Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966) by Elting Morison

“Men, Machines, and Modern Times” by Elting Morison is a difficult book to review, primarily because it really isn’t a book at all, but rather a collection of lectures that the author delivered at various academic institutions in the 1950s. Taken together, the lectures address two distinct topics in the nature of innovation, although that’s not how the author frames things.

The first topic is technical innovation in large bureaucracies. For this, Morison uses the United States Navy as his test bed. He writes about three distinct cases, each of which highlights something different about the challenges of instituting change in large, established organizations.

Military institutions are notoriously conservative and at first blush may not seem an ideal environment for exploring insights into organizational innovation. Indeed, as one naval officer once quipped to the author: “Reforming the Navy Department is like kicking around a forty-foot sponge.” However, according to Morison, studying the Navy is helpful because “The military world in peace is a little like the real world put under laboratory conditions.”

From a timeline perspective, the first case study involves the curious episode of the USS Wampanoag. One of four independent designs pursued as part of a Navy contract to develop a sleek and powerful commerce raider after the Civil War, the Wampanoag was designed from the inside out. That is, lead engineer Benjamin Franklin Isherwood first developed a powerful and efficient steam engine, and then constructed the ship around it, a radically novel approach to shipbuilding at the time. The vessel’s performance in her February 1868 sea trials were “a magnificent success in every way … the greatest success as a steam war vessel that the world has ever known,” according to one contemporary observer. Or as Morison writes in mock modesty, “The Wampanoag was quite a ship.” She could maintain speeds of 17.5 knots, a feat not matched by any other warship for a generation. Yet, the Wampanoag was categorically rejected by the Navy, disparaged in an official report as “too much of an abortion.” Why? Because she was too good, too different – and no longer needed as the war was over. She was a ship designed to fight and the Navy was at peace. Her novel features frightened the navy brass because of the problems they “might” cause. Morison believes that the Wampanoag case is illustrative of a broader problem with the introduction of advanced technology into large organizations. He finds that there is often a tendency “to fit men into the machinery rather than to fit the machinery into the contours of a human situation.”

Next, Morison reviews the case of innovations in naval gunfire at the turn of the century. British naval officer Sir Percy Scott discovered that accuracy could be dramatically improved if three simple changes were implemented together. First, the gear ratio in the elevating gear of the gun needed to be altered to allow the gunner to quickly and easily elevate and depress the gun to follow the target throughout the roll of a ship at sea. Second, the telescopes the gunners looked through needed to be re-rigged so the recoil of the gun wouldn’t influence it. Finally, he crafted a small target at the mouth of the gun that could be manually moved up and down to simulate an enemy ship, allowing the gunners to practice their craft everyday. The upshot, according to Morison, is that Scott’s system “changed naval gunnery from an art to a science.” Accuracy in the British navy is estimated to have improved by as much as 3,000% in a few years. For instance, in an 1899 live fire exercise five British ships fired at a target ship 1,600 yards away for five minutes each and only achieved two direct hits. Six years later a single gunner hit a similar target at the same range 15 times in one minute, with half of the hits inside the 50-inch square bulls-eye.

A young American naval officer (and Morison’s future father-in-law) named William Sims learned of Scott’s stunning achievements and began importuning his superiors to implement the system in the US Navy. At first he was ignored. Then he was ridiculed. Finally he was threatened. The Navy’s fierce resistance to Sims’ proposed changes appear to have come from the “not-invented-here” syndrome, an almost irrational obstinacy to conceding that someone else has discovered a better way to do something with your own machinery. In the end, it took the direct intervention of none-other-than the commander-in-chief, Teddy Roosevelt, to get the Navy to adopt what plainly was a superior system.

The final case study examines the US government conference held in March 1943 to review the anti-submarine warfare campaign in the Atlantic. There were two basic schools of thought at the time. First, the Navy was in favor of sticking with the standard convoy formation. Naval leadership noted that many different strategies were tested during World War I and convoys proved to be the only effective solution. Second, the new Army Air Force was promoting the use of land-based aircraft to perform search-and-destroy missions against enemy submarines. Radar and airplane technology had advanced dramatically since the days of WWI, they argued, and should be given a chance to demonstrate their full potential. In the end, the Navy prevailed, but not because they won the argument. Morison notes that the debate could have been decided on the basis of objective quantitative evidence, which certainly was available, but it wasn’t. Rather, it came down to tradition and protecting one’s turf. As the official historian of the Navy noted, “Admiral King had no intention of permanently sharing with the Army what he conceived a naval responsibility.” The principal insight, according to Morison, is that “In any human situation, no matter how filled with quantitative data it may be, there are always present powerful human considerations that are incommensurable.” Anyone that has operated inside a large corporation will be familiar with that phenomenon.

The second topic that Morison explores is the process of innovation over time. He uses the discovery, development and exploitation of the Bessemer steel process in the United States as his single case study. Whereas each of the naval stories is concise and breezy, Morison’s telling of the Bessemer experience from 1850 to 1885 is plodding and dry. The one chapter dedicated to the topic, “Almost the Greatest Invention,” runs to almost ninety pages.

Morison is quick to point out that “no single fundamental contribution to the manufacture of steel was made by any American,” yet America came to dominate the steel industry. He sees three clear stages in the process of innovation. Each often requires leadership from very different types of individuals.

First there is the “inventive stage” when risk-taking entrepreneurs embrace the newly revealed opportunity. Morison notes that “men on the margins of an art or profession and hence without the commitments of those with long training or experience to rituals of the calling” are most likely to recognize and pursue disruptive changes at first. In the case of steel in the United States, it was Eber Brock Ward, a serial entrepreneur who had had previous success in shipping, mining and logging. In my own experience, if you want to create an innovative business in mobile payments, for instance, the last person you want working for you is a seasoned executive from the credit card industry. Or “Beware the tyranny of experts.”

Second comes “refinement and consolidation” of the new technology. No man was more important for steel production in the United States during this phase than Alexander Holley, a railroad man who immediately saw the immense value of steel over iron. Iron industry veterans may have looked to be best positioned to exploit the Bessemer process, but “they had reached a position of eminence in an ageless guildlike craft and in the community,” Morison writes. The last thing they wanted to do was destroy that craft and community and their vaunted position in it. Indeed, he writes that from the perspective of the iron industry leaders, the Bessemer converter looked “less like a tool of commerce and more like some catapult leveled against a walled town.” It was industry outsiders, like Holley, that could “weigh the merits of Bessemer steel not by trying to decide what it would do to them in the iron trade but what problems it would solve for them in their railroad interests.” In the two decades after the Civil War these pioneers in Bessemer process production in the United States experimented with new and better ways to create high quality steel efficiently. Or as Morison describes it, “Short trials and little errors; trial and tinker; trial, breakdown, change, and tinker…”

Finally, there is the “expansion” stage, one best represented in the United States by Andrew Carnegie, a man who came along after all the kinks had been worked out. Those opposed to investing in new technology often argue, “The first Christian gets the largest lion.” Evidently that was Carnegie’s view, too. By the time he entered the steel industry in 1875 it was well organized and tightly controlled by a small pool of industrialists that allocated production quotas among themselves. In Morison’s words, “The Bessemer innovators set out quite consciously to design a system in which they could limit production to a single product, control rather precisely the amount of domestic production, order within reasonable limits the fluctuations in demand for their product, free themselves virtually completely from alien competition, and maintain a firm hold over the channels of information, including manpower, which advances in the means of production took place.” This system “created by the steelmakers for their own security was beautifully designed for the success of Mr. Carnegie.” Indeed, “the Bessemer men were trapped by their own obscurantism.”

So, in sum, “Ward got it started, Holley brought the technology to a high and practical level, Carnegie provided the ultimate administrative solution.” Morison sees this as a typical framework of technical innovation. Perhaps he is correct, although I’m sure other experts in the field could enumerate many examples that do not follow Morison’s tidy three-speed process.

Morison’s overall conclusions focus heavily on the interplay between man and machine, as the title of the book would suggest. “To state the case in its simplest form,” he writes, “the current problem is how to organize and manage the system of ideas, energies, and machinery so it will conform to all the human dimensions.” And he is quick to point out that we have a shallow understanding of what those human dimensions really are and “must … create a new sort of culture that will give clear definition to what, in the new scheme of things, [they are].”

In closing, I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but it certainly shows its age. The vignettes about innovation in the Navy are classics and often “laugh out loud” funny. The case study on the Bessemer process is tedious, but informative, although I imagine there are better places to learn about it. The general admonition to consider how new technology fits into human needs and condition is wise and timeless. For those with a deep interest in technical innovation in large organizations, “Men Machines and Modern Times” is a classic.