TEAM PLAYERS.(The Talk of the Town)(US military policy and the intelligence community)

James Surowiecki talks about intelligence agencies and managing secrecy

Amid the contentiousness and acrimony of the debate over September 11th and the war in Iraq, the one thing that almost everyone seems to agree on is that the American intelligence community is a mess. We have fifteen agencies responsible for gathering and analyzing intelligence, and they are not exactly a band of brothers. On a good day, they duplicate each other's efforts, leaving important work undone. On a bad day, they hoard information and undermine their cohorts, seeming at times more preoccupied with reputations, budgets, and internal power struggles than with the nation's security.

The intelligence community owes its failings to a history of bureaucratic turf wars, occupational secrecy, and sibling rivalry--a kind of dysfunction that seems typical of the public sector. But its chaotic structure resembles something else: the ideal corporation, as envisioned by management gurus in the nineties, when tight-knit, top-down organizations bound together by a common purpose fell out of fashion. Bandying coinages like "intrapreneurship" and "Darwinian revolution," they argued that people in a corporation should compete as hard against each other as they do against other companies. Businesses were encouraged to "bring the market inside"--to foster internal competition, independence, and decentralization. May the strongest division win; let the weaker ones improve or die. A favorite maxim was "Eat what you kill"--a sort of Ted Nugent gloss on Tom Peters. The Swiss giant A.B.B., a confederation of thousands of small competing companies, was hailed as the "organizational form" of the future. Enron's survival-of-the-fittest model--in which divisions openly worked at cross-purposes--attracted wide acclaim as well. Internal competition is, of course, inevitable. But, where previously it had been seen as something to be counteracted or, at least, carefully managed, in the new world it was to be stirred up and cheered along.

In the economy as a whole, competition generates innovation and creates wealth. We pit companies against each other, and trust that the strongest will prosper and that society will benefit. The pied pipers of the nineties believed that what worked in the world should work on the job, too. To be sure, there were sound ideas buried in the buzzwords. Decentralization is often good: it encourages people to specialize, and it gives them more say in solving the problems they're most familiar with. Independence encourages responsibility. And competition can be a useful prod for making people work and think harder.

But there are some things that people can do better together than they can apart. Companies, in theory, anyway, are a way to make it easier for people to cooperate, to share information, to learn from each other, and to coordinate their efforts. They can also help to mitigate what the economist Ronald Coase famously called "transaction ...