ROBERT MCNAMARA by Tom Peters

“The exclusively analytical approach run wild leads to an abstract, heartless philosophy. Our obsession with body counts in Viet Nam and our failure to understand the persistence and long-time horizon of the Eastern mind culminated in America‘s most catastrophic misallocation of resources—human, moral and material. But McNamara‘s fascination with numbers was just a sign of the times. One of his fellow whiz kids at Ford, Roy Ash, fell victim to the same affliction. Says Fortune of his Litton misadventures, ‘Utterly abstract in his view of business, [Ash] enjoyed to the hilt exercising his sharp mind in analyzing the most sophisticated accounting techniques. His brilliance led him to think in the most regal of ways: building new cities, creating a shipyard that would roll off the most technically advanced vessels the way Detroit built automobiles.’ Sadly, Fortune‘s analysis speaks not only of Ash‘s Litton failure, but also of the similar disaster ten years later that undid AM International under his leadership.”