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.
The first stumbling step toward organization, therefore, is to RECOGNIZE
and DEFINE the PRINCIPAL and the DEPUTIES in a given task.
A good manager, though, can't simply go and deputize every detail of his
job. That might be nothing more than the trick of a lazy man.
Yet a rising young executive (on our list of casual acquaintances) has
done exactly that. He has carried it to such a fine point that he is
able to spend three afternoons a week with Col. Bogie. He is still
rising, although some of us have abiding faith in the old adage that
what goes up must come down. In other words, he's rising to a fall.
No, organizing is not deputizing in that sense of the word.
In EFFECTIVE ORGANIZING, it will be noted from the examples cited, work
is deputized _only when the "principal" is left free to do something
else more important or more profitable_.
The "big boss" didn't hand the plant over to his assistant until he knew
his undivided attention was needed elsewhere--until he knew he could
spend his time more profitably in another phase of the business.
Analyze the conditions under which the sales manager delegated part of
his dictation to a system, and part of his stenographer's typing to a
duplicating machine. You will see that the work deputized fulfilled two
conditions: