MANAGING, such men will tell you, is putting "pep" and "punch" into your work. Pep and punch were once good words. But their good qualities have been so often extolled that most of us have lost sight of the fact that all the "drive" in the world is so much wasted energy when it isn't directed along the right lines. And when it isn't so directed, it comes pretty close to being the lowest form of human endeavor. Witness the "go-getter" who really doesn't know what it's all about, but often succeeds in covering up a world of defects under a cloak of ill-directed energy.
Other men think they are finding out what needs to be done when actually they aren't even getting close to the root of the matter. With the best intentions in the world, they are grasping at the first straw the wind blows their way. Eureka! they shout when they haven't found it at all, but are merely jumping all the way over the facts to conclusions! Actually to know your business or your job demands ANALYSIS.
You have a right to duck. It's another of those words that work overtime and have suffered as a result. A certain type of superficial business executive has done analysis no good. To him the impressiveness of the word suffices—to the complete exclusion of the simplicity of the act itself. And so analysis to you and you and YOU has come to mean involved, complex research—running around a lot in circles and getting exactly nowhere. Analysis has become for you an A1 example of the phrase-maker's art.
REAL ANALYSIS of any problem in business can, however, be simple—in fact, it can be nothing else but simple.
Analysis, says Noah Webster, is "a resolution of anything, whether an object of the senses or the intellect, into constituent parts or elements; an examination of component parts, separately or in their relation to the whole."
Whooee! all that when he might have said "TAKING TO PIECES." For analysis is literally that—taking a thing to pieces to see what makes the wheels go round. Not, however, with the destructive intent of the small boy who strews his watch all over the floor, but with the avowed purpose of getting right down to the sort of brass tacks which make it possible to see the composition of the whole clearly and plainly.
Analysis which befogs the issue is not analysis at all. It's—in the vernacular—a lot of "hooey."
But the RIGHT KIND OF ANALYSIS "breaks down" the problem into its component parts—without losing sight of each part's relation to the whole. There may be only two parts to a job of managing. The messenger who analyzes his business correctly will find exactly two: where to go and what to do after he gets there—the simplest kind of problem and the simplest type of business analysis. But if the analysis consisted of twenty pieces instead of two, it would be no harder; it would only be longer.
The production manager in the shoe factory analyzed his job correctly when he mapped out the route of an order. All he did was take the manufacturing process to pieces so that he could put the pieces together again to form a more efficient whole.
So whether there are two or twenty or two hundred pieces, the act of ANALYZING—of TAKING TO PIECES—differs only in the amount of territory it covers. Naturally it will be a somewhat more lengthy process to analyze the job of managing a steel mill than to separate a peanut stand and its operation into a few component parts. But the approach is always the same.