It actually got worse in the 1970s, I
think.
A new, improved,
management culture took hold ... driven, in large part, by a fascination with some of the changes
Robert McNamara imposed on the US DoD in the 1960s. McNamara was an important figure; he was one of the "dollar a year men" brought to Washington, especially to the Pentagon, early in the war (1942) from industry to help
streamline war production and, in fact, war making. But, as McNamara himself noted in his memoirs, they, the industry 'experts' learned a whole lot about
systematic management from the admirals and generals and they took it back to Detroit and Pittsburg and, indeed, Wall Street. By the 1950s
both the US military and industrial cultures were changed by the introduction of revised management techniques (remember
Management by Results and
Management by Objectives and "balls on the wall" and all that?).
Canada, the Canadian Army, especially, still heavily influenced by London, was slow to adopt the new-fangled American methods and models ... until 1968, that is, when, at the highest policy levels, everything and anything British was
verboten and there was no place else to look for ideas. So, about the time, say mid 1970s, that the US was starting to realize that some (much? most?) of what Robert McNamara had done while he was Secretary of Defence had done at least as much harm as good we were starting to adopt it all,
holus-bolus.
By the mid 1980s we were full-steam-ahead into "management gone wild." If you wanted something, anything to move within the HQ you had to add a "__
Something or other__ Management" section to your proposal, complete with a flow chart, and by the end of the '80s, a spreadsheet, to your proposal.
(I was on both ends of this in the '80s and '90s. I recall, once, in the late '80s, when my boss, a two star, called me into his office, slid a thick stack of paper towards me and said, "PM* __
Project__ just got a new desktop computer system. He left me his quarterly report. Annex A used to be useful ~ one page with some important data clearly visible in a table. Now it's a quarter in thick computer printout that tells me nothing. Take this away and make sense of it, please. And tell all the PMs to stop this voluminous nonsense." Later, when I had my own directorate I recall hiring a consultant to, at considerable expense to the public, repackage my own (military) staff's work into a nice, fancy, civilian consultant's report because our military and departmental management had decided (if that's the right world) that consultants were smart and we, civil servants and soldiers, were not.)
My sense is that things got worse in the 1990s and in the 21st century. We have always had an unhealthy fascination with HQs ~
Old Sweat has reminded us before that if you put three Canadian officers together in a room they are likely to form a new HQ ~ and we, also seem, usually uncritically, to accept whatever the "big boys" (first the Brits, now the Americans) are doing as being best for us, too.
Edited to add:
It wasn't just the military or even DND that developed an unhealthy fascination with the
management for its own sake culture. It pervaded all of government and a large part of industry, too. The notion took hold that you didn't have to produce much, and certainly not just produce something better and cheaper than the competition, all you had to do was
manage processes well enough and you would succeed.
____
* Project Manager (normally a Capt(N) or Col, sometimes a Cmdre or BGen
Another edit: to correct a repetition and a couple of typos
