"I watched him. Things were in a bad way, you see, and getting no better fast. He did nothing much for several days but read his mail. Sat around his office. Didn't make a move to boss anyone. Stuck his nose in here and there to find out what this clerk or that clerk was up to.
"But no action. No tearing his shirt. No nothing. And the complaints were coming in with every mail. They never fazed him. One day I ran across him up in the fitting room. Another time I bumped into him he was picking lasts out of the bins. Again I saw him pushing empty racks into the heeling room elevator.
"Apparently I had picked another lemon. Looked like the best thing he did was sit around and tap his teeth with a pencil.
"He fooled me, though. One afternoon he dropped into my office with a map. He'd drawn it between taps. It was a good map with dotted lines to show just exactly what happened to an order—any order—every order. That map showed when it went into the works, where it went from there. And so on until it went out the shipping room door. That's what he'd been up to the day I saw him picking out lasts. And I tell you I never had any idea how many things could happen to an order. I never realized how shoes halted and stumbled and staggered around that factory of ours.
"There were red lines, too. They showed the changes he proposed making. Here he would stop backtracking. Here was unnecessary travel. Here was an old bottle neck and here was how he was going to crack it open. And look at those lasts lying idle with shoes upstairs waiting to be made on them!
"That wasn't half. It was actually taking four days to get orders through the office routine. He showed me how certain necessary records that took time to make could be made after the shoes were in work. Other short cuts would wipe whole days off our schedules.
"There was nothing to it—when you saw it in red ink. In fact there's nothing half so convincing as red ink. There's been none on our books for the past five years—and during that time the shoe business has been no bed of roses.
"What he proposed was simple as pie—if only someone had stopped to think. We'd simply got into bad habits. We were handling the work the same way we'd handled it back in the days when grandfather started the business. And this fellow had been smart enough to wait and wonder why. Not wonder why either. He went and found out how come.
"In thirty days we were back on earth. We were getting shoes out on time—many many days sooner than we'd even been able to before. And all because a smart young man, who didn't know a thing about shoes but a whole lot about managing, sat and tapped his teeth and drew a few pictures.—All because he had been in no hurry to act until he had found out just what had to be done."
It is so easy to jump to conclusions! If you look about a bit, you will see plenty of men who don't stop to find out what needs to be done before they start trying to do it. They're like the shortstop who hurries his play and tries to throw the runner out at first before he really gets his hands on the ball. An error is more often than not the result.