WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere—much harder than hoeing in the next row—with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations.