Ernest Graves
My idea, which took more effort, was to say, "How much money have you got?" If you
have a certain amount of money, how many salaries will this pay? That will determine
your manpower. If there isn't enough manpower to spend the money, then what
percentage of the effort will you contract? We had a lot of argument about that in the
study program, because there was more money than there were people. So we had to
work out the percentage of the effort that would be contracted.
The districts in the North Central Division had never made this type of plan. They
would just start paying salaries at the beginning of the year, and then at the end of the
year, the money wouldn't be spent. When you went back to Congress with these huge
carryovers, Congress would be very upset. Why, if we have appropriated all this money,
do you still have so much left at the end of the year?
Well, it was very simple. They hadn't made a plan to spend the money. So we spent a
lot of time on this, not so much my telling them how many men to use, but my insisting
that they make plans.
If you talked to my district engineers, they would probably tell you that, unlike my
description of giving them the ball, I was forever telling them what to do. True in this
sense: I was forever trying to teach them how to manage their affairs. But I didn't get
into many of the substantive choices. When I became the Director of Civil Works, I
tried to do the same thing Corpswide. For two years, I visited every division and made
the division engineers tell me how they were going to spend their money.
My concept was that if they made plans, they would spend it, and they would get the
work done. If they did not make plans, they would not spend the money, and they
would not get the work done. I think that panned out. However, it was hard work. The
allocation of personnel had not been based on such rigorous analysis before. It was hard
to generate and sustain interest in doing it this way. We weren't using computers the
way we do now. The spreadsheets were prepared with calculators and typewriters.
Q:
You don't usually have a three-year assignment.
A:
Only twice: as North Central division engineer and finally as Director of the Defense
Security Assistance Agency.
Q:
And so you really don't always, or most of the time, have the luxury of a long learning
period, do you?
A:
What has happened in my case is that I never got that third year of production. I had
the first year of learning, and I had the second year of bringing about changes. But I
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