Background:

Why does a 92-year-old aerospace engineer with 69 years worth of experience in the industry become the subject of commentary at a site devoted to rhetoric? Well, for one, he was a founding father of one of the Cold War period's greatest corporations: TRW. He worked with such celebrities as Howard Hughes and James Woolsey. But, more importantly, he shows up here because of his contempt for the bureaucratic form of communication: the Meeting.

The Issue:

He claims to have attended about three to four meetings a day during his work years. He claims that the 40,000 meetings he has attended could more profitably been reduced to 10,000 meetings. He attended meetings that were about attending meetings; he missed meetings that were about missing meetings. He has destroyed trees and used printer's ink to publish another book, his fifteenth, entitled:
_Meetings, Meetings, and More Meetings: Getting Things Done When People Are Involved_(2005). Can he present a case? Certainly. Is it compelling? Not at all.

The Insight:

For Ramo, there is one overarching purpose in work life: productivity. Productivity has to do with things like designing intercontinental ballistic missile and other forms of persuasion. If we reduce meetings then more missiles and other forms of advanced persuasion will make it from the drawing board to the manufacturing cycle. In other words, here is a rhetor who would prefer to make his point at the end of a missile rather than in the small talk around the water cooler.

Observations and comments about Ramo:

Ramo can be seen "brainstorming grandiose ideas" with young executives at lunch.

Ramo never enters into conversation without a definite purpose. "There is little or no small talk even with longtime friends."

As a servant of the Pentagon, he finds DOD officials strangely inarticulate about their needs. "Planning for the nation's defense is more puzzling and more difficult than I have ever seen."

After abandoning the challenges of the violin, he became an expert in electrical engineering, and, then, he became a devotee of tennis: He wrote a book about Machiavelli and tennis.

Judgment: Ramo obviously deserves high marks for his technical brilliance and his capacity to see production as a legitimate sphere of human activity; he earns very low marks for saying such things as "pinch your cheek and thigh frequently in meetings before you doze off." He earns low marks for avoiding controversy: especially controversies about whether there should be a controversy to begin with; very low marks for his understanding of the canon of delivery: "for those who sweat profusely, cover yourself with a lightweight jacket. (You will perspire more, but few will notice.)" Very low marks for comments that suggest his understanding of delivery means affectless presentations: "I never try to be humourous or funny--it just comes out that way." (wink, wink); low marks for preferring destruction by missile system for some zany ideology than cooperation through persuasion; very low marks for putting rhetoric in the service of a corrupt form of ego-gratification and sportsmanship. Overall grade: F

Conclusion: Ramo is what you might call a representative sample of what is so terribly wrong with the United States in particular and with Western culture in general. We forgot about rhetoric. We forgot that people can learn to work together without boring each other. We forgot that having missiles that threaten our very lives for some crack-pot ideology is worse that the worse things that could happen because you paid a sophist for instruction. No, the mild mannered Ramo, "Mr. Serious-I-have better things to do like blowing up the world than learning to make small talk-Ramo" is a complete failure as a rhetor. And that's saying a lot.

MGGreer