If you were a dealer, would you buy from a factory that was run by guess and by gob when you could give your business to a concern which you knew was functioning in accordance with a sound, well-formulated plan?
There, if you please, lies the answer.
It is not within the purpose of this chapter, incidentally, to play any favorites. Time must be taken out at this point, therefore, to return to the messenger boy who, when we left him, had just finished analyzing his job.
Let's see now how his plan of action is based upon what the analysis taught him. Let's examine this elementary job of managing, not because it may make better messengers of us, but because the examination will show how universal this thing called management is—because it will afford one more proof of our general axiom that the principles of management are ever the same, no matter what particular paraphernalia of business may be used to cover up its old bones.
Did, then, the messenger boy work out his plan in accordance with our FOUR BASIC ELEMENTS? He did, if he was really managing his job—and from the careful analysis he made, we may assume he was.
If his trip meant riding a street car, then going to the cashier for carfare is his primary force. If he can walk, then the primary force is simply getting under way. Hastening as directly as possible to the car line is applying the force at the easiest place to get results. Perhaps he might have to choose between a slow street car which would carry him right to his destination for seven cents, and a fast elevated which, for a dime, would make better time but leave several blocks to walk at the other end. Deciding between the two is directing the activities along lines of greatest accomplishment. And getting his transfer, leaving the car, and going straight to the address on the message, are nothing more nor less than focusing his activities at the POINT OF ACHIEVEMENT.
You see? The Colonel's lady in her Parisian peignoir and Judy O'Grady in her sleazy slip were sisters under the skin. So, if we may stretch a physiological point, are our messenger boy and the man who made the toys.
The plans of both were built on the same foundation.
Or take the plan by which the new general manager of a tap and die concern rehabilitated his company's business.
"Why," he said, reaching for a pad of paper and roughly sketching something that looked like a funnel and must have been because he said it was, "our manufacturing plan looked about like this. Up here at the top we poured in a lot of orders and hoped to high heaven some of them would finally trickle through at the bottom.