Part 30

Things went on in this happy homelike fashion until one fine warm Spring day when Brigadier Boss up and booted the whole bunch of bungling department heads into the great Out of Doors and set about to effect a re-organization.

“What I want is men who do THEIR OWN thinking,” he said, and he began telephoning and writing and wiring and advertising all over the country for A-1 Initiativers.

In due time he got them and called them all into his office and passed the cigars and explained how he wanted each man to run his own Department just as if it was his own business, exercising merely ordinary judgment and commonsense.

Then he went on to tell them how the old herd had always passed the old buck to him, never doing anything unless they were told, fearing even to set down the total of a column of figures without first consulting him, and he wound up with a few Well Chosen remarks about Co-operation and Co-ordination and the old reliable shoulder-to-the-wheel stuff.

Everybody was happy and talky and full of pep and chest-out chatter, for be it remembered that each new Department Head was an Individual and not a Person, and could hold his own with the best bullers of bulldom.

And so they all adjourned to their respective stalls and started in their new work with enthusiasm, energy and enterprise, and any other snapful word that you could think of beginning with “e.”

Things went great and glorious for about a month when the Boss discovered that the new Superintendent had put in a lot of machinery in the manufacturing department that he did not approve of, and he proceeded to give the Supe a double-nutted Call Down that carried to Columbus, Ohio.

The Supe came back not unstrengthfully whereupon the Boss’s eyes flashed like a Zeppelin night-searcher, and the Supe remembering that he had seventeen children and a motorcycle to support, cooled down almost to a solid, and let the Boss rave on like a knight of Montana overcharged by a cabman.

Shortly after this explosion in the factory the Boss happened into the Sales Manager’s throbbing little office, and in the course of a high-spirited but not dangerous discussion on things in general he discovered that the S. M. had re-districted the whole territory and changed agencies right and left and down the middle.

Whereupon Major General Boss let out a roar that shook the business mottoes from the walls and sent the stenographer scurrying to the south gate. Everything he could think of off-hand he called the Sales Manager, and then proceeded to look up a few choice ones in the Dock Hands’ Ready Vocabulary.

At this, the Sales Manager doubled his fists and closed his eyes to an ominous squint, and was all ready to spring—when he happened to think of the monthly installment on his Victrola, and so he dropped into his chair and sat numb and dumb, and then some.

On his way out, the Boss chanced to see the Advertising Manager pouring over a dummy on his desk.

“What’s that bum thing?” growled Doc Boss, pointing his long presidential finger toward the busy little desk.

“Why that’s the layout for a broadside that I’m mailing to the Dealer Trade on our new No. 7’s,” replied the Advertising Manager, smiling.

“No good—no good in the world!” came back Uncle Boss. “Nobody on earth would stop to read that thing. Too big—too unwieldy—copy too scattered—weak copy, too—might just as well mail out a sheet of white paper! A clumsy folder like that, gets in with the second-class matter and goes the route of the wastebasket. Nothing to it!”

“What you want,” continued the Boss, rising in temperature, “is a snappy little envelope insert like this—” And he grabbed up a small piece of paper and folded it angrily and shook it before the surprised eyes of the new Adv. Mgr.

Whereupon, without waiting for further reasoning or retort, Captain Boss withdrew, leaving the puzzled Adv. Mgr. to ponder over the punk suggestion. “Perhaps he’s right after all,” he reflected.

A few days later Colonel Boss wandered into the Advertising Manager’s office again.

“What’s this dinky little thing?” he inquired, picking up a dummy that the Adv. Mgr. had on his desk.

“Why that’s just a little insert I’m getting ready to send out to the Dealer Trade on our new No. 7’s.”

“Holy Smoke!” ejaculated Commodore Boss, “how do you expect us to get by with our No. 7’s on that measley little thing. What you want is a smashing broadside—something big enough for a fellow to see without impairing his eyesight—something that will command attention—something that will—”

“Hold on!” broke in the Adv. Mgr., rising from his warm chair and looking kind of doggone determined. “Last week I had a broadside underway and you came in here and ordered it off, and said you wanted an insert. You now come in and rap the insert and say you want a broadside.”

“Oh, hell,” cut in Premier Boss, “don’t pay any attention to what I say.”

“I’m not going to,” flashed back the now thoroughly aroused Adv. Mgr., “but YOU are going to pay attention to what I say, and you’re going to remember it the longest day you live.”

“When I came here,” he continued, sticking his fist right up close to the Boss’s olfactory knob, “you told me that your old organization was a bunch of dummies and said you wanted initiative. You SAID it, but you did not MEAN it. You don’t want initiative and independent thinking. You want weakness and sycophancy.

“You could not stand a strong mind in your establishment six months. There would be a constant clash for mental supremacy. THE OLD MEN THAT YOU CANNED ALL HAD WILL POWER OF THEIR OWN ONCE. But you sapped their wills to feed your own rotten gourmand Will. And when they had no more mental pap to give you, you despised them. You despised them for lack of the very thing you robbed them of.

“You are a Mental Leech—the most dangerous class of citizen in the world. And when it so happens that your stripe is an employer, your sin is doubly damnable because the mental resistance of the average employe is weakened against your onslaught through the fear he has of losing his job.

“I’ll concede that you have never before been CONSCIOUS of what you were doing,” roared the Adv. Mgr, “but from this moment you shall be conscious of it, and of your responsibility if you dare ever again to use it—you big blustering mental bully you!”