“Consider for an instant the overwhelming importance of a title to some railroaders,” says a high officer of one of that group as he sits at his desk. He is one of the men to whom a title is as hollow as a brass cylinder. “I have known a man to almost froth at the mouth because some stupid underling wrote a letter and addressed him as ‘assistant to the general manager’ instead of ‘assistant general manager.’ We have gone title crazy on some of our railroads. Take that overworked word ‘superintendent.’ We have more superintendents on this system to-day than there used to be track hands on a good sized road, and we have what is even worse, a superintendent of motive power, and a superintendent of transportation ranking the division superintendent who is the head of an important subordinate unit, and entitled to respect among the rank and file of our men as such. Under the new plan, the superintendent of transportation together with the superintendent of motive power, as you have already seen, become assistant general managers.
“Right there is an impersonality that is delightful—and efficient; it has proved most efficient in division organization. Out on our —— division we had several washouts simultaneously last year. We sent at once an assistant superintendent to each point of interruption and so we had at each vital place, a man with sufficient brains and authority to use the forces on the ground to the best advantage. Isn’t that good railroading?”
It is good railroading all along the line. It is good railroading to handle as big a question as the reorganization of a system employing a quarter of a million men and women, without writing a whole library of rules and regulations for its enforcement. Ask Major Hine, himself, how he handles that problem.
“Easily enough,” will be his reply to you. “We have a constitution—also unwritten like that splendid old bulwark of English liberties—and any superintendent, any general manager, can make his own rules for his division or his stretch of railroad as long as they will stand the tests of that constitution. And the railroad’s bulwark consists of but three very simple principles:
“The first of these is that no man may sign the name or the initial of another. That is rank feudalism, and out of place in the twentieth century sort of railroading. Our second clause is that there must be at all times an assistant superintendent in charge of the office. Normally, this assistant, in effect chief-of-staff, is the senior or No. 1 on the list. Here again, elasticity is introduced. The unwritten law provides that whatever assistant may be assigned to the office is the senior of the others for the time being. The chief-of-staff reviews the incoming and outgoing correspondence and reduces it to its lowest terms. Each assistant superintendent signs his own communications, but they pass through the focus of the administrative hour-glass on the desk of the watchful chief-of-staff.
“In the third place, correspondence must be addressed impersonally; from below, ‘assistant superintendent,’ from above, ‘superintendent.’ This requirement is based upon the idea that authority, as in the courts, is abstract and impersonal, that the exercise of authority is highly concrete and personal. The court exists if the judge is dead; the court is silent until the judge speaks.”
Already there is noted a greater willingness to take responsibility. More and more is heard about “this division” and “the company” and less and less about “my department.” The mathematical axiom that “the whole is greater than any of its parts” is sometimes violated in corporate administration, because there is no chief-of-staff to balance the specialization of some department head.
This system of playing trumps in the new science of railroads incidentally, but not essentially, provides for rotation in the position of senior assistant or chief-of-staff. Some conservative divisions have not availed themselves of this feature. On one division the superintendent in the first year of the new organization had four of his five assistant superintendents, each occupy the senior chair at headquarters for three months each. Finally, it came the turn of the old master mechanic.
“I am sweating blood,” he said, “but I never knew before how much there is about a railroad.”