The Big Pie
In "King Henry VI, Part II,"
Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow antiestablishment
rabblerousers, "The first thing we do,
let's kill all the lawyers." That
action may be extreme but a similar
sentiment was expressed by Thomas K.
Connellan, president of The Management
Group, Inc. Speaking to business
executives in Chicago and quoted in
Automotive News, Connellan attributed a
measure of America's falling
productivity to an excess of attorneys
and accountants, and a dearth of
production experts. Lawyers and
accountants "do not make the economic
pie any bigger; they only figure out
how the pie gets divided. Neither
profession provides any added value to
product." According to Connellan, the
highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per
100,000 population. The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants. This
suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
piebakers and piedividers is way out
of whack." Could Dick Butcher have been
an efficiency expert? Motor Trend,
May 1983