Part 8

Our danger, then, is that we may find ourselves down on the floor surrounded by our blocks--and with never a trace of a PLAN for rebuilding the house, and rebuilding it in the simplest, most economical way.

In short, we must be sure we are taking things to pieces, not for the sake of taking them to pieces, but purely and simply to find out what has to be done.

Like the golfer who played golf so much in order to keep fit for golf, we have here a good old-fashioned beneficent circle. ANALYSIS without a PLAN isn't worth a whoop in Hades. It's time kissed goodbye. Wasted effort. And, in like manner, a PLAN without an ANALYSIS isn't worth the paper it's typed on.

Psmith in your office is a great "planner". He always has something on the fire. But somehow or other he never quite puts things over. His plans don't get across. Why not? Oh, just because he doesn't bother to analyze his problem--because he sets out to do what has to be done even before he knows what has to be done. He doesn't base his plan upon an actual need.

Pbrown, on the other hand, is a keen analytical thinker. A student. He's a shark at taking things to pieces and finding out what has to be done. But when he's done that, he's all done. He lacks the initiative that starts things moving. He hasn't that divine spark of something or other that gets things done. A stick of dynamite wouldn't do a bit of good. He simply hasn't the knack of building a plan. He knows what has to be done. He doesn't know how to do it.

Psmith and Pbrown--or Pbrown and Psmith--would make a fast team. But Psmith without Pbrown's analytical ability, or Pbrown without Psmith's capacity for planning how to get things done, isn't worth his weight in gold to any business enterprise.

A manufacturer friend tells an amusing yarn about a Pbrown he hired as sales manager.

"He went around analyzing everything from soup to nuts--the gadgets in our line, our markets, our competition, our salesmen.

"He was an analyzer de luxe. And all I ever got out of all his analyses was a distinct feeling that something was wrong with every gadget we made, that our markets were saturated, that our competitors had us backed off the map, and that our salesmen were a bunch of ribbon clerks.

"So," he continues, "I did a little analyzing all my own. And analyzed him out of his job. Today he's managing a filling station where they drive in for the most part and take it away from him. But in his place I got a man who found out what was wrong with gadgets, markets, salesmen--and right away he built a plan which sold goods."

Thus the futility of ANALYSIS without PLANNING.

There's the danger, too, of getting away from the SIMPLICITY OF TRUE ANALYSIS.

A job undertaken by an advertising agency for a rubber manufacturer supplies a case in point. Stripped of all the details, the task was to find out whether or not the manufacturer might profitably engage in the making of hard rubber tires for industrial trucks and trailers. If names are changed and products substituted, think nothing of it. The principle's the thing.

The agency began by analyzing the business to a fare-you-well. Everyone and everything got cross-examined.

It took three months. And when the analysis was done it told the manufacturer everything from where the rubber grew to where the money went to and came from. The trouble was, he knew all that before--or as much of it as he wanted to know. The report, in the words of a Chicago columnist, was just "64 dam pages." It didn't tell him one blessed thing he wanted to know. Or rather it was so full of plunder that he couldn't make head nor tail of it.

It wasn't SIMPLE. And because it wasn't SIMPLE, it was a far, far cry from TRUE ANALYSIS.

Well, well, the rubber manufacturer went out in the byways and got him a young man who was told to find out, if he could, whether or not there was any market for hard rubber tires on gas and electric industrial trucks, tractors and trailers, and allied equipment.

He found, for example, that there were 40,000 trucks and tractors in service; that annual sales were about 3,200 units. He discovered that, of trailers and hand lift trucks, 125,000 each were in service; annual sales were 12,000 and 10,000 units respectively. But when he came to floor and hand trucks, conservative estimates showed 8,000,000 in use, while annual sales were in the neighborhood of 250,000!

Next he found out, as accurately as possible, how many hard rubber tires were sold as original equipment. The 3,200 trucks and tractors had 12,300 wheels. But 95 per cent of them were equipped with rubber tires at the factory. On the other hand, only 7 per cent of the floor and hand trucks were thus equipped!

Outside of the truck and tractor people, he found the equipment makers opposed to hard rubber tires. Let's not go into the reasons. Yet representative manufacturers in a dozen different lines stated, when he asked them: "All future equipment purchased by us will be equipped with rubber tires."

The whole report wasn't twelve pages long. And three tables, carefully compiled from available facts and figures, told the manufacturer everything he wanted to know.

In short, upon this SIMPLE ANALYSIS, he was able to build a plan for manufacturing and merchandising solid rubber tires. Much good, though, it would have done him had he done his planning first and then found out there weren't enough wheels to wear the tires after he had made them!

* * * * *

So much for our "beneficent circle." Let us look into this thing called PLANNING and find out if there isn't some way of developing a knack of planning which will help us over the second major hurdle in our road to managing.

There is, we shall find, a single problem with which the planner, the constructive manager, deals. Again, it doesn't make a particle of difference whether it's Mr. Schwab and Bethlehem Steel or Tonio and his peanut stand. No business is so "different" that the principles of management fail to apply.

All right, then. The problem of every planner is first to determine what is the PRIMARY MOVING FORCE--the "initiative"--behind his job, and then to find the EASIEST PLACE TO APPLY THAT FORCE in order to set up the required MOTION or ACTIVITY with the LEAST AMOUNT OF EFFORT THAT WILL GET THE BEST RESULTS.

A long sentence. Go over it again and you will find it is divided into four distinct parts:

1. Deciding on the PRIMARY MOVING FORCE with which to set the wheels in motion.