Decisions based on numbers were viewed as scientific, since numbers were thought to imply objectivity and accuracy.18 Management theorists and gurus who dispensed this new wisdom ascended to the office once ascribed by Shelley to poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”19 Before that, “expertise” meant the career-long accumulation of knowledge of a specific field, as one progressed from rung to rung within the same institution or business—accumulating what economists call “task-specific know-how.” Auto executives were “car guys”—men who had spent much of their professional life in
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