Address, “The Rescue of the Fit”
Mr. Emerson—Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: There is a growing clash between employer and employe. The old order is passing away and the new order has not yet come in. The millions lost in strikes are forever wasted. This direct waste due to supposed conflict of interest is one of the great losses. The other is more serious. Not one man in ten is in the place in the world best fitted for him, not one place in ten is filled by the best man in the world for the job. When the job is not bossed by the right man and when the man is on the wrong job there is a waste whose magnitude is incalculable. It is to mitigate, palliate, obviate, these two great sources of waste that on a large scale a new plan is being put into operation. The theory that underlies it is founded on principles, not on empiricism or on tradition or on rule of thumb.
It is theory that has given us the best designs for steam turbines, gas engines, dynamos, aeroplanes—it is theory that gives us this plan of the Employment Department.
What is the theory?
All manufacturing costs fall under three divisions: Materials, Labor, Equipment Charges.
Materials means all materials, whether for manufacture or operation.
Labor means all personal service or personal charges, whether direct, indirect, supervising or managing.
Equipment charges are made up of taxes, insurance, depreciation and interest on investment.
Although these three classes of expense are so different there are some general economic laws which apply to all of them and it is quite certain that what we have learned to accept as to materials, may have some lessons applicable to personal service and to equipment charges. When our building materials consisted of prairie sod the problem was simple, we picked out the best sod in sight, plowed it up, hauled it to one side and erected it into walls. When the task is to build an automobile the handling of materials is not so simple.
In automobile plants the engineering department designs what is wanted, then draws up specifications, precise and scientific specifications; steel that will test under tension or torsion so many thousand pounds, steel balls, that are so round, so hard, so even in size, bronze, that is so resistant, copper that is so pure, etc.
The purchasing department then calls for tenders or for bids. Samples or specimens are submitted for test and these go into the testing laboratory where they must come up to specifications. The purchasing agent says: How good a wire can you sell me for $0.10 a pound? What will the price be on wire testing 200,000 pounds?
The materials having been tested and bought are put into the storehouse under a competent storekeeper. It is his business to see that they do not spoil, that they are not wasted or stolen. He issues only on requisition, the requisition specifying the proper quality and quantity. When the materials go into use they are continually inspected during the progress of the work.
There is therefore an inspection department. Engineers have learned that it is not the price of materials that counts but the quality. As quality goes up quantity goes down and price goes up but not as fast as quality. Although steel wire is dear and cast iron is cheap, we build bridges out of steel wire. Although we can buy carbon steel for $0.14 a pound, we pay $0.60 a pound for high speed alloy steel because it works faster and so much more powerfully that it would be cheap at $800 a pound if we could not get it for less.
As to complex modern materials we need therefore an engineering department to design and specify, a testing department to test and analyze, a purchasing department to buy at the best price and on the best terms, an inspection department to watch results from day to day, hour to hour; a storekeeping department to hold and to conserve, to issue carefully and economically.
Modern personal service is more complex than modern materials. How can we afford to omit as to personal service any of the safeguards found necessary as to materials? These necessary safeguards we apply through a very highly organized employment department directed and managed by specialists of the higher class and a corps of assistants.
In the employment department all these methods so necessary as to materials, we apply also to personal service control, whether we are securing a factory superintendent or a shoveler of sand. First of all an organization is outlined. It is evident that to perform certain kinds of tasks there is only one best organization. Battleships are a modern development, they have been slowly evolved. America started it when the Confederate Government sheathed the Merrimac with railroad rails and sank all the wooden ships. As the London Times editorially said, “The Merrimac made all the navies of the world obsolete.” Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, have helped develop battleships, but the organization controlling every battleship in the world, whether Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Chilean or American, is substantially the same. An American officer could be transferred to a foreign navy and find himself at once. Naval organizations the world over are interchangeable. The ordinary manufacturing concern has no standardized organization, it has generally grown like Topsy. Positions are ill defined and generally worse manned. The first duty, therefore, of a modern employment department is to outline the organization, the one best organization for the business in hand.
Its second duty is to specify the essential and required qualities for each position.
There are three different ways of filling positions:
1. To have on one’s hands some incubus, a king’s son or a king’s mistress or some political henchman, and to create a position for the incubus to fill, “duke of this” or “countess of that,” or a fat contract on city work. In England this is called “finding a berth for a friend”—a berth—a place in which to fall asleep.
2. The second way, and the more usual one, is to see a real vacancy and to shove a friend into it, hoping he will make it a go. The man and the job stand as good a show of fitting each other as a man would of getting the right clothes by drawing a suit in a raffle. It was Roosevelt who saw a vacancy in the Presidency, grabbed Mr. Taft, shoved him into the place, and now declares he does not fit. Personal liking is not the proper basis for a Presidential preference.
3. The third way to fill a definite vacancy is to find the man fitted for the place, and, after test, put him into it, even as we find a suitable wire for a bridge and put it in.
If we have a locomotive of definite design and we need an exhaust nozzle, there is only one design of nozzle that will answer. So if in the organization there is a position to fill, the best man for that position must have certain qualities and not have others, not every man, not the convenient man in ten, probably not one man in ten thousand is the man for the place. The employment department seeks diligently for the right man, the man who combines experience with aptitude. If it had to choose it would prefer the man without experience but with all the aptitudes to the man of experience without aptitudes. The man with aptitudes can learn quickly, reliably and fast; the man without aptitudes can never be anything but a misfit. Therefore the employment department having secured a number of prospects, carefully tests the most promising.
The old-fashioned plan is to ask a few questions, secure a few recommendations, take a look at the man, and if a hunch is felt that he will do, accept him. I know all about this plan, for I have tried it for twenty years, and in some years it has cost me $50,000. The plan does not work. I received the best set of recommendations I ever saw about a sea captain, and when we entrusted him with a $140,000 steamer he deliberately wrecked her in order to make some graft out of the repair bills.
That the man was a scoundrel was written in large type all over his face, but in those days I could not read plain print and I was better fitted, and that was not at all, to navigate the steamer than to select a captain.
When I taught in college I got an inkling of the right way. I taught German, and at the beginning of the year my classes were filled up with sixty students, and at the end of the year there were only twenty left. I worked on the theory that there was no profit to any one in making a bluff at studying German. It was either worth while or it was not. If worth while, learn German; if not worth while, don’t waste time on it. So I weeded and weeded my German garden until only those were left who could really learn. They learned to know German as well as they knew English. The weeding process was hard on me and hard on the misfits, hard on the good students. I gave an immense amount of rough effort to no purpose in an absolutely useless attempt to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. Then sows’ ears might have made good mince meat, but the carving and slashing I gave them hurt them to no purpose. My time was taken up on rough work until the misfits and the good students failed to receive the specially skilled attention and help their progress required. After a couple of years of this I tried a new plan. It was evident that any students who did not know English, English grammar, English spelling, English pronunciation, were not fit to study German, so I examined all applicants as to English, but I gave those who failed a week’s test, lest some genius should by chance be overlooked. I never found the genius. Under this plan I started out with a class of twenty-five instead of sixty. I gave my time to those who could profitably make use of it, and not to those who could not, and every one of the twenty-five learned German.
A man or woman can be tested in five minutes for fundamental aptitudes and traits of character as easily and reliably as I tested the prospective German pupils. It would take one too far to go into the whole subject of character analysis. A great composer like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, can originate music, but there are thousands who can learn to play it well. So with character analysis. It requires a special and rare gift to uncover the lessons written in the coloring, in the texture, in the shape of head, in the expression of the face, of the body, of the hands, in the clothes, in the personal tricks of habit, to cross-check these tests by others as the answers to test questions, but this knowledge has been so formulated that all can learn. So instead of trying to play bumbly puppy by ourselves, of missing the accumulated researches that have been going on all over the world, of repeating all the mistakes that others have made, we do as the Japanese did when they adopted the British navy, the German army and the American schools as models. We are advised as to our employment department by a specialist of the highest skill in character analysis, in all problems relating to the handling of people. The tests are rapid but they are many and they interlock so far as to be conclusive. A man can lie with his eyes or with his lips or with his body, but no man is skillful enough to lie at the same time with eyes and lips and hands and body.
After men have been tested they are employed, not before, and they are only employed because they have the qualities that fit them for a particular place. They may be at the time only 30 p. c. men, they may be succeeding an 80 p. c. man, but the great fact is that the 30 p. c. man can and will become a 100 p. c. or a 110 p. c. man, while the 80 p. c. man is perhaps in reality an overstrained 70 p. c. man. Starting with the best of human material years are not lost gradually collecting it. Not only are the unfit excluded, but what is very much more important, the fit are rescued, they are given opportunity, they jump at once into the places they can fill instead of waiting for years.
What is the unnecessary cost to a business of a 30 p. c. man compared to a 100 p. c. man?
The hourly costs of a man are: His hourly wage, the hourly machine charge, the hourly overhead charge. These three items will easily average $0.70 an hour in a machine shop. If the man works at full efficiency he gives us in a year 2,700 hours of standard work in 2,700 hours of actual time at a total cost of $1,890. At 30 p. c. efficiency, it will take 9,000 actual hours, costing $6,300 to deliver 2,700 hours of standard work. The added expense due to inefficiency is $4,410 for a single worker.
Efficiency does not mean strenuousness. The fluttering rooster is strenuous, but he makes little progress; the eagle flies efficiently, covering miles of country, yet never moving a wing. The Chinese coolie on his river treadmill is so strenuous that he wears himself out in a few years. As a producer of power he costs $1,300 a year for the horse-power hour you can buy from Niagara for twenty dollars. The chauffeur of an American automobile gliding along at forty miles an hour, carrying six passengers, is efficient, not strenuous.
It is evident that under this modern employment plan the rate of wages per hour ceases to be a critical question. The efficient man, like steel wire and high-speed steel, is always worth more than he would think of asking for his services.
The requisition calls for a man with certain qualities—it never calls for a man at $0.20 or at $0.30 or at any other rate per hour. Fixed rates per hour are obsolescent when one man turns out the work for $6,300 and the other man turns it out for $1,890. For $1,890? No, he does not. We do not ask him to; we can not secure and hold any 100 p. c. man for the wage rate in the $1,890. We pay the man more, we gladly pay him more, we pay him as much as we must to secure him, but he is cheap at almost any price.
The man who receives a salary of $60,000 a year is expected to profit his company to the extent of $6,000,000 a year; the man who works for a dollar a day is always a loss, a severe loss, and, therefore, we try to eliminate him by the substitution of a machine. The fight against a machine is to carry on a losing fight against the whole current of the age. To put the worker in a position for which his aptitudes qualify him is to double, treble his value, and everybody is best fitted for something. A group of children were playing automobile; one was the engine, another the chauffeur, others the passengers. A little tot far behind was hurrying along. What are you doing? I am playing automobile. What part are you? I am the smell. In a watch there is not a useless piece. In a perfected organization there is not a useless man; there cannot be an unqualified man without endangering the whole. As I write, 20,000 mill hands are rioting at Lawrence, Massachusetts, because somebody has blundered, because some position had been badly filled.
The wage question is ethical. The workman is worthy of his hire, but also man does not live by bread alone. The man scientifically selected is 100 per cent. efficient because he likes his work, is fitted for it and it likes him; it is no longer a drudgery, it is a pleasure. We are rescuing the fit for the work which by nature’s right belongs to them and under this plan there are few unfit.
In years gone by when a beef was slaughtered much of the carcass was wasted—the horns, the bones, the hair, the hoofs, the blood, the offal went to waste. Now nothing is wasted; everything has its use, and the offal we return as fertilizer to the soil is of greater perennial use than the tenderloins and sirloins which find their way to the tables of the rich.
We have in the past treated men as if they were coal, a raw product only fit to burn, or as the German soldiers pathetically called themselves, in 1870, mere cannon fodder. But mere coal contains ammonia, beautiful dyes, strange and powerful medicines, as well as heat units.
Everybody is normally good for something, and if fitted to the right place is worth more than he now is.
At Seattle a boy of 17 was excluded from the high school because he could not learn their lists of English kings or American Presidents, but that boy went out and when I met him he had grabbed the evaporative power of the sun and was propelling a boat with it on the waters of Puget Sound. He was fit, more fit in a mechanical way than any other boy I ever knew.
It is to this Rescue of the Fit that I look forward for the great uplift of American industries, the great increase in happiness and the great elimination of strife.
It is being put to a practical test in a plant employing 200 men and it is working.
This is my message to you.
President White—There is nothing further on the program for this afternoon, and we will therefore adjourn until 8:00 o’clock this evening, when Dr. Wallace and Judge Lindsey will speak in Tomlinson Hall.
[SIXTH SESSION.]
The Congress assembled at Tomlinson Hall, at 8:00 o’clock p. m., and was called to order by President White.
President White—The delegates, visitors and citizens of this city have a rare treat in store tonight in the program that has been published, and I have a rare honor in introducing the speakers. It will be a red-letter day in my life, and I know it will be in yours.
I now want to make this audience acquainted with “Uncle Henry” Wallace. I would be glad if everyone could know “Uncle Henry” as I have been fortunate enough to know him. He has been an inspiration to every young man and every farmer and all who have known him in the State of Iowa for the past twenty-five or thirty years. He loves to sit down in his office, or study—and I have been there to see how he works—answering letters that the farmers from all over the country write him, and who look to “Wallace’s Farmer” as a source of profit and information upon every subject that affects the home. He comes close to the home, close to the family, to the fireside, answering all their questions and telling them just how they should do this or that, and all in that fatherly, kindly, brotherly way, so that he is referred to by everyone who knows him as “Uncle Henry.” He is going to talk to us tonight upon “Human Efficiency,” and he will speak from a very practical standpoint, for he has had experience all along the line.
I now take pleasure in introducing to you Dr. Henry Wallace, of Des Moines, Iowa, former President of the National Conservation Congress. (Applause.)