Part 12

They make the PLANNING wheels go round.

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Now it's time to take your own job of planning to pieces and see if it, too, does not meet the test.

Here, again, as when the ANALYSIS was made, it helps to set things down on paper. In charting, you will find that by painstaking application of our four principles along the lines diagrammed in the figure on page 65, you can LAY OUT A WORKING PLAN depending for its approach to perfection only upon the amount of thought put into it, and upon the degree of accuracy with which the analysis of the job was made.

The chart you make may be only a guide to the complete plan. Some plans require details which utterly preclude any form of expression so simple as a chart. Other plans can be laid out on the actual chart shown.

In any event, the very attempt to put your plan into diagrammatic form will develop PRACTICABILITY AND ACCURACY OF ARRANGEMENT. The very necessity of having to indicate and to select the primary force back of your job or business; having to trace that force through the various activities necessary to completed work; and then having visibly and physically to concentrate all these activities at one point--those very acts which making a chart compels you to perform, enforce a mastery of the essential details of your business and a grasp of their relations which every manager should have.

Perhaps the plan you have isn't as hot as you think it is.

An office manager friend of ours was pretty proud of his system until one day he charted it.

His company was famous for the quality of work turned out. But the service it gave was wretched. Special instructions were often ignored. Delivery dates were overlooked. All that sort of thing.

The system looked good enough. The office manager said the mistakes were due to carelessness. And it looked as if he were right. So when something went wrong, the nearest employee got a handsome bawling out.

At last the sales force jumped on him with both feet. Too many promises had been broken.

So the office manager was forced to do something about it. And, quite by accident, made a chart of the ACTUAL PLAN OF WORK.

Hello, what was this? Half a dozen responsibilities were standing around absolutely unchaperoned, you might say. Someone might come along and pick them up, or then again----

For example, if a customer on the West Coast ordered a bill of goods, and then, while the order was in work, decided he wanted half the goods shipped by boat through the canal and the other half by fast freight, maybe he'd get his shipments that way and maybe he wouldn't. Under the prevailing "plan" that particular sort of job didn't fall inside any one man's bailiwick. No one man was responsible for seeing that such orders were executed. No "machinery" had therefore been provided for taking care of them.

That's only a sample of some of the duties which landed--in his diagrammatic representation of the actual plan of work--somewhere off the map. For all the action they got, they might as well have been painted ships upon a painted ocean.

Methods in general, you see, were pretty much all right. But there was no recognized initiative back of the plan. Activities were set in motion more or less spontaneously. As a result, certain parts of the business were left without managerial supervision.

Nothing is surer to expose such a condition than actually to chart a plan. In this instance, it was simple to recognize "following customers' instructions"--no matter when, why, or how they came--as the logical primary force. Then the whole trouble was taken care of by centering the responsibility upon the chief of the order department. From then on, all instructions regarding any order cleared through him.

Thus it will be seen that the idea back of charting a plan is not to get something you can work to as an ideal in carrying on a job, but rather to get a PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK on which the work can actually be done. Then it is at once evident whether the "clothes" of the business are hanging on the right limb or whether they have been hung up somewhere on the ground where, like as not, nobody will bother to pick them up.

Too often the plan turns out to be a "sketch."

The builder waits until the architect's first sketch has become a plan.

In business it's like that, too.

When finally you know, from ANALYSIS, what you want to accomplish, it is not difficult to plan the procedure if you start right and forget nothing. You start right if you take time to figure out the primary initiative. You forget nothing if you take the trouble to set things down in black and white.

And finding the motive force and figuring out where to hit with it, is nothing more nor less than charting the moves of the game until you find a succession of activities moving along without back-tracking, without duplication, without wasted effort or supervision.

Thus cultivating the KNACK OF PLANNING is a long step in the direction of becoming a good manager. If you were going to try to tell someone else how to cultivate the knack of planning, the story of the two men shaving in the Pullman washroom serves to illustrate the point.

Both men seemed to be in a hurry. The first hustled over to one of the wash basins, scrubbed his face and hands, dried them on a towel. Then he began to shave. That finished, he washed the lather from his face, dried himself again on another towel, and put away his razor. Next came his teeth. He brushed them, washed away the traces of tooth paste, and dried himself on a third towel.

All this time the other fellow was going through the same motions--but in a much different order.

He began with his teeth. After he had brushed them, he lathered his face. After he had shaved, a single wash was enough and a single towel did the drying job. He had finished his canteloupe and was well along with his eggs before his companion reached the diner. Number two didn't do a better job of brushing his teeth, of shaving, of washing. But he did do a better job of PLANNING.

He started where each operation would lead directly and naturally into the next, performing each at the proper time.