“Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster full of enthusiasm for making things run better, just like your friends to-night; dead sure just like them that he has the key; with lots of pep and brains and interest in his job, pushing his way right up from the stenographer’s desk, with his eye on the Manager’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid awake nights, thinking how to improve the organization, partly because he wanted to improve it, partly because he wanted to get the credit for it ... just like your friends again. And because he is a smart young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out a way to increase business, to increase it like a house afire, and to handle it once it was increased.
“He went to the big man of the concern and laid out his plans. Now, you’d better believe the big men in any organization always have a glad hand out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest and brains; and the boy got treated like a king. Sure, he could try out his plan! On a small scale at first, to see how it would work. Let him take a county out of each of six selected states, and concentrate on them. And, sure, yes, indeed, he could have anything in the organization he wanted, to make his try with.
“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball and planned his campaign. I won’t bother you by trying to tell you what it was.... It wouldn’t interest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the business details. It was a mixture of intensive publicity, special attention paid to detail, a follow-up system that meant personal care and personal acquaintance with the tastes of customers, and intimate knowledge of what past orders from customers had been. To get the right kind of assistants he went through the various departments of that big organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best of the publicity men, the smartest of the order-clerks, the brightest of the stenographers. And then they just tore in and ate up the territory they were practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and sowed it with personal service, they reaped, by George, a harvest that would put your eye out! Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a fifty per cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too big for his skin, paraded into the Manager-in-chief’s office with statistics to prove a seventy-five per cent increase over any business ever done there before! Well, that was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the Manager would certainly sit up and take some notice of a system that had accomplished that!”
My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the butt into the fire-place, and sat looking at the embers with a somber expression. I couldn’t see anything to look somber about. Indeed I found myself stifling a yawn. What did I care how much business a mail-order house did or how they did it?
My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see that the story is all about the same general idea you were all discussing this evening? It is about getting things done more intelligently, more efficiently, about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big opportunities, about learning how to scramble over the obstacles that prevent human beings from being intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, at the first take-off, the boy had soared right over those obstacles, hadn’t he? But the Manager-in-chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In fact he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over those very same obstacles. But you can be sure the boy didn’t once think that his chief might be just as anxious as he was to have things done better. Boys never do....” There was a pause, while my cousin considered the embers moodily.
“So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place all foamy with his wonderful statistics, the bald-headed, gray-haired Manager began to come down to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had been done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went into every detail; and the Manager listened hard.
“And then he shook his old bald gray head. He said: ‘Young fellow, you listen to me. It takes sense to run that system of yours. You’re counting on everybody, from you right down to the boy that works your mimeograph, paying attention to what he’s doing, using his brains and using them every minute. If everybody doesn’t, you won’t get your results, will you? Now, consider this, how did you get hold of a staff that would have any brains to use and would use them? You know how! We let you run a fine tooth comb through our whole organization, thousands and thousands of employees. You took out of every department the very best they had; three or four out of hundreds, and they are the only ones out of thousands who amount to anything after years of training at our expense. And then you put your very best licks into it yourself. Now, who are you? You’re the first stenographer we’ve had in ten years, who took enough interest in the business as a whole to have a single idea about it. You tell me something. Suppose we reorganized along your lines, who would I get to run all the other departments and keep up the high-speed efficiency and red-hot ambition you’ve shown, which is the only reason your scheme works? You know as well as I do I can’t find another one, let alone the eighty or ninety I’d have to have, if we tried to do business on your plan. And if I could—supposing for the sake of argument that an angel from Heaven served such department heads to me on a silver platter, where am I going to find staffs to work with them. You’ve got all the really efficient employees we’ve been able to rake in from the whole United States in the past twenty years.
“‘Did you ever have to work with a plain, ordinary six-for-a-quarter stenographer, such as the business colleges turn out, such as you mostly get? You’ve built your machine so that only brains and sense will run it. How long would it take a couple of hundred of such stenogs to smash your system into splinters? Did you ever have to try and get work out of the average dressy young employee who puts ninety-eight and a half per cent of what gray matter he has on his neckties and the bets he made on the horse-races, and the little flier he took on stocks; and one and a half per cent of his brains on his work when somebody higher up is looking at him? How do you suppose you can persuade a crowd of light-weights like that to care a whoop whether Mrs. Arrowsmith in Cohoes, N. Y., is satisfied with the color of the linoleum rug she bought?’”
My cousin looked at me hard, and again answered an unspoken thought of mine. “Are you wondering why hadn’t the boy interrupted long before this, to hold up his end, if he was really so enthusiastic as I’ve said? This is the reason. Though he hadn’t let on to the Manager, he really had had plenty of troubles of his own, already, keeping even his hand-picked crew up to the scratch. Many’s the time he’d been ready to murder them! Drive as hard as he might, he couldn’t keep them steadily up to the standard he’d set for his work. He’d noticed that. Oh, yes, of course, he’d noticed it all right, and he’d been furious about it. But until that minute, he hadn’t thought of it—what it meant; and the minute the Manager spoke, he knew in his bones the old man was right. And he felt things come down with a smash.
“It pretty nearly knocked him silly. He never said a word. And the old bald-head looked at him, and saw that in the last three minutes the boy had grown up ... he’d grown up! That hurts, hurts more than any visit to the dentist. I know how he felt; probably the Manager knew how he felt. Anybody who’s ever tried to get anything done has run his head into that stone wall.