This does not mean that you should surrender your rights or neglect to avail of your opportunities. It simply means that in the game of business, the same rules of sportsmanship should prevail as in a boxing bout, in a match of golf, or a football game.
Play fair and observe the rules. Let the contest be clean, gentlemanly, sportsmanlike, a contest always having regard for the rights of the other man.
Assuming, then, that the personal relation is a vital factor in successful industrial life, but recognizing the impossibility in this day of big business of reproducing it as it existed between employer and employee in the early days of industrial development, how can a like result be brought about, how can personal contact be established?
Granting that it is impossible for the stockholders of a great corporation, because of their number, because of their geographic relations, to come into frequent or even semi-occasional contact with their partners, the employees of a company; and that the situation is much the same with the directors—at least it is possible, and must be made increasingly so, for the leading representatives of the stockholders and directors, namely the officers of a corporation, to have such contact with the employees, special officers being appointed for that purpose alone if necessary. Because of the vast numbers of employees in many a company, even this is difficult and altogether too infrequent to-day.
As the officers of our great corporations come to see more and more that the problem of understanding their employees and being understood by them is a vital problem, one of the most important with which the management is confronted, they will be convinced not only of the wisdom of devoting far more time to such contact, but of the desirability and the advantage to themselves, and to the employees as well as to the company, of such closer relation and intimate conference in regard to matters of common interest and concern.
If we look into our own experience, we find that the misunderstandings which we have had with other men have been largely the result of lack of contact. We have not seen eye to eye.
Men cannot sit around a table together for a few hours or several days perhaps and talk about matters of common interest, with points of view however diverse, with whatever of misunderstanding and distrust, without coming to see that after all there is much of good in the worst of us and not so much of bad in most of us as the rest of us have sometimes assumed.
But someone says, “We grant the desirability of the personal relation in industry. Theoretically we accept your suggestion as to how this theory can be put into practice in the industrial life of to-day, but practically, will it work?”
I can best answer this question by saying that such a program has been put into operation in a certain coal company in Colorado, in which my father and I are interested and of which I am a director.
If you will pardon a personal reference, may I say that when I visited Colorado some eighteen months ago, I had the opportunity of talking personally with hundreds, if not thousands, of the employees of that company. These men and many of the people of Colorado had formed their opinion of anyone bearing the name of Rockefeller from what they had read and heard. Because of certain industrial disturbances which had developed in the State, bitterness and hatred had existed to a high degree.