Part 13

After all, isn't that precisely what you do in planning any part of your business?

III

Organizing the Work

Remember Psmith and Pbrown? One could analyze, but didn't know what to do with his analysis after he got it. The other was an expert planner, but alas! his plans were never based upon the solid foundation of actual necessity. He planned to do something before he knew what had to be done.

Psmith and Pbrown, together, looked like a grand pair when we introduced them in the chapter on PLANNING. Now, after taking particular pains to give that impression, we shall have to break right down and confess in open meeting that they are but two numbers of the MANAGEMENT TEAM. Probinson is the third.

Probinson ORGANIZES THE WORK. Psmith may analyze to a fare-you-well; Pbrown may plan till he's blue in the face--their best efforts are as of nothing worth unless Probinson is on hand to organize the work of the business. For as surely as there is a knack of analyzing and a knack of planning, just so surely is there a knack of organizing the work.

Thus we approach the third phase of the job of managing.

So far we have seen how the successful manager starts from the top, working backward, to chart his job--and then, having found out what has to be done, builds his plan for doing it. Analysis and planning, however, will carry him just so far. Unless he acquires the knack of organization, he will never make a howling success of his job--he will fall just short of being an outstanding manager.

The office manager for an Eastern concern affords the needed illustration.

P. C.--those aren't his initials--knew office management from A to Izzard. First to arrive in the morning, last to leave at night, he had a tremendous capacity for hard labor. But he never seemed to make a hole in the pile of work on his desk. It grew no smaller fast. Why? Because he never, in all his years of managing, learned to arrange the division of his work. He never learned to deputize it. When his mind should have been free for the more or less important decisions which crop out now and then even in an office manager's life, it was all bound around in the necessity of performing some silly little routine job which any girl of moderate intelligence could have done.

His idea of organizing his job was to try to do everything himself. And within his physical limitations he was a valuable man to the company. But how much more he'd have been worth had he, at some time in his career, acquired the KNACK OF ORGANIZATION!

Don't jump to the conclusion, now, that the successful organizer is one who merely divides up his work and parcels it out among a flock of assistants. Don't think for a moment that it is nothing but deputization.

Effective organization is far more than that.

It is the distribution of work, according to its character or urgency, among the facilities at hand for doing it according to their capacities or cost. And it makes no difference whether those facilities happen to be men, money, or machines--or simply your own available time.

You deputize work when you use an adding machine instead of your head to total last month's sales--when you turn the job of packaging breakfast food over to an automatic machine--when you jot down in your notebook information which would otherwise tax your memory--when you telephone the purchasing agent instead of making your legs take you to his office--when, instead of using your own funds, you do something on borrowed capital.

Deputization may be any one of these just as easily as it may be asking your assistant to find out why So-and-so's order for boys' pants wasn't shipped on time, or making him responsible for working out a new prospect list.

* * * * *

The office manager of a shoe concern found, right after the war, that much of his day was spent telling dealers in Kalamazoo and Keokuk to be patient, please, and they'd get their shoes.

Those were the halcyon days, you'll remember, when salesmen went out twice a year and told their customers how many shoes or ships or sewing machines they could have--and when they could have them.

As a result, this particular shoe factory was loaded to the guards with orders. Orders were shipped when, as and if they struggled from cutting room to fitting room--and from then on down to the packing department.

Complaints were numerous. They weren't exactly complaints, either. Queries, rather. Where are my shoes? Can't you ship March 15 instead of April 1? And so on--until, as we started to say, the sales manager was spending a great part of his time dictating replies to his stenographer. And she didn't have time for any of her other duties.

Analysis proved that the letters were, in the main, of three types. Three letters were therefore prepared, and each day the sales manager went through the inquiries and indicated which letter should go to which customer. In that way the latter got a prompt and courteous reply, as well as certain vague information explaining why he'd have to wait another month for his shoes.

And he was moderately happy. Personal attention from the sales manager could have accomplished no more. Thus a certain part of an executive's and his stenographer's time was deputized to a system.

Could the sales manager have gone a step further and had his letter mimeographed, he would have been DEPUTIZING TO A MACHINE the same amount of his own and a much larger part of the stenographer's time. But, while the customers accepted plausible excuses in place of shoes, it is doubtful whether the cleverest imitation would have taken the place of a real typewritten letter.

With the manufacturer of a proprietary medicine, however, things are different. Women from every part of the country write in describing their ailments. It is not difficult to classify these letters into a dozen groups. And form letters, done in skillful imitation of real typing, do the trick quite nicely.

That is DEPUTIZING--just as it is DEPUTIZING when the "big boss" calls in his assistant and says: "You run this shebang from now on. I've got to see if I can't get the K. C. plant out of the red."

And it's DEPUTIZING when a manufacturer, forced to increase the size of his plant, goes to a real estate operator and gets him to buy a piece of land, put up a building and rent it to him at a certain figure, while he uses his own capital to equip and operate the new plant, because he can make 15 per cent, say, on his capital himself, whereas he has to pay out as rent only an amount equal to 8 per cent of what land, building, insurance, and so on, would tie up.

Fundamentally, then, DEPUTIZING is taking something away from the "principal" of the job or business and assigning it to a "deputy." Principal and deputy may be a manager and his stenographer, a department head and a filing system, or a corporation's capital and a bond issue.