Complaints were numerous. They weren't exactly complaints, either. Queries, rather. Where are my shoes? Can't you ship March 15 instead of April 1? And so on—until, as we started to say, the sales manager was spending a great part of his time dictating replies to his stenographer. And she didn't have time for any of her other duties.
Analysis proved that the letters were, in the main, of three types. Three letters were therefore prepared, and each day the sales manager went through the inquiries and indicated which letter should go to which customer. In that way the latter got a prompt and courteous reply, as well as certain vague information explaining why he'd have to wait another month for his shoes.
And he was moderately happy. Personal attention from the sales manager could have accomplished no more. Thus a certain part of an executive's and his stenographer's time was deputized to a system.
Could the sales manager have gone a step further and had his letter mimeographed, he would have been DEPUTIZING TO A MACHINE the same amount of his own and a much larger part of the stenographer's time. But, while the customers accepted plausible excuses in place of shoes, it is doubtful whether the cleverest imitation would have taken the place of a real typewritten letter.
With the manufacturer of a proprietary medicine, however, things are different. Women from every part of the country write in describing their ailments. It is not difficult to classify these letters into a dozen groups. And form letters, done in skillful imitation of real typing, do the trick quite nicely.
That is DEPUTIZING—just as it is DEPUTIZING when the "big boss" calls in his assistant and says: "You run this shebang from now on. I've got to see if I can't get the K. C. plant out of the red."
And it's DEPUTIZING when a manufacturer, forced to increase the size of his plant, goes to a real estate operator and gets him to buy a piece of land, put up a building and rent it to him at a certain figure, while he uses his own capital to equip and operate the new plant, because he can make 15 per cent, say, on his capital himself, whereas he has to pay out as rent only an amount equal to 8 per cent of what land, building, insurance, and so on, would tie up.
Fundamentally, then, DEPUTIZING is taking something away from the "principal" of the job or business and assigning it to a "deputy." Principal and deputy may be a manager and his stenographer, a department head and a filing system, or a corporation's capital and a bond issue.
The first stumbling step toward organization, therefore, is to RECOGNIZE and DEFINE the PRINCIPAL and the DEPUTIES in a given task.
A good manager, though, can't simply go and deputize every detail of his job. That might be nothing more than the trick of a lazy man.