The science of success

PERSONAL COLUMN BRIAN CROZIER

Could anything be simpler than a cube? As a shape, I mean. No pentagonal oddities about it: six perfect sides, each exactly equal to the others, all angles 90 degrees, twelve sides each of which exactly equals every other.

Simple, as I said; indeed, if you think about it, the quintessence of simplicity. Have you, however, ever tried making one? I don't mean a paper cube, but a cube in bright mild steel, correct in all its dimensions within a tolerance of 5 thou (.005 in.)?

Perhaps you have, and if you succeeded, this article holds little interest for you. 1, on the other hand, tried once, and failed.

These were the circumstances. I think it must have been 23 June, 1941, or whatever day it was that followed Hitler's invasion of Russia, which I read about in the paper on an interminable early morning trolleybus trip to Park Royal.. For reasons that concerned health and not pacifism, I was not in uniform, although of military age. (A year earlier, while France was being overrun, I had donned the drab uniform of a Local Defence Volunteer in Stock- port, and a misguided Somebody in Authority had 'placed a rifle in my hands, omitting only t6 instruct me in its use—and,_ in fairness, to give me ammunition—and told me to guard the power house. I was to challenge anybody I saw with, I think, the words, `Halt! Who goes there?' If the challengee spoke with a German accent, or tried to attack me, I believe I was to clobber him with the butt of the rifle. But that is another story.)

Some months before my trip to Park Royal, I had written to Ernest Bevin and offered my services in what was then called, with some imprecision, `munitions work.' The summons to Park Royal was the outcome.

There must have been thousands who had done as I had, or who, exempted from service in His Majesty's forces for flat feet, defective vision or other infirmities, were being called up for service of another kind. We didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for. Before the war (I was later told), there was a training centre at Park Royal, to which unemployables were sent in the hope that they would be turned to socially useful purposes. Perhaps there is still, to this day, a training centre at Park Royal, run in a similar spirit of dedication to the community.

In 1941, however, it was dedicated to the proposition that inside every infirm journalist, tinker and candlestick-maker, there lurked a mechanic or an engineer trying to burst out. But the old assumptions died hard, and although many of the diversely endowed candidates presenting themselves for training had patently left gainful occupations for the purpose, they were all, quite impartially, treated as morons.

The training centre was run on factory lines and operated in two shifts, from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 2 to 9. On the first day of my first shift (2 to 9), I was given a large, thick piece of steel of no particular shape; provided with a 6-in. rule, a hacksaw and file, and a blue- print; placed at a bench equipped with a vice; and instructed to cut and file down the lump of steel until it closely resembled the picture on the blueprint. If I succeeded, I was given to understand, I stood a good chance of becom- ing a fitter.

As you will have guessed, the blueprint depicted a perfect cube, each of whose twelve edges was exactly one inch long. Standing as I had been instructed to stand, just so, with the left foot out, and holding hacksaw and file the way the man said, I sawed and filed all day; My achievement was disappointingly small, in all senses. At one stage, I thought I was going to make it, as I completed a reasonably con- vincing square face. But alas, it was not at right angles to the neighbouring faces. In the process of reducing the obtuse angles, I damaged my good face. Thereafter, things went from bad to worse, or rather from small to smaller. After six hours' unremitting toil, all I had left was a very diminutive lump of metal, bereft of Euclidean proportions. - The point lies, however, not in this dismal failure, but in its sequel. For having thus proved beyond doubt my utter inaptitude to be a fitter, I was transferred to the inspection department, where I soon learned to pass judgment on the work of others.

Shortly after that, a vacancy for a stores inspector occurred in a factory manufacturing aircraft accessories, and I was sent along to fill it. My work consisted of making sure the material delivered was what the company had ordered. Since even I had learned to differentiate between 10-gauge steel plate and B i.d. tube, my duties did not strain my technical resources. On the other hand, I was not making the slightest use of the delicate skills I had mastered in the inspection department at Park Royal, such as the use of Mr Vernier's clever calipers and the handily precise micrometer,

Soon the squareness of the peg, relatively to the roundness of the hole, dawned on the management, and I was transferred to the view- room. Four or five months later, I found myself promoted to deputy, then acting, chief inspector, in charge of a staff of fifty in five factories; all this, to be noted, the traceable consequence of my abysmal performance with hacksaw and file.

Had I, then, stumbled on one of Parkinson's unwritten Laws, e.g. `Proved incompetence is the way to the top?' I have often, in the inter-

vening years, been tempted to think so. Of course, it is not as simple as that, since, demonstrably, proved ability has been known

to get a man to the top, quite possibly as often as proved incompetence. So let us try .a variant: `Proved inaptitude is the ambitious man's opportunity.'

This one, I think, stands up reasonably well to critical scrutiny. Consider the case of a sub- editor on a daily newspaper, whose ambition is to become a special writer. It is widely held that 'subbing' kills a writer's natural gift, although observation disproves it.- What is true, on the other hand, is that the better a 'sub' is, the less likely it is that he will be released from subbing to do what he wants to do.

This was particularly true just- after the war, when British newspapers were still cruelly

compact and good sub-editors desperately scarce, while the supply of reasonably com- petent writers (that is writers whose work would get past the subs and into the paper) greatly exceeded the demand; those with by- lines being, moreover, fiercely and under- standably ready to repulse competitive thrusts from the subs' room; It followed that the sub- editor with writing ambition hadn't a chance unless his subbing was demonstrably poor in comparison with his writing potential; the splash sub faced a life sentence in the subs' room, leading admittedly to the alternative prizes of executive promotion.

But it is in the great world of politics that the most suggestive examples of the connection between incompetence in one field and success in another are to be found. Certainly, the retention of power has little discernible con- nection with efficient government. During his long years in office as President of Indonesia, Sukarno ruined the economy of one of the

potentially richest countries in the world, the process being greatly accelerated after he had set himself up as the nation's guide in a

disastrous experiment called `guided demo- cracy.' Yet it took half a dozen failed assas- sination attempts, several uprisings and a

botched coup d'etat to bring him down. Much the same, mutatis mutandis, could be said of Ghana's Redeemer, Dr Kwame Nkrumah.

Mao Tse-tung brought China to its economic knees in 1958, with the lyrical excesses of the `great leap forward,' and latterly has plunged it into administrative chaos by turning its young hooligans loose. Yet the demonstrably abler

Liu Shao-ch'i, for all his command over the Communist party, has been quite unable to stand up to his boss.

Nearer home, has not the demonstrated mis- management of the country's finances, accom-

panied by a wanton running down of its

defences, immeasurably strengthened Mr Wilson's hold on power (since there is nothing

like the certainty of electoral rejection to close the ranks of a party in office, calming the recalcitrants and stilling the plotters)?

In an utterly different context, it has been instructive to observe how brief a moment has

been needed for `Che' Guevara, despite his

dismal failure as a guerrilla leader and irrelevance as a theoretician of violence, to be-

come a myth, beguiling the uprooters of shrubs and paving stones, and throwing stardust into the eyes of publishers and reviewers of his inconsequential writings.

None of this, to be humble, either amounts to a Law or constitutes a Science. But it does.

I hope, open avenues for the explorer of Inman behaviour and the observer of life's Icongruities.