Abstract

The article focuses on analytic thinking and analytic thinkers, recent heroes of U.S. management and of U.S. society. Broad social changes toward humanism have included strongly antianalytic components. Within management itself there seems to be a growing disillusion with what had appeared to be the almost limitless potential of the management scientist. The analytic method, in its computer-assisted form, has been accused of missing immeasurable subtleties, of redefining the real problems into forms that fit the method but miss the point, and of naivete and arrogance in its dealings with human problems of input and implementation. The author has proposed that if one broadens the usual conception of problem solving into at least a tripartite model-problem finding, problem solving, and problem implementing, some of the issues surrounding the analyst in management may be clarified. Improving analytic training and analytic skill have contributed enormously to the problem-solving segment of that three-step process. -