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" "The inability of business and political leadership to rise to new heights [required by the] unprecedented situation, [familiar to us now as the Great Depression.. urged for] bold policies...bold anything is needed at this time.
Wallace Brett Donham (1877 – November 29, 1954) was an American organizational theorist, Professor of Business Administration and the second dean of the from 1919-1942. The use of case studies in HBS education was greatly expanded during Donham's time as dean.
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As a result our graduates leave us without having formed the habit of seeking wide generalizations related to diverse variables in the social situations which surround them. Because they lack both habits and methods which lead them to seek generalizations, they become, after they leave us, Specialists themselves and make decisions without the guides to action within their special fields which wider viewpoints might give. To develop them as we must, the artificial dividing lines between social sciences must in large measure be broken down. Specialized training must be both counteracted and supplemented by training which brings in the widest social implications. Otherwise men will not be trained to meet the problems faced by public and private administrators.
To me, there are multifarious forces at work in government departments which are different from those in private business; the responsibility to and necessary interference of Congress, the responsibility to the President, to defined over-all controls, have little parallel in private business. The power politics of government departments are radically different from the power politics of private companies. The existence of pipe lines into Congress strengthens the bureaucracy against the chief executive of the particular subdivision of government. It may strengthen it against the President of the United States or Congress itself. Dimock himself points out how easily government bureaucracies develop organized opposition to policies involving change. This opposition may in substance, though not in form, sabotage all change which appears to threaten the security of the bureaucracy. Power politics, of course, exists in large private companies; but the urge to expand functions and simultaneously to defend what exists seems to me radically less in the case of well-run, large, private industry than in the case of big departments of the government. The quantitative difference becomes a qualitative change.