BREWER BRINGS DILBERT PRINCIPLE TO L.A. UNIFIED.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

ASK Admiral David Brewer, the soon-to-be LAUSD superintendent, about his philosophy of business management, and he is likely to quote author Jim Collins about confronting ``the brutal facts.'' Or maybe Harry S. Dent about the 21st century's circular business models.

He might talk about about ``circles of influence'' or about ``umbilicaling'' to ... things. You might hear about hedgehogs, or autopsies, or ``change agents,'' or other pop-business terms coined by the motivational authors in their best-selling books, CDs and lectures.

It seems that Brewer, the school board's surprising pick to replace retiring Supt. Roy Romer, is an ardent adherent to the organizational self-help genre. During a meeting with Daily News' editors and writers on Thursday, Brewer cited Collins' theories about business success, and those by similar authors such as Dent, so often it prompted one of the editors to later refer to him as ``Admiral Dilbert.''

Collins wrote the best-selling ``Good to Great,'' which explored how companies improve. The book was such a hit, Collins turned the idea into successful business itself. The book's success probably has something to do with the non-nonsense but colorful approach Collins takes to describe pitfalls and problem-solving in business management, such as ``The Hedgehog Concept,'' ``The Flywheel'' and ``Getting the right people on the bus.'' I'm not completely sure what these terms, but I'm sure Brewer does.

It was odd to hear so much pop-business theory coming from a career Navy man. The U.S. government, the military in particular, isn't known for its business acumen and innovation. Remember those old stories about $500 hammers and $1,000 toilets?

But not only does the admiral spout business philosophy, he plans to apply it to the Los Angeles Unified School District's bureaucracy. Right away.

Among the first thing Brewer said he plans to do when he assumes leadership of the $7.5 billion district in mid-November is put it under a microscope.

``One of the things I've already told my staff is we're going to go into that cycle,'' said the superintendent-designate (contract negotiations are still pending). ``Once you do your analysis, then you come around and make decisions, and when something doesn't work you got to have the guts to kill it.''

Specifically, he plans put the school's bureaucracy to the Collins's ``Good to Great'' (tm) Diagnostic Tool. His goal will be looking at whether people are in the right jobs.

Brewer also plans to hire some of his own people, a few of whom he's already identified. ``I'm going to bring in some change agents,'' he said.

I was intrigued by all this pop-business jargon Brewer used, so I went to Jim Collins' Web site (www.JimCollins.com) to find out a little more about it. The diagnostic tool itself is online, available for free and quick download.

Most American women, whether they will admit it or not, know a little something about diagnostic tools. We might know them as compatibility tests, or love tests or those creepy ``are-you-a-skanky-ho?'' tests found in Cosmo.

The way it works is the test has a series of questions posed as statements about issues such as your relationship or personal grooming habits. For example, ``He brings me flowers.'' Then, you answer as honestly as you can -- but in pencil in case you need to erase it later -- by picking from four or five qualifiers such as ``never'' to ``sometimes'' to ``every Friday night, like clockwork.'' Each response is numbered, and after you finish, you turn to the back where it tells you how to calculate your responses to come up with a number which then corresponds to one of four assessments of your relationship or compatibility or whatever, such as ``Dump the loser.''

The ``Good to Great'' (tm) Diagnostic Tool is in the basic Cosmo love-test format, only with fancier words. Instead of adding up a score, you have a ``trend analysis'' which helps you ``assess the trajectory of your organization'' to figure out your ``trend score'' in various ``input principles.'' Can't you just see Catbert, the evil HR director in the Dilbert comic strip saying something like that?

Brewer's language may be Dilbert-esque, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. Good management principles are good management principles no matter what you call them. And it's a fair bet that it's been a long time, if ever, since anyone applied theories of successful businesses-management practices to the LAUSD.

Won't it be fun when the school district's midlevel bureaucrats have to start figuring out whether they have tapped their organization's ``Hedgehog'' enough to reach those ``Big Hairy Audacious Goals?''