Drucker on dissent and imagination, and Eisenhower on the related necessity of surfacing bureaucratic differences

Somewhere in Supreme Command, supreme strategist Eliot Cohen discusses the importance when formulating strategy of surfacing differences rather than papering them over, which is the general impulse in Washington.

I thought of that when I read this comment in an oral history given by Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the awful general and, during the 1950s, one of Cohen’s predecessors as counselor to the State Department:

… the president [Eisenhower] and I went over to Mr. Dulles and the president said he wanted me to coordinate the policy plans and policy for the meeting. He said, ‘Doug, there’s one thing I won’t have.’ He said, ‘I know your bureaucratic language where there are differences, you smother those differences with general language, and then every department goes its own separate way.’ He said, ‘That’s the sure road to disaster.’ He said, ‘I want, when there are disagreements, I want first to find out if the two secretaries or three secretaries, if Treasury is involved or somebody else, can iron out their difficulties. If they can’t I want those issues brought with clear, separate and distinct positions that differ to me. And then I will decide what our position is going to be.’ He said, ‘The last thing in the world that we can afford is that wonderful bureaucratic language that you guys are so great at inventing where it’s nice and general and it means everything to all people and each one goes his separate way.’ He said, ‘That’s no way to go.’

(P. 42, Douglas MacArthur II oral history, Eisenhower Library)

The more I learn about Eisenhower as president, the more impressed I am.

By coincidence, in my research for my current book, I’ve also been reading, because it gets into George C. Marshall’s handling of generals, Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. Drucker hits a similar theme and develops it further. Not only is it important to surface dissent, a decision should not be made if there is no dissent, because real decisions by their very nature are difficult and contentious. Moreover, he says, imagination is needed to make good decisions. And the way to tap the imagination, he says, "is argued, disciplined disagreement." (P. 153 of my edition)