INSTRUMEN TATΙΟΝ by Ralph H. Müller
Improved instruments—comments on data recording, paperwork, consultants, corporate reorganization, and Government fiscal policy
RANDOM COMMENTS
sultant or louse this thing up ourselves?" New hope dawned on the horizon with the advent of Professor C. Northcote Parkinson's fourth book, "Inlaws and Outlaws." I t also contains a new principle, Parkinson's Third Law, which is this, "Expansion means complexity, and complexity, decay." The pity is that although he is a shrewd critic of our economic fads and foibles, he will be read and enjoyed for his subtle penetrating humor, but most of his keen and transparently clear arguments will be glossed over. Concerning some consultants his anecdote has enough familiarity to make most of us recall a similar incident. A few greedy and illinformed stockholders insist upon reorganization of a corporation, and the experts are called in. Their incursion into the business is tabulated as follows :
Chemists have long been familiar with X-Y recorders and systems permitting data accumulation in sequential form at high speeds. However, in space technology vast amounts of telemetered data must be recorded and tabulated in a brief time interval. Elaborate collating and interpretation must, supplement the data recording and the entire system requires the services of experts. The arrangement can run into millions of dollars for the simple reason that the whole story is revealed in a matter of minutes or even seconds. This complexity and high cost is completely justified by the nature of the problem. I t is increasingly bewildering that man continues to complicate his life by needless paper work, memoranda, edicts, threats, progress reports, and quizzes which he receives from inspired bureaucrats. When his paper work suffers from excessive clarity or simplicity, the situation can be rectified by hiring a consultant, a tax expert, a Government lawyer, or an economist. Some executives have enough restraint or residual common sense to subscribe to E. V. Robert's hilarious wall motto, "Shall we hire a con-
A. Half the executives were fired. B. A digital computer costing one million dollars was acquired as a symbol of progress. C. All partitions were demolished making a general office out of the space previously occupied by individual offices. D. The office color scheme, which had been primrose and white, was changed to lilac and gray. A very different (at first sight) case originated in another corporation in which two of the noisiest stockholders, Barker and Maybite, insisted that the firm's organization should be modernized. The consultant hired in this case made the following recommendations: A. Barker and Maybite became directors. 1-5. A digital computer costing one million dollars was acquired as a symbol of progress. C. The general office was divided up by partitions to form individual offices. 1). The office color scheme, which had been lilac and gray, was changed to primrose and white.
INTERESTING AND INFORMAM OST TIVE READING is to be found in a brief catalog of Electro Instruments, Inc., at 8611 Balboa Ave., San Diego 11, Calif. Among its products arc digital instruments, amplifiers, X-Y recorders, oscilloscopes, and data logging systems. Characteristic of these products is the trend toward complete transistorizing of the circuitry. Also in its extensive line of digital instruments, great improvements have been made by establishing potentiometric balance at comparatively high voltage level, and depending upon high precision attenuators to effect balance at the 10 to 100 microvolt level. This avoids the difficulty of erratic voltage errors when switching is attempted at this microvolt level.
It is not to be assumed that recommendations of this sort are wholly useless. The psychological effect on new management, the personnel, and the stockholders may be quite impressive if the new order of things offers the opportunity to produce new memoranda, directives, and glowing accounts of the new face-liftuis; operation. The frenzied paper work in itself is enough to lift the entire organization out of its monotonous groove. With any appreciable change in staff, there's the possibility that the previous accumulation of tons of paper will have to be destroyed because it is not intelligible enough to enough people. We have failed to recognize a secret and terrifying weapon. There is probably enough paper stored in industrial and governmental files to blanket every major capitol in the world with a suffocating 12-foot layer. If the chemist would devise a cheap and simple method of nitrating this mass, it would yield incendiaries of staggering proportions. Some of our crusty old reactionaries who still believe in a five-cent nickel continue to warn us about fiscal and tax policies which threaten to "kill the goose that laid the golden egg." They are right, of course, but times have changed. Beltsville could probably develop a strain of goose immune to the most outrageous treatment, and the golden egg is indeed a myth because it could be transported in nothing flat to that deep hole in Fort Knox. We are coming dangerously close to the statutory minimum in our gold reserve. Our extremely prosperous European friends are expressing doubt about our fiscal policy, and when they start calling for gold, let us not imagine that they can be put off indefinitely with the remark, "No dice." We hereby propose "Muller's Tax Panacea." We give the government all our earnings and merely retain the tax. A silly proposal of course, but harmless compared with prevailing practices which are also silly but happen to be legal.
VOL. 34, NO. 12, NOVEMBER 1962
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