in reality an illusion. The literature of the business field, for example, seems to share the same general concern about the individual's slide toward anonymity but here the business institution seems to be the villain of the piece. I have been shocked, at times, to realize how I must appear to those who take the recent works of fiction and nonfiction seriously. If you believe Mr. Sloan Wilson, for example, you will be wondering why I am not wearing the gray flannel suit which I do not own. If you believe Mr. Hawley of "Executive Suite," you will be convinced that I became president of the Du Pont Company through a process of intrigue and violence reminiscent of Mack the Knife. My activities would be abetted, I might surmise, by the machinations of my wife and the plotting of my secretary, whose duties would of course be presumed to be largely extracurricular. I assure you that I did not, my wife did not, and my secretary's duties are completely orthodox. If you believe Mr. White of the "Organization Man," you will have the idea that my role is to convert my colleagues into a carbon copy of myself, a goal which I might say I would resist as vigorously as they.
Fantasy and misconception obscure the truth and are certainly a disservice to scientific inquiry. The assumption that the problem lies only with business gives to other equally valuable organizations a sense of false security. The problem is not specific, it is general; it is not particular, it is common to all situations in which men gather together in a common purpose. The truth itself offers sufficient challenge to our ingenuity and wisdom. There is an inherent danger in man's involvement with large numbers of his kind; men as well as children can lose their way in crowds.
The problem, moreover, is not solely one of protection for the individual—it is in some respects, one which involves protecting the organization itself from the stagnation created by those who find that "conformity," like vice, can first be endured, and finally embraced. The unhappy fact is that conformity is for some an alluring state, a condition representing the course of least resistance. All too many, I am afraid, reach a point at which they seek refuge in protective coloring, with security replacing accomplishment as the primary goal.
When this happens, instead of the individual becoming the victim of pressures within the organization, it is the organization that falls prey to organization men. A comfortable sense of ease may bring solace to an individual, but to the organization itself it brings only a descent to mediocrity.
Perhaps the problem can be defined best by noting the extremities. On the one hand, as the embodiment of the completely feckless individual, we might cite Robinson Crusoe, untroubled by any obligations not of his own making. For the opposing extreme, I might suggest an example drawn not from literature but from natural history. Perhaps the Omega of Robinson Crusoe's Alpha may be found in Darwin's comments on the army ant, which he describes in these grisly words: "Natural selection has been applied not to the individual but to the colony, within which there are no individuals at all but simply cells in an insensate organism, powered by blind instinct."
Somewhere between the two we may find a workable compromise. It seems obvious that in finding an answer we must face facts as they are and not indulge ourselves in the nostalgia and sentimentality which seem to be at the bottom of so much modern criticism. It is no solution to suggest that we turn back the clock to the day of small artisan enterprises, worthy and satisfying as those simple times may have been. Nor is it any solution to withdraw, like the beatnik, with a weary protest manifested in a beard, soiled sneakers and a vernacular which identifies his house as a pad and his wife as a chick. Progress produces problems, to be sure, but if we face them squarely and refuse to be misled by superficialities, they can be met.
We must realize, first of all, that we are not dealing with criteria susceptible of absolute measurement as is possible in the physical sciences. Part of the present difficulty arises, it seems to me, out of our attempts to rationalize human behavior in terms of a statistical norm and to replace intuitive judgment with a formula. A human being is not an inert compound whose boiling point and specific gravity can be determined precisely. Even the terms and definitions with which we examine the problem are elastic and inexact.
We like to use the word "freedom," for example, in describing the goals of our society, being at the same time uncomfortably aware that complete freedom is something which rarely exists. The realities require us to settle for the widest possible latitude of personal option consistent with the needs of others. To the extent that we join together in any form of association, we surrender some part of our independence as the price of harmonious human relationship.
Actually we see this close at hand in the benevolent institution of matrimony. It is in marriage that man makes the first voluntary surrender of rights and privileges which until then had been purely of his own decision. As a member of a family group he will henceforth suffer some dilution of personal prerogative, hopeful only that in the face of feminine wiles he will not come out too far behind. He accepts these limitations with such grace as is consistent with his good nature.
In our family lives we suffer our minor irritations, hoping that our wives and our children will bear understandingly with those they find in us. It seems to me that the test of a successful marriage lies in finding a reasonable modus vivendi in which each party gives up some, but not too much, of personal idiosyncrasy. When one or the other partner overwhelms the other, or when the struggle for domination creates continual tension, the marriage is a failure, de facto if not officially.
It is similarly so in any social or business relationship. We are obliged not by compulsion but by the amenities to waive certain of our rights and some of the more individualistic traits of our personalities out of deference to the general good. Despite our differences of personality, tastes and interests, most of us manage to reach the common understanding which is the basis of good manners. Good manners are, as Emerson noted, "the happy way of doing things." We accept them out of our desire to live in our social environment with the least possible friction.
As we accept those restraints, we approach, I suppose, the condition which is so widely discussed today as "conformity," a loose and flabby term often misused and misconstrued. It is evident that there is confusion between the voluntary conformity of behavior which we call good manners and the enforced conformity of thought which represents an invasion of personal rights and a brake upon our capacity to follow our own destinies.
There is a stout and significant difference between the simple amenities and the coercion or the compulsions toward unified thought. The two are often confused. Members of the Communist party, presumably free to indulge themselves in all manner of personal whim in conduct or dress, maintain in matters of conviction a monolithic unanimity which makes their reaction to any question wholly predictable. In contrast, there are bold and imaginative thinkers—and I have known many of them—whose habits and manners are wholly conventional.
In the social area, we bow to accepted standards without loss of self-esteem. In the realm of thought and of ideas, however, we rightfully resist any effort to submerge our personal characteristics into a dull and lifeless composite.
The question is, after all, not qualitative, but quantitative: How much, or, better, how little conformity should be tolerated? Mr. Jefferson's dictum on the forbearance of an ideal government could well be transplanted to this area of human relations. Let us conform as little as is necessary to good manners, pleasant relationships, and the highest use of individual talent.
Conformity in behavior is a necessity; conformity in patterns of thought a danger. Unfortunately, people have come in modern times to mistake one for the other. There is a strong body of opinion which assumes that the conformist is the boy who gets ahead. School boys are now given grades on their "ability to cooperate," presumably on the theory that this will advance their fortunes once they launch their careers. "Cooperation" is, of course, a necessity at any time, but the premium is and always must be on original approaches.
An organization does not flourish by virtue of the superior talents it enlists. All organizations fish in the same general pool and it is unlikely that any nets a catch appreciably better than others. Its advancement will derive from having provided for its people a climate of achievement in which men of ordinary stature are somehow stimulated to extraordinary performance. The extent to which any given individual can produce beyond his rated capacity may be very small, yet the sum of these, added together, will make the difference between a great organization and an indifferent one.
Obviously this process, through which common men perform uncommon deeds, cannot endure in the face of anything that deprives the individual of his dignity or his importance. Nor can it exist in our intricate day and age in an atmosphere of anarchy which ignores the need for close relationship and group effort. Somewhere between the two lies the middle ground through which men can find their way to satisfying careers and on which the organization can find its most effective pace.
In our organization we put the highest possible premium on ideas, fresh and original ideas that are important to the extent that they do not mirror traditional thinking. We are not conscious of any inhibiting restrictions. I have yet to see a man make his way to the upper levels by conforming to any precast or prefabricated mold. I have seen many fail by following such a course. And I have seen far more fail by pursuing conventional approaches than I have ever seen fail by ignoring them.
Achievement, after all, begins with the human intellect. Organizations, perhaps unfortunately, are without this God-given capacity. They exist and prosper only as they can give free rein to the minds and spirits of their people. When they cease to do so they cease to be organizations and become, first, empty shells, then anachronisms, and finally memories. Only man's intellect and spirit, after all, are vital, sanctified and immortal. [../_borders/footer1.htm]