New Answer

To the overworked question of what-holds-back-defense-production, Alvin Earl Dodd, American Management Association president, last week gave a perspicacious answer. His answer: too many of 1941's executives and workers got their training in the Backward Thirties when the brakes were on initiative, the emphasis on managerial conservatism. But now the loudest cry is for dynamic expansion, more output, more speed. For many a man-at-the-wheel this hairpin turn has been too much; now time is lost while they try to regain the road.

Some Dodd remarks (in his annual report to 4,380 A.M.A. members):

> "We [the managers] have developed many leisurely customs which are not geared to the current situation. . . . Before we can eliminate this handicap, management and labor must acquire a keener sense of the urgency of the rearmament effort."

> "We are short of skilled man power. Many companies during the depression had to drop their training work as 'extra expense.' "

> "In addition to being undermanned, industry was also underequipped. Because of the lean depression years . . . the defense production era of the 1940s found a high degree of obsolescence in American industry."

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