THE CATT CONCEPT: The New Industrial Darwinism

by Ivor Catt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 1971

This is a contrived, often muddled indictment of American industrial management practices by a brain-drain reject, Ivor Catt is an Englishman who recently spent six years working as a computer designer in the States, during which time he was employed by no less than five different electronics companies, an experience which left him resentful and apparently in urgent need of rationalizing his rather startling job mobility. Hence the genesis of the Concept -- in which Cart states that modern business management in this country, despite all the jawboning about being dynamic, is really designed to waste or stifle employee talent rather than achieve maximum productivity. The best workers fall victim to the ""sad New Reality of high-speed hire-and-fire,"" eventually knuckling under and becoming as cautious and unproductive as everyone else -- or they are doomed to bounce from job to job, just like poor Cart did. He tries to liven the book up with ""laws"" like ""The Incompletion Gambit"" and ""The Supremacy of the Prosaic"" which exemplify behavioral patterns developed by those who do adapt to the New American Industrial Reality; natural selection doing its dirty work. But the problem is that the Catt Concept rests on little more than one man's bitter and limited experience: while granting the British penchant for and success with a posteriori reasoning, assertions that U.S. management practices are ""designed for the maximization of paranoid tendencies"" require strong supportive evidence. Cart says of his stateside jobs, ""Lunacy was all around, madder and madder."" Perhaps now that he's back home he will apply for a position with Roils Royce and may another apple fall on his head. Flimflam Peter Principle.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION