If you are putting up a new office building or re-arranging an old one, try and locate the main file room next to the telegraph office. Or put one over the other so that quick communication can be made by some such device as a chute, dumb waiter, or pneumatic tube. Telegrams received can then be hurried to the file room and related papers attached, when desirable, without taking the valuable time of an official to send to the file room for them. Here is a place for a really rational conservation of official time. The effect of effort should be in proportion to its intelligence and intensity rather than to its amount.
Experts long ago established the fact by time studies, and otherwise, that flat, vertical filing cases are the most efficient and economical. There are a number of satisfactory makes on the market. Like selecting a typewriter, it is largely a matter of personal preferment. The way to beat another man at his own game is first to sit in, play and learn. Gamblers would become extinct if all men lived up to this advice. Most railway officials regard organization as an exception to this precept because, as I said before, nearly every man flatters himself that he is a born organizer. Before you raise the stakes too high in trying to beat another man's game of organization, better first sit in and play it his way.
Do not be afraid to trust outlying offices, like those of your superintendents, to run their own files. Have them inspected as often as may be necessary to insure uniformity and efficiency. Do not forbid their adding numbers as emergencies arise. Assemble these new subjects periodically, say once in six months, for standardization, and amplify the working numbers if necessary. You must allow for differences in the human equation. Some men are strict constructionists, and some are broader. Some men classify under a few subjects, while others subdivide to a greater degree. You know the old story of the man who was indexing and feared that something might be overlooked. So under the caption, "God," he put the cross reference, "See Almighty God." Without a retrospective study of actual performance you cannot well say just how many sub-numbers shall be used in a given office, any more than you can determine in advance how many train orders a certain dispatcher should put out under the standard code. Among the advantages of using a card index for running a file is that by counting the live cards we know the number of subjects in actual use. This is not inconsistent with book numbers, the book then being used as a reference encyclopedia from which subjects are entered on cards as fast as each necessity arises.
Remember that while immutable principles must eventually triumph over local conditions, much depends upon considerate application. The local condition didn't just happen, but had its origin in some reason, good or bad, perhaps once convincing but now outgrown. Sometimes the reason is so vital as to be a principle in itself. In our beloved Southland there are local conditions of society which do not obtain elsewhere in this country. True Southerners thank God that human slavery has been abolished. They are striving earnestly and successfully to adjust conditions created in the birth pangs of a social revolution. Well managed railroads like the Louisville & Nashville adjust their working policies to these basic conditions. Nearly a decade ago Samuel Spencer, as president, felt that the Southern Railway needed an infusion of new operating blood and a rotation of types, both excellent things in themselves, but, as experience showed, easily overdone and carried to an irrational degree. With native talent at hand for the developing he imported to the proud old civilization of his birth some rough and ready brethren of the western prairies. These earnest men and their followers knew how better than they knew why. They were long on art, but short on science. Demoralization and wrecks, attributed to inadequate facilities, cost the road much public confidence, cost the stockholders hundreds of thousands of dollars, and finally, in an awful tragedy, cost the able president his useful and honored life. Fate accorded to outraged sociology and her smaller sister, organization, terrible and undeserved retribution. For, barring this one mistaken policy, Samuel Spencer was an earnest patriot and a constructive railway statesman. As a youth he served in the Confederate army. Through life devotion to his flag was a passion. As a man and a gentleman his character was unblemished, his integrity was stainless. Peace to his ashes. Success to the Southern. Its great traffic strength, actual and potential, rests on the broad foundations laid by Samuel Spencer. Prosperity to the railroads. By constant search for the lessons of human efficiency to be drawn from such experiences as these, they prove their broad claim to scientific management.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER X.
THE LINE AND THE STAFF.
Chicago, June 10, 1911.
My Dear Boy:—You have asked me to tell you something about line and staff. The term line is used to indicate the direct sequence toward the active purpose of the organization. The line officer exercises a direct authority over men and things. He is the incarnation of administrative action. The staff is supplementary to the line as equity is supplementary to law. The staff officer is the playwright. The line officer is the actor. The actor is usually too much absorbed with the technique of his art to write new plays. The line officer, as such, seldom originates new methods, because he is too close to his everyday problems of administration to cultivate perspective. The ideal staff officer has had experience in the line.
The line with a railroad—its fighting force, so to speak—is the operating department. Because they are staff departments the offices of the other three, namely, accounting, traffic, and executive, legal and financial, can close from Saturday noon until Monday morning. The operating department, being the line, keeps the road open and the trains moving. Because of the poverty of our language, we now encounter some difficulties of expression in explaining all the various ramifications of line and staff. A staff department, because of its size, may exercise line functions within its own interior administration. Thus, the auditor organizes his office forces under appropriate chief and subordinate officers who, within the accounting department itself, exercise the authority of line officers. When such accounting officers get outside their legitimate sphere and endeavor to act as line officers in the operating department, expensive friction begins. This feature I shall discuss with you later. Suffice it to say that at present the hardest of all problems is to keep line and staff in economical balance. Staff departments then may within themselves exercise line functions. This grows rather from necessities imposed by size than from inherent nature of function. The first staff officer was an adviser and exercised no authority, except that of polite inquiry, because there was no one whom he could properly command. So the line, the operating department, soon grows so big as to require staff officers within itself, people who have time to think out improvements because they are not burdened with administrative responsibilities.