"De Camp, L Sprague - The Care and Feeding of Mad Scientists" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

And thereupon he rolled up his eyes and withdrew his soul once again into the Nirvana of the higher mathematical physics.
The scientific administrator's lot is a pretty exacting one. He has to go as far as he can to give his scientists optimum working conditions, but he can seldom go so far as they would like. They would like laboratories stocked with unlimited equipment which they could simply pick up in the stock room and walk off with, without even signing a receipt, and a minimum of supervision and reports. Then the administrator would not know what was going on, and when Congress or the Front Office or the Faculty Committee came around to ask what his geniuses were doing to justify their expense he would have a tough time answering  which would not be good for next year's appropriation.
Or he might find that one of his bright boys had gone off into some line of work that happens to fascinate the scientist but that has nothing to do with the overall objectives of the organization.
On this last point, a tot of trouble would be saved if the administrator would make it quite clear to the scientist when he hires him, just what is expected of him. If the man is employed to do dull routine tests on hydraulic valves he should be made to understand that fact clearly, and if he doesn't wish to test hydraulic valves he does not have to take the job. But if the scope of the job is not made clear the scientist may get a bright idea for an improvement in rotameters and neglect the valves for his wonderful new discovery. And then trouble pops and the administrator is caught in the middle between the outrage of the scientist who is insulted by the lack of appreciation of his genius and the equal outrage of the man who is paying to have valves tested and expects just that.
Another thing the administrator has to watch out for is overorganization, a disease that flourishes in large organizations in general and governmental departments in particular. We all know something about the general principles of organization; authority must be congruent with responsibility, fields of authority must be sharply demarcated, objectives must be clearly stated, and so on. And we know something about line versus staff organization and organization charts.
Now, there are people who love those little charts with their lines and boxes as a pig loves mud. If given a free hand they will think up so marry interlocking relationships and lines of authority and committees, and ordain so many committee meetings and consultations and memoranda in octuplicate, that the organization will be paralyzed by sheer complexity. No organization will work very well if it is so complicated that even those running it can't understand it.
To give an example, during the late war I once had charge of the War Production Committee of the Naval Air Material Center in Philadelphia. This was the governmental equivalent of a labor-management committee in private industry, and was supposed to process suggestions for increasing production. Somebody in Washington set up the most elaborate scheme you ever saw, according to which several hundred people in the shops and laboratories were to be organized into five levels of committees. The shops elected the first set of committeemen, who in turn elected the second from among their number, and so on.
As this was too complicated to be workable we simplified it to a mere four levels and went ahead. We had three hundred sixty committeemen working about one hundred fifteen hours a week on WPC work, plus five fulltime employees  including Lt.Comdr. de Camp - and three parttime officials spending another two hundred fifty hours a week on this activity. And most of the "work" was sheer waste motion. The useful part of it could have been done by a mere handful of people spending a fraction of the time, while the rest actually produced instead of talking about production. [footnote: I am happy to say that some months before the end of the war, the admiral and I agreed to abolish the whole monstrosity, and I was allowed to go back to gadgeteering.]
Overorganization is especially pernicious in dealing with scientists, who mostly like to work by themselves and who to some extent became scientists so that they could do so.
And speaking of line and staff organization, there are two ways of handling the minimum routine work and papershuffling that must be done. One is to divide it or rotate it among the scientists, so that each gets his fair share of drudgery. The other, which is better if the organization is big enough to afford it, is to setup service departments to handle such matters. A scientist is not normally expected to clean the floor under his desk; you hire a janitor for that. By the same token you can take much routine letter-writing; materialordering, and the like off his shoulders by providing expert help.
On the other hand he will probably have to do a certain disagreeable minimum of drudgery no matter how he hates it and no matter how wellorganized the laboratory is. For instance, he will have to write his own progress reports, or at least dictate them, because nobody else knows enough about his particular work to do so intelligently. And if you don't make him turn in progress reports, he may die on you, leaving a mass of mysterious wires and tubes whose meaning nobody knows.
Even a "pure" scientist, relieved as far as possible of administrative and routine tasks, will have to learn something of administration in order to manage his assistants. True, some very special scientists like mathematicians work without assistants - without any equipment save a pencil and paper and some reference books.
But most laboratory scientists as they rise in their field are given bigger projects that require the help of extra hands and brains. A young scientist may start out all right until he reaches the point of having six or eight assistants. Then he runs into trouble because he has to get along with one technician who is a chronic loafer, another with a sneeringdisagreeable personality, another who steals laboratory equipment to sell, and so on. Then, despite his lofty boasts of neither knowing nor caring about the black art of human relations, he has to learn it or else.
So much for laboratory scientists. There remains the matter of scientific expeditions. Here you need not worry much about paper work and overorganization, because the ordinary expedition is too small. It may comprise anywhere from one person to a few score; expeditions whose personnel runs into three or four figures, like the Navy's recent reconnaissances to the Antarctic, are very exceptional. And a few score people is still small compared to the six hundredodd researchers of General Motors Research, or du Pont with more than eighteen hundred scientists and an even larger number of technicians.
Expeditions, however, have their own peculiar troubles  troubles not often brought out in the stories. The bigger the expedition and the more remote and rugged the place it is going, the more acute the difficulties will be. These troubles are personality conflicts, and any expedition of more than a halfdozen members is likely to have them.
For one thing exploring attracts not the prosaic, steady, average type of person, but the aggressive and unconventional individualist. When you crowd a lot of people of this type, of varied backgrounds, together for long periods, suffering from equatorial heat or polar cold, tempers get short and personalities grate. Faults of character that would be overlooked in civilization show up with glaring distinctness. Moreover if the conditions are to be rugged, the leader must pick comparatively young persons to stand the hardships, and being young they have not developed the selfcontrol and tolerance that might enable an older group to get along.
A candid account of many expeditions would reveal a distressing story of feuds, hatreds, mutiny, and outbursts of temper. The leader of such an expedition is in a difficult position. When a man turns out to be no good after it is too late to send him home, he can't simply shoot the twerp. All he can do is relieve him of all duties connected with the expedition. And then he has the character underfoot for months, sulking, intriguing and plotting absurd revenges.
But when the explorers get home they feel ashamed of having acted in such a childish manner. Hence in writing up their experiences  or, more usually, having a ghost do it for them  they tend to gloss over their personality troubles, and so most written accounts of expeditions give a deceptive effect of sweetness and light.
One of the most famous American expeditions of the last thirty years operated in a far country for several successive years, and one year the scientists actually threatened to strike if two of their number were not excluded from further participation. These two, while pleasant enough ordinarily  I met both of them  became hogs when the supply and variety of foods was restricted. Thus when the jelly was passed at dinner one of them would take all of it. Another member almost caused a massacre because he ribbed and kidded a young native government official attached to the expedition, until the young man left in a fury and reported to his government that the group was really a secret military expedition.
However, from what I have been able to gather, most of the personalitytroubles are caused, not by the scientists, but by the other personnel: aviators, mechanics, photographers, and so on. Scientists are by and large fairly easy to get along with if you don't expect too much of them. Their general tendency is to concentrate on their own recondite researches and to pay little attention to each other and none at all to other human beings.
All these troubles are compounded when an expedition is mixed as to sex, for after a few months in the jungle or on the Greenland ice cap even the average lady scientist looks good. More than one such mixed expedition has come home tearing its collective hair trying to figure out how to effect assorted trades of husbands and wives. When one mixed expedition was sent out some years ago, the people who managed it seriously considered sending the men across the ocean in one ship and the women in the other, to defer as long as possible the evil day when sex would rear its beautiful head.
If an expedition must be mixed, it probably works best when it is small and consists entirely of married couples. If the director brings his wife but does not let anybody else bring his, you have a source of friction. And if you mix married couples, single people of both sexes, and married people without their mates, you are asking for trouble.
But anybody who tries to manage people or activities for any purpose is asking for trouble, which is no adequate reason for giving up a worthwhile project. A successful expedition or laboratory is not one that has no personality or administrative troubles, but one that achieves its objectives in spite of them.

THE END