[The Navy as a Fighting Machine by Bradley A. Fiske]@TWC D-Link bookThe Navy as a Fighting Machine CHAPTER VIII 8/33
For this reason, _the higher one is in position, the more imperative it is that he understand all elements involved, and estimate properly their various weights_.
The success or non-success of a man in high authority depends largely on how his sense of proportion leads him to allot his time. But a matter fully as important as the allotment of time and attention to the consideration of various matters by the various members of the personnel is the allotment of money for the various items, especially of the material; for, after all, every navy department or admiralty must arrange its demands for ships, guns, men, etc., with reference to the total amount of money which the nation will allot.
For this purpose, only one good means of solution has thus far been devised--the game-board. The game-board, naturally, tries out only the units that maneuver on the ocean; it does not try out the mechanism inside those units, because they can be tried out best by engineering methods.
The province of the game-board is merely to try out on a very small scale, under proper conventions or agreements, things that could not be tried out otherwise, except at great expense, and very slowly; to afford a medium, half-way between actual trials with big ships and mere unaided reasoning, for arriving at correct conclusions. When the game-board is not used, people conferring on naval problems can do so only by forming pictures in their own minds, endeavoring to describe those pictures to the others (in which endeavor they rarely perfectly succeed) while at the same time, trying to see the pictures that are in the minds of the others--and then comparing all the pictures.
The difficulty of doing this is shown by a little paragraph in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," in which Dr. Holmes points out that when John and Thomas are talking, there are really six persons present--the real John, the person John thinks himself to be, the person Thomas thinks him to be, the real Thomas, the person Thomas thinks himself to be, and the person John thinks him to be.
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