Politics & Statistics

Held in Prague 14 years ago at the suggestion of Czechoslovakia's Founder-President Masaryk was the first International Management Congress. Last week, for its seventh get-together, the International Management Congress convened in the U. S. for the first time. Somewhat self-conscious about their messages of international cooperation, all but one of the 2,000 delegates from 21 nations tactfully avoided reference to last week's Czechoslovakian crisis. The one was Robert J. Watt, American Workers' Delegate to the International Labor Office. To avoid further offending visitors, five paragraphs of his speech relating to "Fascistic brutality" were cut out of the printed copies distributed to the press. Czechoslovakia's official representative, wiry little Dr. Emanuel Slechta, limited himself to a deft understatement which brought down the house: "The world is in a great need of better international management."

Self-styled a "forum for interchanging world experience in all phases of management," last week's convention was held in Washington's capacious Chamber of Commerce building, drew a full complement of U. S. tycoons. But what they had to say along the standard themes of U. S. management problems lost the spotlight to the embarrassed remarks of the European representatives. Sample: Lord Leverhulme (soap) of England, retiring president: "The more freedom and smoothness there is in the give & take of goods and services between the countries of the world, the more encouragement there will be to the growth of that right temper between nations which alone can diminish the recurring threats of war."

When Lord Leverhulme departed from Washington the British soap tycoon was supposed to go to Boston for the tenth annual Boston Conference on Distribution. That too had an international theme -- discussion of a world census of distribution -- but with things getting hotter abroad every minute, Lord Leverhulme decided to go home, left his speech to be read to the 400 conferees.

Self-styled a "national forum for problems of distribution," the Boston conference generally produces more concrete discussions than do broader conclaves like the International Management Congress. As a basis for this year's chief topic, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce submitted a history of the U. S. census of distribution of commodities by wholesale and retail merchants. Need for such a statistical breakdown was first felt in 1922. By 1925 a committee headed by Owen D. Young was at work on the idea. First nationwide census was made by the Bureau of the Census for the year 1929, was repeated and improved for 1933 and 1935, producing such figures as the number of retail establishments (1,653,961), banks and other financial institutions (44,101), advertising agencies (1,212).

In Europe, however, a report from the International Chamber of Commerce showed, only Ireland has carried through a similar census, in 1933. Elsewhere statis tics are extremely spotty. Britain has no complete tabulation of its retail establish ments, France of its consumption of tex tiles, Germany of its volume of advertising.

But scarcely had the conference agreed that a drive for a coordinated world census should be pushed when Harvard Business School Professor Malcolm McNair got up to observe: "The spreading of knowledge has made the seesaw of business boom and depression more violent." Rea son, said Professor McNair, is that businessmen now spend much of their time watching what other businessmen are doing, thus accentuating mass action rather than the individual action behind true business enterprise. In this he found a comforting conclusion: "We are in that stage of understanding . . . where a little knowledge has proved to be a dangerous thing."

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