The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him twice as much wages.
Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well—twice as much work.
If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do three times as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it seems big.
The little man becomes a big man.
From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.
The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world.
Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at least, in the great managers of employers?
You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven. Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each other's arms. They dance between their machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work. You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats with flushed and glowing cheeks.
Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?