P. C.—those aren't his initials—knew office management from A to Izzard. First to arrive in the morning, last to leave at night, he had a tremendous capacity for hard labor. But he never seemed to make a hole in the pile of work on his desk. It grew no smaller fast. Why? Because he never, in all his years of managing, learned to arrange the division of his work. He never learned to deputize it. When his mind should have been free for the more or less important decisions which crop out now and then even in an office manager's life, it was all bound around in the necessity of performing some silly little routine job which any girl of moderate intelligence could have done.
His idea of organizing his job was to try to do everything himself. And within his physical limitations he was a valuable man to the company. But how much more he'd have been worth had he, at some time in his career, acquired the KNACK OF ORGANIZATION!
Don't jump to the conclusion, now, that the successful organizer is one who merely divides up his work and parcels it out among a flock of assistants. Don't think for a moment that it is nothing but deputization.
Effective organization is far more than that.
It is the distribution of work, according to its character or urgency, among the facilities at hand for doing it according to their capacities or cost. And it makes no difference whether those facilities happen to be men, money, or machines—or simply your own available time.
You deputize work when you use an adding machine instead of your head to total last month's sales—when you turn the job of packaging breakfast food over to an automatic machine—when you jot down in your notebook information which would otherwise tax your memory—when you telephone the purchasing agent instead of making your legs take you to his office—when, instead of using your own funds, you do something on borrowed capital.
Deputization may be any one of these just as easily as it may be asking your assistant to find out why So-and-so's order for boys' pants wasn't shipped on time, or making him responsible for working out a new prospect list.
The office manager of a shoe concern found, right after the war, that much of his day was spent telling dealers in Kalamazoo and Keokuk to be patient, please, and they'd get their shoes.
Those were the halcyon days, you'll remember, when salesmen went out twice a year and told their customers how many shoes or ships or sewing machines they could have—and when they could have them.
As a result, this particular shoe factory was loaded to the guards with orders. Orders were shipped when, as and if they struggled from cutting room to fitting room—and from then on down to the packing department.