PAPERmaking! FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 2, Number 1, 2016
Now, first of all, there is the technical front. It is absolutely essential that whatever industry we are in, we should keep well in the forefront technically. If we don't, we shan't survive. That, of course, entails a very close study of the proportion of your resources you will spend on research and of the amount that you spend on research, or devote to research, how much you will devote to developing lines that you are already working on, improving your capacity for turning out things you are turning out, and how much you will devote to what is much more fundamental in research and that is a problem much greater and, having settled that, it is one on which the future prospect of our industry depends very much. Another thing is the continuation of progress, technical progress of his education which starts long before a man comes to join an industry, and we are very much inclined, I think - certainly in Great Britain, and we certainly were in Australia - to have this idea that you have got to shove everybody through university. Perhaps I am prejudiced because I never went to university. But they used to tell me in Australia that we must have five thousand more scientists. Well, believe me, if they had had five thousand more scientists the next morning, they would not have known what to do with them. They have got scientists - at any rate, fellows with B.Sc. degrees - watching dials in control rooms and, honest to God, I believe I could learn to do that in a week. When your needle goes into the red, you pick up a telephone and say, "Number five furnace is getting too hot." What we want, I think, even more than these very large numbers is quality, and you will make more progress if you have five hundred really first-class technicians or scientists than you will if you have five thousand ordinary ones, and we ought to go in our education systems, I think, very much more for quality. If you will repeat that to anybody, I shall get a lot of letters tomorrow morning telling me I do not know anything about it - but, that is what I believe. Another thing, I think, in which industry lags is long-range planning. We get mixed up between what is planning and what is development. To me, a soldier, planning is something you do quite a long way ahead and a lot of it you never use. But, you take, for instance, when the Common Market, two or three years ago, burst on an astonished British industry. The damn thing had been going on about five years and had been talked about for about fourteen years, but you found there were a large number of British in the United Kingdom ran about saying: "What the hell is this Common Market and what are we going to do about it?" They would have been very much better off if four years earlier they had got down to planning what the Common Market meant to them and the effect it would have, if it came, on their business. In that, I really do think that the services, the Army, can teach industry something. I believe, however, large industry should have a small group of planners. The planners would be quite young men. They would be taken from various parts of the industry in which they had already distinguished themselves. They would be relieved of all executive authority. They would be put directly under the control of the Chairman or one of the Vice- Chairmen and their job would be to go around the organisation, with the authority of the Chairman, and ask any questions they liked, find out about things, produce ideas and work on any ideas that were given to them. I think that would produce a dividend. Don't keep them out too long or else they get swell-headed, but send them back to the grind-stone every two years, or every eighteen months, if you like, and pick new ones. But, I do think every organisation should have a small planning section, responsible to the top management, with no executive authority, whose job is simply to discover and examine ideas. I think, very often, the sections of industry are not terribly good at that; planning is a bit muddled.
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Article 12 – Leadership (Field-Marshall Slim)
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