Beyond human scale: the large corporation at risk.

Despite their new "lean and mean" image, major corporations in America, claim the authors, increasingly suffer from the same bureaucratic sclerosis that afflicts other large organizations, such as the federal government.

This is not exactly a revelation--popular writers like Robert Townsend and Thomas J. PEters have helped turn this view of corporate structure into a kind of conventional wisdom. Still, the fact that most large corporations turn a profit perpetuates the myth that they are paradigms of efficiency, even as foreign competitors and small domestic firms eat away at their profit margins. Ginzberg and Vojta do a credible job puncturing this myth by concentrating on the growing dissatisfaction of management personnel; by analyzing the similarities between corporations and other large organizations (the military, the Catholic church, universities, academic hospitals); and by putting the whole thing into historical perspective.

The problems, they believe, stem from the way corporations have adapted to their own phenomenal growth since World War II. Senior managers have kept budget authority and control centralized at the executive level, while an expanding and diversifying stable of semi-autonomous divisions have had to compete with each other for scarce corporate resources, such as R & D and marketing support. This has blurred lines of responsibility and accountability, slowed decisionmaking to a crawl and forced middle-managers to spend more and more time writing reports and battling for turf rather than concentrating on concrete business tasks. CEO's, in turn, tend to exhaust themselves "keeping the peace" among competing divisions, with little energy left over for the more important work of analyzing markets and planning strategy.

If they want to survive and prosper, large corporations must revamp, among other things, their performance-appraisal and compensation systems to reward managers for productive endeavor rather than infighting and paper-shuffling.

The book's message is not as strong as it might have been because the authors offer little evidence and few illustrations to support it--you either buy it or you don't. (Vojta, a career executive at some of the nation's largest banks, also chose not to realte any of his doubtlessly impressive first-hand experience.) One assertion that's hard to buy is what might be called the yuppie's revenge: corporations are "at risk" partly because young, well-educated middle-managers are dissatisfied with corporate life, want "meaningful" careers, and are less willing than their apparatchik elders to "claw and fight their way up the corporate hierarchy." In fact, yuppies seem eager enough to claw and fight their way into other rigid, generally meaningless careers, such as corporate law, as long as they're promised prestige and high salaries. The older generation, on the other hand--and the authors admit this--got on board the management escalator during the 50s and 60s, the "Golden Age" of corporate expansion. Corporate bureaucracy was less extensive, and promotions, raises, power and prestige came more quickly and predictably. Transport today's disgruntled corporate yuppie back 25 years, and he'd be happy as a clam.