Great administrators are made by tools, not born with instinct

Evidence

Said Bruère: “There was the constant futile search for the great administrator, great by instinct and personality. He wasn’t found because he doesn’t exist. A great administrator needs the tools and techniques of sound administration.” The search, he said, “should not be so much for good men as for these good tools and techniques; the idea should be not so much to jail the grafters as to install [in government] business systems which will make grafting difficult.” Before government could become humanitarian, he said, it must become businesslike. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 257

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Bureau of Municipal Research’s core doctrine: systems over heroes, tools over graft-jailing.
• XREF: Directly echoes the ‘tools over good men’ institutionalism of the law-merchant economics chapters; systems allow virtue where personality alone cannot. — connects to: Moses believed human personality and judgment could be reduced to exact numbers; Early reform failed because cities lacked administrative tools like budgets — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 256; Scholarly progress is driven by inherited tools, not individual genius — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 25 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Scholarly progress is driven by inherited tools, not individual genius #corroborates (0.85) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 25
• An era’s organizational possibilities, not a thinker’s mind, shape the work #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 108
• Authority is a constructed, analyzable mechanism rather than a natural given #expands (0.75)
• Authority operates as an unexplained representation of complexity, not revealed wisdom #corroborates (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 217