Systems, Purposes, and the Watergate

LET ME identify myself, in order to identify with you. I wandered some years ago into a profession for which, because it did not seem to have a name, I have tried to popularize the term public executive. My kind of work is to bring people together in organizations to make something different happen, in the public interest. And you, the scientists of management, have enormously helped us practitioners of management. You have done your best to make a science out of this most occult, psychic, and humane of all the professions. You have forced the public executives -among them many of you-to count whatever could be counted. And that was good, even if your efforts did persuade some executives, and legislators, that what can be programmed into a computer must be more important than what cannot. Above all, you made the way people work together an honored topic of systematic study. Through the efforts of this Society, among a very few others, the analysis of organization systems is now a respectable way to spend our time and the taxpayer's money. But I am here to tell you what you know already too well: it is not good enough. To have learned how to think in systems-rather than in pyramids, boxes, budgets, flow charts, balance sheets, or PERT diagrams-has certainly advanced our capacity to cope with physical reality, and to plan and carry into action at human command operations of almost unimaginable complexity. But the question I want to raise with you is whether systems thinking may have retarded our capacity to cope with ethical issues, to think systematically about values, to man the switchboards where purpose is plugged into power.