“When you have so many little pieces,” says my friend the Hard-Core Bureaucrat, working at another agency, “it’s so easy to let one drop off the table. We could sure use a good word processor-cum-PERT machine.”
Although computers can help you tidy up your work, they themselves can be messy enough unless you know what you’re doing. There’s no substitute for a good computer expert in many cases. And training, too. In the following chapter, you’ll have one answer to “people” problems—the “Who-How Solution.”
Backup:
◼ [VII], Graphics Tips, page [331].
8
People: the Who-How Solution
Stewart Research, Inc.—a fictitious name, along with the others in this tale, which is true in the main elements—once seemed on the verge of big money.
Frank Stewart, a slim, intense young chain-smoker, was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large company to monitor congressmen and bureaucrats influencing certain business activities. He planned to sum up gigantic piles of newspaper stories inside a computer. Then his early-warning service would ferret out patterns for his benefactor and other businessmen trying to keep up with the vagaries of government. Stewart’s plan may come to pass, but last I knew, he was fighting off unfounded rumors of bankruptcy.
“We’ve wasted upwards of $40,000 on computer consultants and the consequences of their ‘advice,’” Stewart told me in the modest white-frame home where he and his wife lived and worked and took in boarders.