It would sound like heresy, wouldn't it, if we hadn't sat in and watched him begin with his final objective and work back through the means which make the objective possible. Only by careful analysis would he have had courage enough to FOLLOW HIS PLAN THROUGH to its successful conclusion.
And here's the amusing sequel. Today, as he still dabbles at feeding people, he will admit that he's a better ceramic manufacturer as a result of his cafeteria experience. His pottery had always yielded a nice profit. When he sat down with his sheet of coordinate paper and analyzed it, he found his job of management differed not at all in its fundamentals.
His first job he found was "out front" getting more customers in. A better knowledge of markets, a better job of selling, a better product—those were the ways to get the customers in and make them come back for more.
And his need for a better product led him out into the plant where he found that tunnel kilns with exact temperature control would more than treble the production of the old periodic kilns—and would produce better ware.
But that's another story. The important thing, anyway, is not what he found had to be done in the cafeteria and in the pottery, but HOW he found it.
He took his business to pieces—BACKWARDS.
He began with the objective he wanted to get—MONEY. It was a simple matter to find that to get money from the business he had to get customers to come in and spend money; that to get customers to come in he must make his place look like a good place to come to; that to make his place look attractive he must spend money on equipment and thought on the arrangement and display of food.
And there he had his big job cut out for him, with the other jobs following along in natural sequence. It altered the whole METHOD OF MANAGEMENT.
How this METHOD OF MANAGEMENT is applied to your job is shown in the chart which follows. It's a skeleton of what the cafeteria man did.
Indeed, it's more than that. For it shows what every manager—whether he manages a steel mill, a punch-press department or a time-study job—must do if he is to get an honest-to-goodness PERSPECTIVE OF HIS WORK.