The Charlatan and Other Weasels

The professional analyst better known as the cost analyst, the systems analyst, the operations research analyst, grew it’s own profession during World War II and directly thereafter. Some would credit the work done to locate German U-Boats as the first attributable activities of our formal profession. Whereas there is plenty of documentation to suggest the mathematical formulations that were developed during this timeframe constitute what we now refer to as operations research, analysts have been around much longer than 1940.

Frederick Taylor published his work; "The Principles of Scientific" Management in 1911 giving him an auspicious start in the field but one, which is typically credited with the Modern MBA, vise operations research. There is no doubt that his time and motion studies constitute, for the analyst, a very well documented way to collect the first data.

But way before Taylor arrived on the seen anyone in business strived for efficiency although they might not have been certain how to achieve it. They learned by making trades and by making mistakes. Almost 100 years previous, however, Eli Whitney labored to produce machinery and interchangeability to improve efficiency in his factories. Whitney, however, has both supporters and critics. The individual typically credited with the invention of interchangeable parts is Samuel Colt who took before Congress 15 guns. After disassembling them, he mixed up the parts and reassembled them. The approving Congress immediately placed orders for 10,000 of the weapon never realizing that the demonstration was a shame and Colt had marked all the parts so he could reassemble them correctly.

Regardless of what took place on that day, Colt, enlisted the help of Eli Whitney and together they eventually got it right and the first assembly line took root – this well before Henry Ford apparently invented one. This paints a darker side of analysis, a side that allows the initiated to obscure the truth with promises of greater efficiency and cheaper products. Perhaps they will, perhaps they will not, but many well-documented cases of fraud occurred throughout the 1800s culminating in Congress passing a False Claims act in 1863.

The Charlatan is the guy who convinces his boss that by adding sawdust to the gunpowder they were selling the Government that the company could save money. Perhaps it wasn’t the analyst who told his boss to do this, but if the analyst was telling his boss not to do this he never blew the whistle. This creates a problem for our profession, and therefore becomes the heart and soul of our ethical dilemma. This is a typical problem, which is called the whistle blower scenario. Blowing the whistle is a no win scenario and cheating inside the no-win scenario makes matters worst. Even with protections in place blowing the whistle must be considered carefully with both facts and figures.

As with profit, the primary motivator of malfeasance in the commercial sector, crooks may actually desire the "wrong" answer. Let's hope you are not the one with the time managment study showing how to manipulate the machine to make an extra buck. Let's also hope you an not employed by a crook.