Behind the Times (18 page)

Argyris was the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard University. In 1969 Punch Sulzberger asked Professor Argyris to come to the
Times
and give a series of talks on management skills to the
Times’
senior executives. Sulzberger had just presided over a widely publicized disaster in the Washington bureau of the
Times.
He had agreed to appoint one of Rosenthal’s chief assistants as the new bureau chief in Washington—and then had reversed his decision when the Washington bureau lobbied him against the choice of a “New York man” over one of their own. Sulzberger told his associates that there must be a better way to run the paper; the idea of “everyone sitting down” and listening to “rational discussion” appealed to him.

Argyris, however, disdained the seminar approach. He had a more
elaborate plan. He persuaded Sulzberger to sponsor instead a multiyear “management study and executive development program” at the
Times.
The Argyris project would proceed in two stages. First Sulzberger granted Argyris and his assistants—and their tape recorders—unprecedented access within the
Times
building. Argyris was given his own office at the
Times
, and permitted to attend executives’ meetings, budget sessions, and story conferences. In all, he tape-recorded more than fifty such meetings. Of the forty top executives at the paper, thirty-eight cooperated “enthusiastically,” including Sulzberger. Argyris was not allowed to interview “lower level”
Times
people. He was told that the top editors believed such interviews would “upset” the staff (despite the ban, Argyris managed to talk to twenty reporters and desk editors).

In the second stage of the project, Argyris conducted what he called interventions—a series of sessions with Sulzberger and other
Times
executives intended to convey to them what he had found, “to help them communicate better with each other, and with the publisher.” The aim was to instruct everyone to improve their “interpersonal skills and listening abilities.” Institutions like the
Times
, Argyris believed, were “living systems” that periodically required “self-examination and self-renewal.” Before coming to the
Times
, Argyris had done interventions and prescribed for the living systems of IBM, Polaroid, General Electric, and the State and Defense Departments, among others. Midway through the intervention phase, however, Argyris abruptly ended the
Times
project.

There had been hostility from the first. Sulzberger and his executives, Argyris came to believe, were not really interested in change, openness, or candor. As he was told by one senior
Times
man: “
You know you’ve become a full member of this organization when you genuinely believe that few changes are possible
and
that it is necessary to hold such a belief to remain sane.”

It was relatively easy for Sulzberger’s men to dismiss Arygris’s work. While they were processing the great events of the day, he was scoring the tapes of his interviews on “thirty-six variables that enhance or detract from individual interpersonal competence, that facilitate or inhibit effective group dynamics or intergroup relationships, and that result in organizational norms that increase or impede effectiveness.” It sounded like so much psychobabble. Yet Argyris had a point: The
Times
needed help. When Argyris began his interviews at the
Times
,
Sulzberger and his top associates were debating proposals to start a new feature department. It would appear daily; it would consist of a full page made up of materials from
Times
writers as well as contributions from outsiders. John B. Oakes, Sulzberger’s cousin and the editorial-page editor, had first conceived of the idea a decade before. He had long wanted to accommodate outsiders’ contributions that were, as he put it, “too long to be a letter to the editor and too short for a Sunday
Magazine
essay.” Later, Scotty Reston lent his Washington presence to the idea. But the plan languished. While both Oakes and Sulzberger now remember that they wanted to accommodate divergent views in the
Times
, they also worried that such counterpoint might detract from the
Times’
own editorial voice. Mostly, though, the idea became immobilized in a tangle of conflicting interests because of the proposed location of the new feature. Physically, it was to be placed opposite the editorial page of the paper. That page was by tradition given over to obituaries. While Sulzberger and his associates agreed that the death notices did not require such prime display, different factions had different ideas for the space. The business department wanted to use the page to sell more advertising; Rosenthal wanted the space for more news.
Oakes wanted the page for the new department—and he wanted it to be under his jurisdiction. Sulzberger chose not to decide among the competing claims.

For four years, committees convened, planners planned, editors jockeyed—and the impasse continued. Finally, in 1970, Oakes remembered, he made the beau geste. He withdrew as a claimant for the space, telling his cousin Sulzberger that if it was a choice between having a department under Oakes’s control or no department at all, then Oakes would step aside. That enabled Argyris to settle the matter in one so-called intervention session, a meeting of the executives involved that lasted just thirty minutes. The result was the creation of a separate department, under the jurisdiction neither of the news staff nor of the editorial-page board: the Op-Ed page of the
Times.
In the Sunday paper of September 30, 1990, the
Times
marked the twentieth anniversary of the Op-Ed page with a commemorative section. The introductory history spoke of the “eloquent” advocacy of Reston. Nothing was said of interventionist Argyris’s contribution, an unstartling omission. The glancing recognition accorded Oakes was a surprise. It turned out that when the editors planning the anniversary section met with Punch Sulzberger to see if he had any special “marching orders”
for them, one of the men, Robert Semple, came away with the message: “
Don’t reopen old wounds.”

There were other, perhaps justified, reasons for the editors’ hostility toward Argyris. Sulzberger had given the researcher permission to publish a book or article about his experiences at the
Times
, provided the
Times’
identity was cloaked. There were guarantees that
Times
executives would have the right of manuscript review and that an elaborate system of coding would be used. In the final manuscript, the publisher Sulzberger became Mr. P; Mr. R was Rosenthal, and both Mr. Q and Mr. T stood in for Oakes (at his insistence, to throw off readers). The paper itself was called the
Daily Planet.
No one was fooled when the materials were published in 1974, with the title,
Behind the Front Page: Organizational Self-Renewal in a Metropolitan Paper.
To Sulzberger’s chagrin, the rest of the publishing world, and the
Times
staff, enjoyed a few laughs at the expense of Mr. P.

Enough soiled laundry emerged from Argyris’s tape-recorded meetings to hang out to dry for months afterward. Argyris’s readers sit in as Rosenthal and Oakes each accuse the other of “unbalanced” journalism. Oakes thinks the news department is too soft and featurized—“magazine-like,” he tells Rosenthal. Rosenthal counters that the editorial page is too “shrill.” Both men worry that the
Times
is drifting “leftward.” But the most startling discussions on the tapes center on Mr. P. Sulzberger laments that he “can’t run this place like it used to be managed” in the lax old days under his father. Yet no one cares much for Mr. P’s “undisciplined” style. Sulzberger, for example, set up an executive committee, but then bypassed it and dealt directly with his subordinates; he talks to some excomm people individually about the proposed new feature and then tells them, “Don’t discuss this with the others.” The executives willingly go along with such little deceptions; they don’t want to be open in front of the others, who they regard as their rivals. They see everything in a you-win/I-lose framework.

Argyris’s tape recorder is running during the big Op-Ed page debate. Playing interventionist, he moves the discussion to the reasons why, after four years, there is still no decision:

SULZBERGER
: “Each of you tells me your views and then you leave and nothing happens.”

EXECUTIVE
A
: “After four years of waiting I think [Sulzberger] should make a decision.”

EXECUTIVE
B
: “Why do we have to focus on Sulzberger? Why can’t we talk about the best decision-making structure? Why do we have to get into this behavioral science crap, if you’ll forgive the expression?”

SULZBERGER
: “But will we learn anything?”

ARGYRIS
: “Perhaps this is another fear. If we talk about Sulzberger, then it makes it more legitimate for him and others to talk about us.”

SULZBERGER
: “Why is it necessary to look at how we operate as a group? Let’s take an issue and discuss it.”

ARGYRIS
: “Once in a while, it’s important to open up the hood of your car and see if the motor is working effectively.”

SULZBERGER
: “My father used to say if you had a car going fifty miles an hour, never open up the hood.”

ARGYRIS
: “This is a choice that we now have to make. Do we want to look at our behavior?”

SULZBERGER
: “I think we have to. We can’t go back to the old days.… My difficulty is that I try to involve everyone and I get no decision made.… I wanted to open up the big issues of the paper. Where are we going? Are we drifting, resting on our laurels? I wanted … a rational discussion that would lead somewhere.… I’ve never been able to succeed in doing it. And I’ve tried every format I know. Everyone starts to defend what he is doing and we end up with a one-to-one relationship.… Let me say this. I’m willing to start over again.”

It is Argyris, however, who falters. The interventionist expresses frustration at his failure to get the group to vent their feelings about Sulzberger. Argyris vents his own feelings, telling Mr. P that he is the most “ambivalent” CEO Argyris ever met: “You want people to be open with you, and yet you don’t want to get rid of historical legacies; you were open about your feelings toward others, yet, as I listened to the tape, I don’t think you were as open about your own feelings toward yourself.”

Rosenthal later wrote dismissively of the project—a vision of the
Times
filtered through Argyris’s “own version of what a corporation should be.” “Live and learn,” Rosenthal concluded. But Sulzberger never lost faith in the magic bullets of the academy—a touching trait his son would inherit in his turn as publisher. His own Mr. Fix-It turn of mind made him receptive; and if he was ever beset by doubts, then the pressures of performance required of public corporations pushed
him forward. And so, just a few years after the Argyris experiment, Sulzberger instituted a program of Management By Objective, another organizational tool stamped
MADE
IN
HARVARD
. The MBO program required annual self-examinations by senior executives. Similarly, when the Wall Street security analysts began setting “industry standards” of 20 percent annual return on revenues for newspapers, Sulzberger bent the
Times
toward more B-school expertise. Newspaper publishing became too important to be left to newspaper publishers. The
Times
convened a half dozen new committees—on readership, “the future of newspapers,” color pages and photography, and new sections for the paper. Still later, Punch Sulzberger, with his son’s enthusiastic endorsement, commissioned extensive polling surveys of so-called “light” readers and nonreaders. In-depth questionnaires and focus groups were employed to tease out what people wanted in their newspapers, and why they weren’t reading the
Times
every day.

In more recent years, the younger Sulzberger became excited over Demingism—the ideas of the “quality pioneer” W. Edwards Deming. Demingism might be called Management-By-Obligation. Deming’s fourteen-point plan for managerial behavior supposedly helped such companies as GM, Ford, and Xerox lift their myopic focus from the bottom line to a broader vision that included the customer. On June 6, 1991, some one thousand
Times
employes gathered (in two shifts) at the New Yorker Club to hear how Demingism was being applied “to every department and every employee” of the
Times.

Many of these same employees took in their Arthur-flavored Demingism, and its dashes of personal discovery, team play, candor, and quality work-circles, with the same pose of weary skepticism that reporters usually adopt when invited to news conferences by promoters of “miraculous” self-help nostrums. But Arthur Sulzberger wasn’t kidding about Management-By-Obligation. After the 1991 announcement that Demingism was here to stay, the
Times
held no fewer than five retreats for staff members in the period October 1992 to January 1993, at such “facilitating” locations as the Hyatt Regency of Greenwich, Connecticut. Amazingly, for a company with such a long institutional memory, few of the 1992–3 seminar participants recognized the Deming days as Argyris Part Two—the colorized re-run of the old black-and-white comic opera of twenty years before, with some of the same arias being sung by new divas. For example, in place of Abe Rosenthal complaining, back then, “Why do we have to get into this
behavioral science crap …”, this time Max Frankel is the one who protests, “Let’s not play these stupid games!” Through it all, the 1970s’ Argyris and the 1990s’ Deming, each Sulzerger in turn listened, nodded, squirmed, added his own recitatives—and picked up the check for the experts’ services.

If, as Punch Sulzberger reminded his managers, “Dad”—Arthur Hays Sulzberger—didn’t believe in poking around under the hood of a car that was running, the grandson no longer felt any such inhibition. At the modern
Times
, various mechanics swarmed all over the vehicle.