Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER XVIII.
ORGANIZATION OF THE IDEAL RAILROAD.
Spokane, Wash., August 5, 1911.
My Dear Boy:—Someone has asked me how far up and how far down the principles of the unit system and the chief of staff idea can be applied. It is too bad the answer is so easy. Otherwise we might inaugurate a guessing contest and offer prizes. The unit system is applicable to every phase of modern organization. When its principles are better understood, you will see develop in the great financial centers some such important title as vice-chairman, in order that rank and authority may be conferred superior to that of the presidents of the constituent properties. Both the chairman and the president need a senior vice-chairman and a senior vice-president, respectively, to act as chief of staff. The New York Central once had a senior vice-president, W. C. Brown, and the St. Louis & San Francisco created the same position for Carl Gray. When these two able men became presidents, their former positions were discontinued. Puzzle: Find the reason. Answers to be sent to the Puzzle Editor, Louis D. Brandeis, Boston, Mass.
A prominent railway executive, who is also a distinguished bridge engineer, said to me, "You must be patient until railway people can measure this big idea in their own little half bushels. I did not see it clearly until I thought it through in terms with which I am familiar. I reverted to my graphic statics and measured organization as a bridge truss. This showed the chief clerk as a short ordinate between the longest, the head of the unit, and next longest, the official second in rank. We would never design a bridge that way, for the short ordinate in between would break under the strain. You interpose the chief of staff and diminish your strains logically to suit the decreased resisting power. Why don't you show the old telegraph men and the electric people the same idea in terms of things with which they are most familiar? They should see that you can not step down your potential through an undersized transformer."
Railroad administration is usually said to be divided into four real departments, namely: the executive, including legal and financial, the traffic, the operating, including maintenance and construction, and the accounting. Most railroads place each of these departments in charge of a vice-president. I think that this is usually a mistake. Experience has demonstrated the practicability of the same man being a division master mechanic, for example, and at the same time performing some of the broader duties of an assistant superintendent. Likewise an assistant general manager can act as the head of the mechanical bureau in the general office. When we reach so high as to go beyond the heads of real departments we find our old friend, volume of business, and his bastard brother, unbalanced administration, to demand more balance wheels. The unit has become of too large a size for a single governor. If you don't believe this, watch somebody try to transfer a bureau, freight claims, for example, from the department under one vice-president to that of another.
When I incorporate and organize that ideal railroad it will have a president, a senior vice-president and as many other vice-presidents as may be necessary. The vice-presidents will be real assistant presidents, not heads of departments. Each will be an expert graduated from some particular department. Such graduation will depend more upon the man being big enough for a vice-president and possible president than upon the department itself. Since volume of business warrants separation of the financial and the corporate from the legal, and of passenger from freight traffic, I shall have seven departments, under seven general officers, namely, the general inspector (who will also be the comptroller), the secretary, the general treasurer, the general manager, the freight traffic manager, the passenger traffic manager, and the general counsel. Each of the seven departments will have its own office file. All of the vice-presidents will have one consolidated office file in common with the president.
Trusting that these few lines will restrain you for a brief period, which is Boston & Albany for hold you for a while, let us consider the application of the unit system to a humbler sphere, that of roadmaster or track supervisor, who is the head of a highly important sub-unit of maintenance organization. The roadmaster's clerk is usually paid less than a section foreman. As a result such clerk is either a callow youth looking for speedy transfer or an old man married to the job. In the latter case, after one change in roadmasters the clerk probably dominates the office. He puts so much fear of paper work in the minds of the section foreman that few aspire to be roadmasters. Instead of a clerk, why not have an assistant roadmaster, a real understudy, promoted from section foreman at a slight increase in pay and allowances? Get the working atmosphere of the section into the roadmaster's office. Perhaps some of the section foremen are not relatively as stupid as certain superiors who take snap judgment on possible qualifications. Some people deny the necessity for a roadmaster's office. Is it not rather difficult to hold a man responsible without giving him access to first hand records of performance? An assistant superintendent or an assistant general manager can and should come to his own headquarters where there are clerks to furnish him necessary information. A roadmaster away from division headquarters cannot gain such contact without deserting the subdivision for which he is responsible night and day. He cannot well take the section foreman from work to compile statistics.
When the word superintendent is eliminated from all higher titles so that it means the head, and a real head, of an operating division, there will be a bigger return for that item of operating expenses known as "superintendence." If the notion still lingers that operation is merely train movement, and that it is enough for a superintendent to be a high class chief dispatcher, the idea of real management can be driven in by calling the head of a division a "manager." In such case, the title general manager would have a logical meaning. The title district manager would fit the case where subdivision into such territorial units became unavoidable.