Man & Machine at Carnegie Tech

As a name, number or statistic, every American is now embedded in the memory of at least one electronic digital computer--the versatile calculator that is rapidly taking charge of everything from taxes to insurance to airline reservations to CIA intelligence. Man's capacity to manage vast organizations is being enlarged enormously by the computer's ability to simulate complex situations, weigh thousands of variables, and produce dependable decisions far faster than the human brain. By forecasting future markets, computers locate gas stations and branch banks in the most profitable places. By controlling runaway inventories, they curb one of the leading causes of recessions.

Computers promise to make U.S. business far more efficient, possibly bigger, certainly more powerful. However it affects lower-echelon employment, the computer is sure torequire a new breed of top manager: men who combine the talents of the big-businessman, the public administrator and the scientific researcher. Where will such paragons come from?

Humming Hatcheries. One answer lies in the rapid rise of U.S. graduate business schools, once academic backwaters and now humming hatcheries of bright young men who model themselves on such star managerial successes as Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara (M.B.A., Harvard '39). The top schools include Harvard, M.I.T. and Chicago, plus Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, U.C.L.A. and others. Such schools no longer teach business as a series of narrow, separate management skills (production, marketing, accounting). The new stress is on the Big Picture, and few schools think bigger than Carnegie Tech's Graduate School of Industrial Administration in Pittsburgh. It is the first graduate business school to stress behavioral sciences, higher mathematics electronic data processing and management simulation exercises as basic for managerial careers.

As small as it is precocious, Carnegie's G.S.I.A. was launched just 15 years ago with $6,000,000 from the late William L. Mellon, then board chairman of Gulf Oil. Now almost twice as rich the one-building school holds itself to 125 students and 35 professors (average age: 34). The school's renown comes from its stress on "scientific decision making"--a systems approach to orchestrating companies by using the most advanced technological tools. Such gelt-edged Gestalt, said one British economist in a recent assessment of J.S.^business schools, has made Carnegie "the one with the highest intellectual level."

Flexible Managers. Founder Mellon required all applicants to have undergraduate degrees in math, science or engineering. Master's students get a basic two-year dose of law, economics, politics, psychology, sociology, statistics and writing, plus more math and science. The goal, says Dean Richard M. Cyert, 40, a top scholar of statistical sampling,' is "men flexible enough to accept future challenges."

Trying to prepare for "the world of 1985," Carnegie envisions factories that run themselves and managers largely concerned with planning future factories. To manufacture thinkers, Carnegie essentially teaches patterns of behavior--how men act in organizations, the interaction of banking, money and markets with unions, politics and science. To arm themselves for high-level decisions, students study techniques from linear algebra to clinical psychology to computer programming. Along with other required courses, for example, they study "Ideas in the Changing Environment"--how society and business have interacted in important historical periods. First-semester required reading spans 17 books, from Darwin to Freud to Spengler.

Embryo eggheads are hard-boiled in the now widely copied "Carnegie Management Game," a grueling electronic exercise that often strains high-salaried executives who come back for refresher training. A measure of the competition is that Carnegie's 40 doctoral candidates come from the top 5% of U.S. college graduates, are expected to publish at least three papers before they get degrees. In the four-year-old Ford Foundation doctoral-dissertation competition, eight of the 26 awards have gone to Carnegie students. No other school has won more than two.

Cunning & Dog Food. Carnegie is lavishly addicted to long-range research, in which students join professors to anticipate future business problems. By simulating human problem solving on a computer, for example, Psychologist Herbert A. Simon and his colleagues have been teaching the machine to "think"--that is, to make "cunning" choices by a form of reasoning rather than computing answers by doggedly calculating all possible alternatives. Using Simon's methods, an M.I.T. researcher has computerized the numerous and subtle judgments required in trust investment. Carnegie claims credit for the first industrial application of linear programming, which has since been used for everything from oil refining to concocting dog food. Oth er research projects range from the psychology of insecure employees to the economics of the U.S. theater.

While peering into the future, Carnegie faculty men love to fire off scary prophecies. Knowledge will so outweigh experience in the computer age, says Psychologist Harold J. Leavitt, that young men might better remain in school and "stay away from the whole damn scene for 25 years." Leavitt envisions business careers lasting only 20 years, as against 40 now, and says that executives will avoid obsolescence only by going back to the university "one year in four or six."

Identity Crisis. Leavitt's more comforting colleagues see computers as welcome liberators from 9-to-5 routine. Workers may simply stay home until summoned by closed-circuit TV when something goes wrong with the machine. People will like their jobs more when the drudgery is removed. Although room at the top may be reserved for a small elite speaking an argot no one else understands, much of the current worker-boss strain may vanish as men relate to machines rather than one another. This has already happened to Air Force men tending the SAGE warning system. Ranks seem to blur, says one officer. "All of the interaction seems to be with the electronic system," he explains.

Carnegie graduates are now so fashionable that they average ten job offers at starting salaries as high as $12,000. Only 13 years have gone by since the first graduates left Carnegie; yet almost 25% of the first four classes are presidents of their own firms or close to it in other firms. In a recent survey, 75% of master's graduates described their jobs as "new to the company" since they arrived. Nearly 70% of them held open-ended jobs invitingly described as "up to them to define."

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