Throw the Rascal Out!

> "Nobody should be chief executive officer of anything for more than five or six years. If he doesn't retire gracefully, throw the rascal out."

> "All decisions should be made as low as possible in the organization. The charge of the Light Brigade was ordered by an officer who wasn't there looking at the territory."

> "The only people who thoroughly enjoy being assistants-to are vampires. The assistant-to recommends itself to the weak or lazy manager as a crutch. It helps him where he shouldn't and can't be helped-- head-to-head contact with his people."

These karate chops to the corporate system are from a new book, Up the Organization, a breezy assault on business inefficiency clearly destined for the best seller list. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, has ordered a printing of 100,000, a run usually reserved for sex-saturated novels. The author, Robert Townsend, is an executive best known for driving Avis from a distant second in the car-rental field to wealth and prominence in only three years (1962 to 1965) as its chief executive officer. (He now is owner of a small newsletter, The Congressional Monitor.) His book is more a hip survival manual than a reasoned study. Its short chapters pop corporate conceits like balloons at a shooting gallery, but often fail to offer anything of substance to replace them. Still, many of his observations will bring nervous laughs in executive suites.

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His advice to newly arrived chief executives: "Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency." That is just what Townsend did on moving to Avis from American Express. He sought out Doyle Dane Bernbach. William Bernbach, the agency's chief, came up with a theme that did not entirely please anybody. The only honest statements he felt the ads could make were that the company was second largest and that its people were trying harder. ownsend agreed, and the rest is history.

True to his conviction that bigness usually leads to calcification, Townsend stepped out of Avis when it was acquired in 1965 -- despite his opposition -- by the giant conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph. "If you have a good company, don't sell out to a conglomerate," Townsend advises. "Conglomerates will promise anything for your people, but once in the fold your company goes through the homogenizer along with their other acquisitions of the week."

For proof of the widening gap between business and the consumer, Townsend proposes a simple test: let an executive place a call to his company and pretend that he is a customer seeking help. If he reacts harshly to the almost inevitable runaround, he should then try phoning his own office and experience the obstacle course he has set up. As one way of clearing away the communications barriers between the boss and his customers and employees, Townsend suggests getting rid of secretaries -- an idea not likely to reduce the book's publicity potential. He has a few words about boards of directors: "Suppliers of goods and services -- like lawyers, accountants and bankers --should be kept off the board if at all possible. Give one of these a seat and you shut off healthy competition from his profession to serve your company."

Nepotism is another danger. Townsend argues that the Ford brothers should have left the Ford Motor Co. when it went public. "When they didn't," he notes, "it seemed inevitable that their first classic misadventure should turn out to be named after a relative." He also gives a kick to management's all-purpose crutch, the computer -- "big, expensive, fast, dumb machine-typewriters." The adding-technicians who operate them? "They're building a mystique, a priesthood, their own mumbo-jumbo ritual to keep you from knowing what they -- and you -- are doing." He is wary of automation. "I've never known a company seriously injured by automating too slowly," he writes, "but there are some classic cases of companies bankrupted by computerizing prematurely."

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Corporate viability, in Townsend's view, means a running skirmish with the business establishment. "When the vast majority of big companies agree on some practice or policy," he writes, "you can be fairly certain that it's out of date. Ask yourself: 'What's the opposite of this conventional wisdom?' And then work back to what makes sense." Essentially. Townsend calls for an end to institutionalized submissiveness. "Most of us," he sardonically asserts, "come from good solid European stock whose record of rapacity, greed, cruelty and treachery would make Genghis Khan look like Mahatma Gandhi. To go down now without a whimper (much less a bang) is completely out of character."

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