"Who, for instance?"
"Well, there"s Edison."
"Yes; and while you were having a good time with the boys, wearing good clothes, and enjoying the comforts of life, Edison was working and studying, wearing shabby clothes and patched shoes, so that he might buy books. What right have you to say that Edison has a better head, naturally, than you until you have done what Edison did to develop his?"
"Well, if you put it that way--none, I guess."
"Then you might have been an Edison if you had sacrificed, worked, and studied as Edison did?"
"Perhaps."
"Then where does the "hard luck" come in? While you were having a good time, Edison was having a hard time. Isn"t that so?"
"Yes, and now Edison is on Easy Street and I am headed for the Bay. I see your point, Mr. Socratic. I guess it isn"t luck, after all. It"s my fault.
But knowing that won"t make it any easier for me when I get canned."
"What"s the use crossing the bridge before you get to it? I read the other day of a man who studied law, was admitted to the bar, and made money on it, all after he was seventy years old."
"Think there"s any chance for me? Can I learn anything at my age?"
"You learned something just now, didn"t you?" asked Socratic.
"Yes, I guess I did."
"Well, if you can learn one thing, you can learn a hundred, can"t you?"
"Guess so."
"Will you?"
"I sure will."
If you are a worker and not a shirker--if you are a lifter and not a leaner--if you have done your best to succeed in your present vocation, and are still dissatisfied, and feel that you could do better in some other line of work, we hope that this book has been of some a.s.sistance to you in determining your new line.
If, however, you have never attempted your best--if you have never worked your hardest--if you have grown weary, and laid down your burden in the face of difficulties and obstacles--if you have neglected your education, your training, your preparation for success, then, before you make a change, before you seek vocational counsel, do your best to make good where you are. It may be the one vocation in which you can succeed.
PART TWO
a.n.a.lYZING CHARACTER IN SELECTION OF EMPLOYEES
CHAPTER I
THE COST OF UNSCIENTIFIC SELECTION
People used to thank G.o.d for their sickness and pain--at the same time naively praying Him to take back His gift. This inconsistency was due to a combination of ignorance and the good old human foible of blaming some one else. Folks did not know then, as well as they do now, that they had the stomachache because they were too fond of rich dainties. The cause of the pain being mysterious, they went back to first principles and blamed (or thanked) G.o.d for it. They believed that G.o.d afflicted them for their good and His glory, but their belief was hardly practical enough to keep them from praying Him not to do them too much good or Himself too much glory.
Bodily ills are no different from our other troubles. In case of doubt as to their origin, it is far more convenient to blame some supernatural source for them than to take the blame upon ourselves. In support of this, take the att.i.tude of employers toward strikes and lockouts, their most outbreaking and violent troubles. These are named in all of our contracts along with lightning, tornadoes, floods, and other "acts of G.o.d," if not directly, at least by inference It is plain enough, at any rate, that those who draw up the contract consider strikes and lockouts as wholly outside of their control, as they do the elements. It is the same old ignorance, the same desire to shift the blame.
WHO IS TO BLAME?
Modern business common sense counts strikes and lockouts among preventable industrial diseases, just as the modern science of medicine cla.s.ses smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, the plague, tuberculosis, and the hookworm amongst preventable bodily diseases. The strike is a violent eruption, according to those who have made the closest study of the situation, resulting from long-continued abuses of bad management, bad selection, bad a.s.signment of duties, and other vicious or ignorant practices. So a fever is a kind of physical house cleaning for the removal of debris of months or even years of foolish living.
But persistent violation of the laws of health does not always lead to acute disease. Seated in the office of a prominent and successful physician in a Western city one day, we were discussing with him the true nature of disease. "My patients," said he, "many of them are now lying on beds of pain, burning with fever. They are called sick people. The folks walking along the street out there are called well people. The terms are inaccurate. Fever is the effort of nature to throw off poisons, poisons which have been acc.u.mulating in the system for years as the result of wrong ways of living. Many people suppose that fevers are caused by germs.
This is not true. No germ can harm or disturb a healthy body. It is only when the body is depleted in vitality that its defenses come down and germs find a ready soil in which to propagate. People who have fevers, therefore, are only taking a violent manner of getting well, and, if wisely treated and intelligently nursed, they do get well. As you know, it is a very common experience for a person to feel far better after recovery from a spell of sickness than he has for years previously. Now, nine out of ten of the people going along the street who call themselves well are not well. The majority of them are probably only 25 per cent, efficient physically. They are loaded up with the debilitating consequences of their own recklessness or ignorant manner of living."
A PROLIFIC CAUSE OF INEFFICIENCY
In the same way, there are latent illnesses and inefficiencies in many commercial organizations which never reach the point of strikes and lockouts. For some reason or other that lively germ, the walking delegate, fails to get a foothold. Perhaps there would be a beneficial house cleaning if he did. Discontent, dissatisfaction, unrest, and constant changes in personnel load the body up with wastes, inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses. Any employer who thinks at all, and who has any basis for judgment as a result of observation, knows that what he desires to purchase, when he pays wages, is not a prescribed number of days and hours, is not a standard number of foot pounds of physical energy, but rather human intelligence and human willingness and enthusiasm in the use of that intelligence in his service. It is true that most employees do a certain amount of physical work, but it is also true that the value of that work depends entirely upon the amount of intelligence and good will the employee puts into it. The employee who is doing work for which he is not fitted and is unhappy and discontented is doubly inefficient. He is inefficient because he is not well fitted for the work and could not do his best even if he were perfectly satisfied and happy. And he is inefficient because he is in a bad psychical state. With his mental att.i.tude, he could not do good work even if he were in the place for which he was best fitted.
Efficiency experts maintain that the average employee in our industrial and commercial inst.i.tutions is only from twenty-five to thirty-five per cent, efficient. Sixty-five to seventy-five per cent, loss in productive power on the part of the forty million workers in this country const.i.tutes an almost incalculable sum.
Who is to blame for this loss? Are we not too intelligent, too well versed in the laws of cause and effect and too courageous to try to blame the Almighty for it or to lay it to the public schools or to hold the employee accountable? As a matter of fact, no matter how we may try to shift the blame, those of us who are executives know only too well that our board of directors and stockholders hold us strictly responsible for results. What they want is dividends, not excuses. They do not care to hear how hard it is to find good men. They are not interested in the stories of employees who are so ungrateful as to leave just when they have become most useful.
They will not permit you to shift any of the blame upon the shoulders of the employee. They expect you to use methods in selecting and a.s.signing employees and handling them after they are selected that will yield the largest possible permanent results.
HIGH COST OF HIRING AND FIRING
Employers who will take the trouble to study their records for some years past, will, unless they are very exceptional, find that the average length of service in their organization is much shorter than they would be prepared to believe unless the actual figures were before them. We have the word of its manager in regard to a certain foundry in the Middle West that the average period of employment for any one man in that foundry is only 30 days. We know a large steel mill employing 8,000 where the average length of service per employee is a few days more than four months. These figures were given to us by the employment manager of the mill. The head of the employment department of a large electrical manufacturing company stated to us that the average length of service per employee for his organization was one year or a little less.
From "Current Affairs," Boston, we quote the following significant editorial:
"Do employers realize the waste and extravagance and actual money loss due to haphazard hiring and firing?
"Twelve typical factories were recently investigated as to their employment records by Mr. M.W. Alexander. He chose the normal industrial year of 1912. He chose representative factories, big and little, in several States. The results of this inquiry were reported in an address before the National a.s.sociation of Manufacturers.
"Mr. Alexander found that this group of factories had 37,274 employees at the beginning of 1912, and 43,971 at the end of the year--a net increase of 6,697 workers. But the books showed that the factories had actually hired 43,571 new hands, 35,874 having been dropped during the year Of course, not all were fired. Some were absent because of sickness, some died, some left voluntarily; but these were only a small proportion. And the fact remains that in order to increase their working force by 6,697 these twelve industries had to break in 42,571 new employees and suffer the consequent extra expense of instruction cost, reduced production, and beginners" spoiled work. Making liberal discounts for the workers unavoidably withdrawn, it is estimated that these twelve factories suffered a definite money loss of more than $831,000 during the year on account of reckless hiring and firing.
"The conclusion seems justified: "The highest grade of judgment in the hiring and discharging of employees is needed. The employment "clerk" of to-day will have to be replaced by the employment "superintendent" of to-morrow, not merely by changing the t.i.tle and salary of the inc.u.mbent of the office, but by placing in charge of this important branch of management a man whose character, breadth of view, and capacity eminently qualify him for the discharge of these duties.""
It is probable that most executives and employers do not know because they have not fully considered what this rapid ratio of change costs. This cost, of course, varies over a very wide range, according to the kind of work to be done and the cla.s.s of employees. The sales manager of one organization told us that it cost his concern $3,000 to find, employ, train, and break-in to his work a new salesman. The employment manager of one of the largest corporations in the world in-forms us that it costs him $10,000 in actual money to replace the head of a department. The employment manager of a large factory employing people whose wages ran from $5 a week up, told us that the records of his department showed that it cost $70 to get the name of a departing employee off the payroll and to subst.i.tute thereon the name of a new permanent employee to take his place.
But these are only costs that can be computed. There are other costs perhaps even greater, records of which never reach the accounting department or the employment department. Let us tell you a story:
A COMMONPLACE STORY
Joe Lathrop, foreman of the finishing room, had a bad headache. It had been along toward the cool, clear dawn of that very morning when, having tearfully a.s.sured Mrs. Lathrop for the twentieth time that he had taken but "one li"l" drink," he sobbed himself to sleep. His ears still range disconcertingly with the stinging echoes of his wife"s all-too-frank and truthful portrayal of his character, disposition, parentage, and future prospects. His heart was still swollen and painful with the many things he would like to have said in reply had he not been deterred by valor"s better part. It was a relief to him, therefore, to take advantage of his monarchical prerogatives in the finishing department and give vent to his hot and acrid feelings.
With all his flaying irony and blundering invective, however, Joe Lathrop never for a moment lost sight of the fact that there were some men upon the finishing floor whom it was far better for him to let alone. With all his truculence, he was too good a politician to lay his tongue to the man tagged with an invisible, but none the less protective, tag of a man higher up. And so Joe Lathrop let loose his vials of wrath upon those whose continuance upon the payroll depended upon merit alone. One of these was Robinson.
HATED FOR HIS EFFICIENCY
Robinson had been finishing piano frames upon this floor for twenty months. He was a young married man, in good health, ambitious, faithful, loyal, skilful, and efficient. He was a man who worked far more with his brains than with his hands. He understood the principles of piano construction, and was, therefore, no rule-of-thumb man. He had studied his work and, as a result, had continually increased both its quant.i.ty and quality Robinson was not self-a.s.sertive, perhaps a little taciturn, but there was something about him which made people respect him. Over the dinner pails at noon there had been many a conjecture on the part of Robinson"s fellow-workers that he was in line for promotion and that he might be made a.s.sistant foreman at any time.