Part 3

"But no action. No tearing his shirt. No nothing. And the complaints were coming in with every mail. They never fazed him. One day I ran across him up in the fitting room. Another time I bumped into him he was picking lasts out of the bins. Again I saw him pushing empty racks into the heeling room elevator.

"Apparently I had picked another lemon. Looked like the best thing he did was sit around and tap his teeth with a pencil.

"He fooled me, though. One afternoon he dropped into my office with a map. He'd drawn it between taps. It was a good map with dotted lines to show just exactly what happened to an order--any order--every order. That map showed when it went into the works, where it went from there. And so on until it went out the shipping room door. That's what he'd been up to the day I saw him picking out lasts. And I tell you I never had any idea how many things could happen to an order. I never realized how shoes halted and stumbled and staggered around that factory of ours.

"There were red lines, too. They showed the changes he proposed making. Here he would stop backtracking. Here was unnecessary travel. Here was an old bottle neck and here was how he was going to crack it open. And look at those lasts lying idle with shoes upstairs waiting to be made on them!

"That wasn't half. It was actually taking four days to get orders through the office routine. He showed me how certain necessary records that took time to make could be made after the shoes were in work. Other short cuts would wipe whole days off our schedules.

"There was nothing to it--when you saw it in red ink. In fact there's nothing half so convincing as red ink. There's been none on our books for the past five years--and during that time the shoe business has been no bed of roses.

"What he proposed was simple as pie--if only someone had stopped to think. We'd simply got into bad habits. We were handling the work the same way we'd handled it back in the days when grandfather started the business. And this fellow had been smart enough to wait and wonder why. Not wonder why either. He went and found out how come.

"In thirty days we were back on earth. We were getting shoes out on time--many many days sooner than we'd even been able to before. And all because a smart young man, who didn't know a thing about shoes but a whole lot about managing, sat and tapped his teeth and drew a few pictures.--All because he had been in no hurry to act until he had found out just what had to be done."

* * * * *

It is so easy to jump to conclusions! If you look about a bit, you will see plenty of men who don't stop to find out what needs to be done before they start trying to do it. They're like the shortstop who hurries his play and tries to throw the runner out at first before he really gets his hands on the ball. An error is more often than not the result.

MANAGING, such men will tell you, is putting "pep" and "punch" into your work. Pep and punch were once good words. But their good qualities have been so often extolled that most of us have lost sight of the fact that all the "drive" in the world is so much wasted energy when it isn't directed along the right lines. And when it isn't so directed, it comes pretty close to being the lowest form of human endeavor. Witness the "go-getter" who really doesn't know what it's all about, but often succeeds in covering up a world of defects under a cloak of ill-directed energy.

Other men think they are finding out what needs to be done when actually they aren't even getting close to the root of the matter. With the best intentions in the world, they are grasping at the first straw the wind blows their way. Eureka! they shout when they haven't found it at all, but are merely jumping all the way over the facts to conclusions! Actually to know your business or your job demands ANALYSIS.

You have a right to duck. It's another of those words that work overtime and have suffered as a result. A certain type of superficial business executive has done analysis no good. To him the impressiveness of the word suffices--to the complete exclusion of the simplicity of the act itself. And so analysis to you and you and YOU has come to mean involved, complex research--running around a lot in circles and getting exactly nowhere. Analysis has become for you an A1 example of the phrase-maker's art.

REAL ANALYSIS of any problem in business can, however, be simple--in fact, it can be nothing else but simple.

Analysis, says Noah Webster, is "a resolution of anything, whether an object of the senses or the intellect, into constituent parts or elements; an examination of component parts, separately or in their relation to the whole."

Whooee! all that when he might have said "TAKING TO PIECES." For analysis is literally that--taking a thing to pieces to see what makes the wheels go round. Not, however, with the destructive intent of the small boy who strews his watch all over the floor, but with the avowed purpose of getting right down to the sort of brass tacks which make it possible to see the composition of the whole clearly and plainly.

Analysis which befogs the issue is not analysis at all. It's--in the vernacular--a lot of "hooey."

But the RIGHT KIND OF ANALYSIS "breaks down" the problem into its component parts--without losing sight of each part's relation to the whole. There may be only two parts to a job of managing. The messenger who analyzes his business correctly will find exactly two: where to go and what to do after he gets there--the simplest kind of problem and the simplest type of business analysis. But if the analysis consisted of twenty pieces instead of two, it would be no harder; it would only be longer.

The production manager in the shoe factory analyzed his job correctly when he mapped out the route of an order. All he did was take the manufacturing process to pieces so that he could put the pieces together again to form a more efficient whole.

So whether there are two or twenty or two hundred pieces, the act of ANALYZING--of TAKING TO PIECES--differs only in the amount of territory it covers. Naturally it will be a somewhat more lengthy process to analyze the job of managing a steel mill than to separate a peanut stand and its operation into a few component parts. But the approach is always the same.

And no matter how good you may be with the woods, how the approach does affect the final score!

* * * * *

Consider for the moment that you have a house built of blocks and want to take it to pieces. A quick and easy way of separating it into its component parts would be a swift kick aimed down around the foundations.

A quick method. But comes nothing. There are all your blocks lying on the floor, but so far as knowing what they're all about, you're worse off than ever you were before you kicked your house down.

The other way of taking your house of blocks to pieces is to start with the roof and WORK BACKWARDS. The very thought, then, of "taking to pieces" suggests the correct way to undertake the analysis of a business or of a job.

And a study of the methods of successful managers will convince the doubtingest Thomas that starting at the top and working down to the cellar is the method they follow in the analysis of any business problem they have to tackle.

Once a busy ceramic manufacturer found himself in the restaurant business. He knew about all there was to know about dinnerware up to the point where it left his customers' counters. What went on after that was pretty much Greek to him if you know what we mean.

And then he became a restaurateur. All because his brother-in-law got into him for several thousand dollars and then couldn't quite seem to make the darned thing pay a profit.