“When I gave you that job I was following out a plan that has proven successful in many cases as shown by magazine articles. I thought you would make a good Sales Manager because you knew nothing about Selling, just as the best organizers of Business Men’s Associations are Kendallville Professors who know nothing about Business, and the best writers of Efficiency Stuff are men who file their correspondence on a hook, and the most dazzling Shop Management Talksters those who heave a wheelbarrow over a fence and never see the gate.
“I now see that I was not only Dead Wrong but absolutely bughouse. I might as well expect to get a good hair-cut by a piano-tuner or boxing-lessons from a Tea Tenor, as to get a good Sales Manager out of any man who gets off a train head-first and doesn’t know a Sample Case from a schmeerkase.
“In twelve long, lanky months you haven’t yet got the lie of the 2nd hole on the Selling Course, and I have a sneaky suspicion that you wouldn’t get around the first Nine in ninety years.
“You couldn’t get a Salesman’s point of view if he stuck you in the leg with it, and for the same reason you couldn’t see the Dealer’s slant on things, nor the House’s policy if you trained a super-telescope on them.
Proff O. U. Bojack (Bus. Doc.)
“Besides all that, you have been so busy trying to think out some new high-sounding title for your job, and writing brainless Briefs on Salesmanship for the tired Trade Press, and attending so many noonday foolishers called Business Luncheons, that you haven’t yet had time to learn whether our Line of Goods is made to wear or to eat.
“Here and there in this worryful World of Business you will occasionally find some old moss-chest who still holds that Salesmanship means SELLING GOODS, and not Charts, Maps, Conferences and After Dinner Oratory. I now see, after a brief but total eclipse of Horse Sense due to too much reading and too little thinking, that I am one of those Old Timers myself.
“I don’t blame you,” he went on, unmindful of a pair of quaking pants before him, “for getting the Bilged Bean right at the crank-up, for you have never shinned the rough spots of Salesmanship yourself, and you haven’t got the imagination of a moving van.