The twelve principles of efficiency

Front matter

Cornell University LiBr;

The twelve principles of efficiency

3 1924 002 746' 737

Introduction

Harrington Emerson's earlier book "Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages" appeared originally in 1908, and a third edition, revised and enlarged, is being reissued almost in parallel with this second and later work on "The Twelve Principles of Efficiency." The relations between the first and second presentations of the subject thus become clear. The former sets forth a new view of the whole industrial problem and of the relations and proportions of the factors entering into it. It is the declaration of a philosophy. This latter work, stronger even than its predecessor, and more specific in statement, reduces the doctrine of efficiency to a code upon which to base rules of practice.

In the volume now published, the author defines twelve principles by which efficiency is determined. Five of these concern relations between men — or, in the industrial problem, specifically between employer and employee. Seven of them concern methods or institutions and systems established in the manufacturing plant or in the operating and distributing company. These twelve principles are so definite, ii INTRODUCTION

so constant, so true, that they may be used as gauges. Any industry, any establishment, any operation, may be tested thereby, and its inefficiency located and measured by the amount of its failure to conform to one or more of the twelve principles.

Yet the twelve principles are not isolated and independent influences, but are interdependent and co-ordinated — related to one another (in- the author's effective simile) as the stones of a dome. One or even several may be lacking; yet the structure, though weakened and imperfect, will stand. From a wholly material, non-moral, and near-visioned point of view, indeed, the seven "practical" principles alone would be sufficient for the achievement of success. Even an evil purpose can be most effectively accomplished by their observance. When, however, these are interlocked with the five "altruistic" principles, purposes, as well as measures, are turned from lower temporary desires to the larger eternal desirabilities. The doctrines of efficiency therefore define something infinitely greater than a system of management. They set forth a morality, and provide practicable measures for its attainment.

The method of treatment is simple and logical. An introductory chapter lays down the premise that the prime institutions for the attainment of efficiency are not men, materials, money, machines, methods, but theories of or-

INTRODUCTION 111

ganization and principles, and that inefficiency prevails because the type of organization in general use does not lend itself to the application of efficiency principles. The second chapter discusses the type of organization under which efficiency principles can be successfully applied. The twelve following chapters take up each one a single principle: — 1. Ideals; 2. Common-Sense and Judgment; 3. Competent Counsel; 4. Discipline; 5. The Fair Deal; 6. Reliable, Immediate and Accurate Records; 7. Planning and Despatching; 8. Standards and Schedules; 9. Standardized Conditions; 10. Standardized Operations; 11. Written Standard-Practice Instructions; 12. Efficiency Reward. Two concluding chapters show how the principles are applied as a means of diagnosis of industrial conditions and correction of existing inefficiencies.

Charles Buxton Going.

Lord, Thou hast made this world below the shadow of

a dream . . .

I'll stand the middle watch up here — alone wi' God an'

these My engines . . .

. . . through all the seas of all Thy world . . . . . . What I ha' seen since ocean steam began Leaves me no doot for the machine: But what about

the man?

The man that counts, wi' all his runs . . .

"Mister McAndrews, don't you think steam spoils

romance at sea?"

Damned ijjit! . . . Romance!

Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song

o' Steam! . . . True beat, full power, the clangin' chorus goes Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin' dynamos. Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed, To work, ye'll note, at any tilt an' every rate of

speed . . .

An' singin' like the Mornin' Stars for joy that they

are made. . . .

Now, a'together, hear them lift their lesson, theirs an'

mine: "Law, Order, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline!" ...

Oh for a man to weld it then, in one trip-hammer

strain . . .

An' by that light — now, mark my word — we'll build the

Perfect Ship.

Preface

Why has the time come to discard the old and use the new?

What past truths have become fallacies?

What new truths are becoming basic?

Why has this book been written?

These are some of the queries to which the reader may justly expect answers, especially if they reveal the point of view from which the principles of efficiency have been collated, elaborated, and applied.

"What about the man?" What about humanity, present and future? This is the test to be applied to every ideal, to every organization, to all equipment ; the ideal of humanity is to be kept burning by every executive, because the ideal of humanity, not the ideal of selfish gain, underlies every principle of efficiency.

My eldest daughter accuses me of starting every discussion with the period before Adam. This is perhaps due to a lingering, but almost obliterated, trace of German Griindlichkeit pounded into me in German schooldays. (From the remote beginning there have been forward steps which we now clearly see, but which were not perceived at the time.) French

VI PREFACE

teaching, of which I also had full share, if not so thorough as German, is far more logical and clear. The French always seek causes and accept what flows from them.

Beginning, therefore, before Adam, we can go back to a time when there was no life on this planet, when molar, molecular, and corpuscular forces were active, and in strict obedience to unsentient law, there was the logical morality of the conditions. The moralities of physical movements, of chemical affinities, of corpuscular activities, are teaching us more and more; they are still our foundations.

After a long while life came to our earth, and its one morality seems to have been "Every creature for itself and its descendants." Between species and species there was no justice, no mercy; between individual and individual, no justice, no mercy; only a dawning of morality in conjugal and parental love. In those days, deceit, rapacity, cruelty, dishonesty, unchastity were the great virtues since only those survived who practiced them most assiduously.

Then man appeared, and practising all the old virtues, he slowly evolved a higher morality. "Tnou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself." The tenets of all the great religions exhale the individual duty to the individual neighbor. From the period of this

PREFACE Vli

higher but narrow morality we are just emerging.

In the last 150 years another event has occurred, next in importance to the advent of life, to the advent of humanity. This event is the substitution of coal, oil, gas, and distant waterfalls for human, for animal muscular energy, for nearby use of wind and water current. Formerly men carried out their plans by forcing other men, by compelling asses, oxen and horses to work for them.

Now men carry out their plans by making uncarnate forces work. Two men or two horses working together work more efficiently than four; one man or one horse singly works more than half as much as two working together. The most efficient incarnate unit is therefore one man, one horse. How does man power or horse power compare with uncarnate power?

Comparisons

Man. Horse. Power Engine.

Weight per horse power,

Fuel per horse-power hour,

pounds 6 3.6 0.5 to 3

Cost of food per ton $40 $20 $1 to $40

Maximum horse power, per

unit Vs 1. 70,000 or more

Available working time,

Tilling the soil even with so perfected a tool as a'good spade, it would take 560 seasons to turn over a square mile of land, 640 acres. A viii PEEPACB

man with a team and good plow can do it in four seasons. I tried it and became discouraged, Twelve men with three mechanical tractors and fifty-one plows in a gang can turn over 640 acres in 36 hours. I have a photograph of the outfit at work.

Per Cent of Energy From Fuel

Small steam plant 5

Man working steadily in a manual trade 7

Large steam or oil plant 10

Small gas engine ■. • 20

Man working for a short time at maximum of endurance 21

Large gas engine 30

At $2.00 a day, man power costs per horse power, $54,000 per year of 7,500 hours. In a small gasoline engine it costs $300 a year per horse power; for large power installations, whether steam, gas or electrical, it costs from $20 a year up to $200 per horse power. Man power costs therefore from 135 to 1,350 times as much as uncarnate power.

Thirty men, as men work, will yield 1 horse power of energy each hour, but so will 1 to 5 pounds of coal. A ton of coal may be assumed to have the energy of five men for a whole year.

One hundred and sixty years ago the use of coal had not yet begun on a commercial scale; all the work was done by man and beast. Sixty years ago in the United States the consumption of coal, used most wastefully, was one-quarter ton per adult male, each ton able to do the work of five men. Today the consumption of coal is

PREFACE IX

equal to the energy of 22 men and the energy from oil, from gas, from distant waterfalls, is not included.

On the average each adult man is supplemented by 22 mechanical slaves whose keep averages less than one four-hundredth of his own value of $2.00 a day.

As a producer of muscular energy man is hopelessly outclassed, as an intelligent supervisor and director he is just beginning to come into his inheritance. In these directions he has no competition nor limit to his value.

It is true that in the ages from which we are just emerging, the wealth of the few was based on the poverty of the many. The free inhabitants of Athens reached the highest state of real civilization the planet has ever seen because for every free man there were at least five slaves. Pharaoh, advised by Joseph, grew rich by using the seven years of famine to rob his people of their money, their savings, their cattle, their lands and their liberty. As slaves they could be and were requisitioned to do muscular work, as beating the ponds at night to scare the frogs that their masters might sleep, or to swing fans all night, as in India today, that the rich may slumber. Those few who were rich were supported by the labor of the many. Today this is not so.

If some gifted thinker should discover a method of making the sun convert lead into radium, a million times more powerful than

X PREFACE

coal, he would have robbed no one, he would have impoverished none, he would immensely benefit humanity, even though the discovery netted him $1,000,000,000.

Muscular energy no longer counts for much. The world's energy comes from engines, and any man who develops a tool or machine to do work formerly done by men is adding to the number of tireless slaves who serve first the inventor and then all humanity. It is not true that a machine permanently displaces a man; it promotes him, but it is the duty of corporations and of the State to make the period of transition easy, not one of temporary hardship.

It is not labor, not capital, not land, that has created modern wealth or is creating it today. It is ideas that create wealth, and what is wanted is more ideas — more uncovering of natural reservoirs, and less labor and capital and land per unit of production. Gold has very little intrinsic value, diamonds have none except to cut glass and stone. It is a thought, a sentiment, that gives value to gold and diamonds ; it was the invention of the incandescent lamp that doubled the value of platinum. Columbus with his idea of land to the west, Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, with their ideas of liberty, Jefferson with his idea of territorial expansion, Fulton with his idea of the steamboat, Stephenson with his creation of the locomotive and track; it was Howe, Morse, Edison, Westinghouse, Bell and Gray, Marconi ;

PREFACE xi

it was Lincoln, it was Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. J. Hill and Harriman with their ideas, it was Roosevelt with the Panama Canal, that have made the United States what it is. All these men used labor and capital to uncover and develop the hitherto unutilized resources of the universe.

The Dutch and the Huguenots settled in South Africa about the same time North America above the gulf was colonized. The United States grew on account of ideas ; South Africa remained undeveloped because of paucity of ideas, paucity of energy. The blacks had to do the work. There was no use for steam engines.

Muscular effort can be stimulated by the lash — intelligent supervision, intellectual production, never ! One single idea may have greater value than all the labor of all the men, animals, and engines for a century. The age of muscular human effort and of the lash is passing away, and the old morality with it ; the age of supervision, of co-operative stimulus,- is in full advance; and with it comes a new morality, under which the Golden Rule can be extended from the relations between individuals to those between classes, nationalities, and races. The highest official cannot dictate to the youngest apprenticed worker. Both are creatures of the machine, but both in turn must serve it, for unless its every law and need is lived up to, it will refuse to work efficiently, often re-

Xii PREFACE

fuse to work at all. With these new duties and privileges of men toward each other old truths become fallacies and paradoxes become the basic truths of tomorrow.

To forward the new morality, to extend the dominion of man over uncarnate energy and its use, to substitute highly paid thinkers and supervisors for devitalized toilers, to help each individual, each corporation, each government to meet its part of the obligation, above all to inspire those executives on whose skill all progress and all wise performance depends, is the justification of these essays.

Harrington Emerson

November, 1911

Chapter I. Organization and Principles the Prime Instruments for Efficiency

The Efficiency Problem Exemplified by an Actual Example — How 60 per cent Increase of Output with 10 per cent Increase of Payroll Was Attained in Six Months — 50 per cent Reduction in Payroll Cost in Twelve Months — This Reduction Secured by a New Type of Organization and Application of Certain Principles— Principles More Potent than Material, Money, Machines or Methods — Power of These Principles Shown by Recent History — The Franco-Prussian War as an Example — How Bismarck and von Moltke Applied the Twelve Principles of Efficiency — Japan's Application of Them the Cause of Her Military and Industrial Prowess — Application of Efficiency Principles the Basis of Ascendency ....

Chapter II. The Type of Organization Through Which Efficiency Is Attained

Inefficiency Is Caused by Industrial Disease — The Germ of this Disease Is Defective Organization— Two Fundamental Types of Organization Described and Exemplified — Line Organization Effective for Offense and Destruction— Staff Organization Effective for Defense and Construction — Inefficiency of Line Organization Shown in the Spanish- American War — Strenuousness the Opposite of Efficiency — Piece-Rates Based on the Theory of Strenuousness — Standard Times and Bonus on the Theory of Efficiency — Examples of Industrial Mistakes Due to Defective Organization — Ordinary Organization Passes All Power and Responsibility to the xiii xiv CONTENTS

Workman — Functional Organization Brings All Knowledge and Skill to the Assistance of the Workman— Many Modes of Introducing Efficiency-Control into Line Direction — General Form of an Efficient Organization 27

Chapter III. The First Principle: Clearly Defined Ideals

Efficiency Principles, though Interrelated, Stand in Logical Sequence— The First Essential Is Correct Ideals and Purposes — Examples of Perverse and Deleterious Ideals — Their Costly Results — Even Greater Losses from Vague Ideals or No Ideals — The American Temperament Stronger in Impulses than in Fixed Ideals — National Characteristics as Revealed by Ideals Carried into Execution — The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World — The Seven Modern Wonders — Efficiency Ideals Weak in Modern Engineering Works — The Fallacy of Over-Reliance on Equipment — Relations of the Efficiency Engineer to the Formulation of Ideals — The Alternatives Offered the Modern Manager 59

Chapter IV. The Second Principle: Common Sense

Supernal Common-Sense versus Near Common-Sense— The Difference Illustrated by Examples— American Enterprise Characteristically Given to Exhausting Natural Resources — Continental Enterprise Characteristically Devoted to Realizing Immaterial Resources — The Difference Exemplified by American Exports and Imports — Contrast between German and American Governmental Policy — Evil Consequences of the American Tonnage Mania — The Curse of Immediacy — Characteristics of American Industrial Managers — Modifying the Type of Organization the First Step toward True Ideals and Sound Common-Sense 91

Chapter V. The Third Principle: Competent Counsel

American Industrial Leadership Characteristically Self-Reliant — Reluctance to Seek Ad-

CONTENTS XV

vice of Specialists — Competent Counsel Necessarily Derived from Many Minds — The Establishment of Efficiency Counsel a Constructive Type of Organization — Competent Counsel Justified by Many Recognized Examples 119

Chapter VI. The Fourth Principle: Discipline

Institutions that Have Been Built upon Discipline— Railway Operation an Object Lesson — The Meaning of Discipline as an Efficiency Principle — Discipline as a Regulator of Conduct— Discipline Exemplified by Nature's Operations— Esprit du Corps a Species of Discipline — Failure of Social Institutions that Repudiate Discipline • — • The Reciprocal Faith Inspired by Discipline — It Meets Great Emergencies — Industrial Disasters Traceable to Lack of Discipline — Definition of the Self- Executing Discipline which Constitutes an Efficiency Principle 135

Chapter VII. The Fifth Principle: The Fair Deal

Old-Fashioned Conceptions of Organization Blind to the Fair Deal — Persistence of these Low Ideals in Modern Industry — Acknowledgement of the Fair Deal Must Begin with the Employer — The Fair Deal Essential to National Preservation — Proof of this Found in the Future Relations of Wage Earners to National Efficiency — Examples of Unfair Deal in Industrial and Commercial Management — Effects on the Acts and Purposes of Employees— The Fair Deal and Wage Relations Defined— Nine Provisions that Should Constitute Standard Practice 167

Chapter VIII. The Sixth Principle: Reliable, Immediate and Adequate Records

The meaning of Records as an Efficiency Principle — The Nature of Records — Object of Records — Use of Records — Records of Efficiency and Cost of Locomotive Repairs — Analysis of Operation Costs Duly Recorded — Relation between Standard Costs and Recorded

XVi CONTENTS

Costs— How Records Aid the Prosecution of Efficiency — Quality the First Consideration — Fallacy of Reduction of Wages— Efficiency and Quality Improved by Higher Payment per Unit—What Facts as to Every Operation an Efficiency Record Should Show — Relations of Cost-Accounting to Efficiency Records — The Cost Formula as an Instrument for the Reduction of Wastes 205

Chapter IX. The Seventh Principle: Despatching

Despatching a Fundamental Principle of Nature's Cycles — Examples — Marvels of Despatching in Railway Operation — Absence of Despatching in Shop Operations — Examples of Resultant Inefficiency — How Despatching may Improve Conditions in a Great Organization— Despatching Unstandardized Work More Profitable than Standardizing Undespatched Work 241

Chapter X. The Eighth Principle: Standards and Schedules

Two Kinds of Standards and Schedules — Time and Motion Studies a Sub-Division of Standards — Typical Schedules of Man-Efficiency— The Diagram Discussed — Diagrams of Standard Performances in Physical Effort — The Relation of Wage Systems to Standard Performances — Piece-Rates Objectionable because They Stimulate Strenuousness instead of Efficiency — Establishment and Use of Rational Work Standards 261

Chapter XI. The Ninth Principle: Standardized Conditions

Nature's Achievements in Standardization of Creature and Environment — Standardizing Ourselves to Environment— Standardizing Environment to Ourselves — Human Achievements in Standardizing Conditions — Relations of Standardized Conditions to Individual Achievement of New Standards — Standards as a Progressive Evolution 279

CONTENTS xvii

Chapter XII. The Tenth Principle: Standardized Operations

Standardized Operations Reached only by Observance of Preceding Principles — Details, though Appalling in Number, are Successfully Controlled by Systematic Approach — Examples of Standardized Operations in Manufacture^— Progressive Betterment of Performance not Hampered by Standardization — The Methods of Efficiency Work through the Preceding Principles to the Standardization of Operation

— The Profitable Results of Planning 297

Chapter XIII. The Eleventh Principle: Written Standard-Practice Instructions

Race Progress Is Slow until the Records of Knowledge can Be Preserved — Ideals, Arts, and Crafts Lost through Lack of Written Records — Examples of the Advantages of Written Records — The Influence of the Code Napoleon — How Recorded Instructions Have Operated to Increase Naval Efficiency — The Operation of the Principle in Industrial Establishments— Steps Essential to Introducing Standard Instructions in Engineering Works — Growth of the Body of Standard-Practice Instructions — What Can Be Accomplished. . . . 319

Chapter XIV. The Twelfth Principle: Efficiency Reward

Desire of Reward a Natural Instinct — It Maintains and Stimulates the Preservation of the Race — Natural Selection an Automatic Payment of Efficiency Reward — Hopeless Perversity of Attempting to Nullify Efficiency Reward by a Level Wage System — Compensation for Work cannot Remain an Exception to the Natural Law — The Question of Union Opposition— Essential Basis for a Just Efficiency Reward— Piece-Rates Based upon a Wrong Principle— Conditions under which they may Be Made Tolerable — Profit-Sharing not Efficiency Reward — A System that Meets the Demands of Equity — Time Payments and Bonus Rewards— Halsey, Gantt, and Taylor as Con-

Xviii CONTENTS

tributors to a Just Understanding of Correct Wage Principles — The Efficiency System of Wage Payment in Practical Operation — Its Nine Essential Parts — Efficiency Reward Brings to their Highest Development Materials, Muscle, Mind and Spirit 341

Chapter XV. Efficiency Principles Applied to Measurement and Cure of Wastes

Waste Elimination a Fundamental Ideal of Efficiency Effort — Every Waste Elimination Brings Immediate Reward — Differences between Masculine and Feminine Instincts — Intuition and Individuality Characteristically Feminine — Organization and Development of Principles Essentially Masculine — The Lesson Illustrated by History — Wastes Eliminated not by Intuition, but through Principles — Trusts Originate through Intuition; they can Succeed only through Adoption of Principles — Testing Plant Efficiency by the Application of Principles — Successive Steps in the Betterment of Plant Efficiency — The Method Applied to the Steel Corporation — Differences Between the Old and the Modern Principles of Accounting— Fundamentals of Modern Accounting Are Standards, Efficiencies, Equipments — Why Graft could not Prevail where these Standards Are Applied 371

Chapter XVI. Executive Control of Line and Staff

The Philosophy of Efficiency Applied to an Industrial Plant — The Best Plant with the Best Philosophy of Efficiency Helpless without Executive Direction — Supremacy of the Strong Man Indispensable — He Must Coordinate Line and Staff— Not Essential that the Executive Be Expert in either Staff or Line— Essential That He Have Powers of Direction and Co-Ordination — Power of Leadership Exemplified in History and Industry

What the Great Corporations might Become under Supernal Men, Working through Principles to Realize Supernal Ideals 401

THE TWELVE PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENCY.

The wise man built his house upon a rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock. But the foolish man built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it. — St. Matthew, 7, 24-27.

He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster. — Proverbs, 18, 9.

By the wisdom of the centuries I speak, To the tune of yestermorn I set the truth;

I, the joy of life unquestioned; I, the Greek; I, the everlasting wonder Song of Youth!

Rudyard Kipling.

THE TWELVE PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENCY

Chapter I ORGANIZATION AND PRINCIPLES THE PRIME INSTRUMENTS FOR EFFICIENCY

The invisible makes the nation. The nation is not made great, it is not made rich, it is not made at all, by mines and forests and prairies and water powers. Great men make a great nation great, and the qualities that make men great are invisible. — Lyman Abbott.

THE owners of a large industrial plant with many orders ahead desired to increase the output from thirteen units a month, the highest average up to that time, to twenty-three units a month, and to do this in ten months.

The manager of the plant, a man of unusual ability but of the old school, had been in charge for some time, but knew only one way to deliver the increase, namely, to add to equipment and employ more men. He therefore countered the demand of the owners for twenty-three units by asking for $500,000 worth of additional equipment. Even if this capital investment had been possible, it was no solution of the difficulty, as it would have taken at least a year, probably longer, to secure the new equipment.

When matters were in this state — demand for increased output by owners, demand for increased equipment by manager — an investigation of the plant was made by two competent efficiency engineers of wide experience, who submitted a long report of which the concluding paragraphs were: —

Your plant consists of a large Machine Shop, Boiler Shop, Erecting Shop, Blacksmith Shop, Foundry.

Having examined into the conditions of each of the shops and having consulted with the manager, the superintendent, the various foremen, some of the contractors, and a number of men, we are able to state definitely that with some slight physical betterments, and provided the present manager, or a man of similar disposition be in authority, the output of your shops can be increased 60 per cent, without adding to the present forces, without adding to the equipment, and without increasing the payroll more than 10 per cent, and that these results can be gradually attained within a period of six months.

To accomplish these results certain principles of organization were advocated. The organization and principles were adopted and applied by the managers, and the results are shown by an extract from a letter, written- by the local official ten months later.

New York, May 1, 1908.

It will interest you to know that our output for the month of April showed an increase of 69.2 per cent over the monthly average of the last fiscal year.

The average working hours are 9 per day instead of 10 as formerly. The payroll reduction is 15 per cent, amounting to -8,000 to -10,000 a month less than last year.

The same efficiency engineers were subsequently called to another plant, to investigate and to advise. ' In this case also their principles were accepted, their recommendations carried into effect through modified organization with the following results:

o b

,5 wis

0 %

2 %

10 %

17.3%

It is not to be supposed that two men could come from the far west, go into eastern industrial plants, and through their own familiarity with the conditions know better how to direct

V

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>-* S3 hi o o V

> o «J

u w J

> o a

3§

o o

Pay

Pay : Cost Ton.

Sept.,

'08..

.. 527

4.69

2,473

$29,380 $11.88

July,

'09..

. . 263

9.04

2,377

15,248 6.41

Aug.,

'09..

. . 298

10.51

3,133

17,280 5.51

Sept.,

'09..

. . 312

10.92

3,408

17,394 5.14 them than the experienced local managers in charge. The men who came out of the west were not as well equipped with knowledge of operation or devices, were not as well acquainted with local methods and men, as the local managers, but they were far better equipped with knowledge of a new type of organization through which alone efficiency can be secured, and they had not only this knowledge but also extended and successful experience in applying it.

The difference in achievement between the modern man and the men who lived thousands of years ago is not an internal difference in quality of brain, but the tremendous external difference in conditions and equipment. The boy with the far-reaching sling knocks out the heavily armored spear-wielding giant.

It is exceedingly difficult to advocate certain principles without individuals, tribes, and nations, unable to free themselves from the personal point of view, immediately jumping to the conclusion that an attack is being made on their competency, their skill. Greek athletes could have made good records if they had had bicycles, motor cars, and aeroplanes, if they had had repeating pistols and rifles; but the arrow, however skilled the archer, does not carry as far or as straight as the rifle bullet. The principle underlying the rifle is very old — that of the blow tube — a very different principle from that of the bow and string ; but the man who equips the savage with a rifle makes him more powerful than all the armored knights of chivalry, and the man who equips the modern industrial manager with a new industrial application of an old principle of organization and accomplishment, gives the mediocre manager a greater possibility of attaining high efficiency than was ever possessed even by the greatest industrial geniuses working along the old lines.*

The men from the west knew the new theories because they had applied them on a tremendous scale ; they knew how to design and operate a new kind of shop control, as different from the old as the rifle is from the bow — as different as bicycle riding is from walking, flying from motoring, Arabic notation from Roman numerals. These principles in their application to shop control may not appear particularly lofty, inspiring, or even interesting

* "Two kinds of success, that of the rare genius, the other, that of the ordinary man who does ordinary things a little better than his fellows." — Roosevelt's university address in Norway.

to anyone except those whose pocketbooks are to be immediately benefited — namely, the plant owners and managers, the plant workers, and the clients of the plant; but they will evoke deeper interest when it is perceived that they are fundamental and of universal application; that in all ages lasting efficiency depended on them, and without them is always impossible; that the same principles have been applied elsewhere on a stupendous and noble scale, and that it is not men and materials, money, machines, and methods that count, but far more potently theories and principles.