should come to employes through the superintendent's office, not only
to respect the integrity of the organization unit, but to preserve a
history of the transaction in the authorized office of record--to get
all the runs, including the general manager's special, on the right
train sheet as it were. Whoever acts, whether the superintendent
himself or an assistant, has at hand in one office of record full
information for his guidance. You understand that the superintendent is
boss. He may see any or all communications from employes as he thinks
fit. Where previously he instructed his chief clerk what to bring to
him personally, such instruction he now gives to his chief of staff. An
employe who addressed "Assistant Superintendent" may receive a reply
signed by the superintendent himself. This is an honest record, not a
subterfuge. Some assistant, the chief of staff, has handled the paper
as well as the superintendent himself. To the subordinate the
superintendent is normally an incidental representative of authority
entitled to the greater respect to be given his higher rank. To the
general offices, and to co-ordinate units, the superintendent is an
essential head of a component unit who must not be ignored. Therefore,
since there is an implied obligation for the superintendent to answer
superior authority himself, all communications from superior and
co-ordinate authority are addressed impersonally, "Superintendent." A
railway is so extensive that the superintendent should spend at least
half the time out on his division. In his absence the chief of staff is
allowed to communicate with the general offices and other divisions in
his own name, but "for the superintendent." The superintendent may
answer from the road himself, but in any case the general offices know
who has really taken action. Going down on the division any assistant
may sign, subject to review by the chief of staff. Going up to higher
authority only the superintendent or his chief of staff may sign. The
rights of the individual assistants are preserved by permitting any one
to go on record to the general offices when he so desires. He writes
his letter, addresses it "Assistant Superintendent," and takes it to
either the superintendent or chief of staff and requests that it be
forwarded. In this exceptional case a letter of transmittal is written
setting forth the views of the superintendent. A cat may look at a
king. A meritorious idea should not be throttled because it does not
happen to appeal to the next superior.
When a division official on any road rides a train, he does not first
thing try to tell the conductor what meeting points should be made. He
usually says, "Let me see your orders," which is in effect asking the
conductor what the dispatcher has said must be done. Protected by this
vital information the official may then venture some suggestions. In
the preliminary lecture explaining the unwritten laws of the unit
system the new assistant superintendents are cautioned to apply the
same principle. They are not to see how much trouble they can make, but
how little. If the transportation assistant, for example, pulls up to a
water tank at 7:20 a.m. and sees the section men just going to work,
he does not jump on the foreman for being late, but quietly asks, "What
are your working hours? What time does the roadmaster tell you to begin
work?" The moral effect of the presence of an alert, observing
official, armed with sufficient authority, becomes an asset of value to
the stockholders. We have not enough officials to ride every train and
cover every point. The more open, intelligent supervision we can get
from each official the better should be the operation. Of course, if
the officials were not experienced railway men a condition of nagging
and rawhiding might result which would prove fatal. What the unit
system does is to try to make potential the latent knowledge and
ability which every official possesses in a greater or less degree. The
old over-specialized system denies that this stored-up reserve exists
to any practicable extent.
The fact that the title of assistant superintendent is uniform tends to
bring out the real individuality of the different assistants. Each has
to have his name on the door of his private office. As we hear less and
less of "my department" and more and more of "this division," the
references to "the trainmaster," "the master mechanic," etc., etc.,
give way to "Mr. A.," "Mr. B.," etc. The assistant superintendents have
definite seniority, and when two or more come together under
circumstances rendering it necessary, as at a wreck, the senior present
takes charge and becomes responsible. Remember that rank and authority
can be conferred by seniority in grade as well as by grade itself.
The scriptural warning that no man can serve two masters is still
applicable. In our case the master is the corporation, represented at
different times by various individuals clothed with authority. The
conductor runs his train under the laws of the land, the policy of the
president, the rules of the general manager, the bulletins of the
superintendent, the assignment of an assistant superintendent, the
orders of a dispatcher. He collects tickets and fares as directed by
the general passenger agent and reports on forms prescribed by the
auditor. The lower we go in the scale the fewer the superiors with
whose instructions the employe comes in direct contact. The trackman
knows authority only as its exercise is personified by his section
foreman until the paymaster tells him to wipe off his feet before
entering to receive his check. Therefore, put out a slow flag against
too fast running over such low joints as "one boss," "complete
responsibility," "divided authority," etc., etc., until you feel
certain just what speed they will stand.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER IX.
STANDARDIZING OFFICE FILES.
Chicago, June 3, 1911.
My Dear Boy:--It has doubtless occurred to you how worthless as
evidence are many of the office files. How can any one tell a year
afterward whether the general manager or the superintendent ever saw
the telegram on which his name is typewritten? On most roads any one
of a half dozen or a dozen people may have dictated the message. How
much better, as under the unit system, to have every man doing business
in his own name! He can then supplement the written record with much
more intelligent recollection of events related to the transaction. We
dictate the most important telegrams, which pass unquestioned, without
an autograph signature. This is common sense and just as it should be.
When an unimportant letter is written somebody has to get out a pen and
sign some name or other. How inconsistent! Why not, for certain kinds
of correspondence, let the stenographer typewrite the name of the
dictating or signing official, and then authenticate with the office
dating stamp or a private seal mark? The office dating stamp should be
kept under lock and key in official custody in order that it may be
used for authentication, like the seal of a notary public. To save the
labor of constant signing I predict that some time we may go back to
individual personal seals carried on a finger ring or a watch fob. That
is the way they authenticated documents at a time when the gentry felt
themselves above learning to read and write.
If you have occasion to dictate a message over the telephone from your
house at midnight, do not let the operator imitate your autograph
signature, but have him print your name with a pen, pencil or
typewriter. Also, take good care to have such messages sent to you
afterward for you to check. Your time is valuable, but it cannot be put
to better use for the company than in insuring the integrity of your
individual transactions. It may be that no record whatever is
necessary. With all our craze for accumulating files we do not record
many telephone conversations. You must be the judge as to whether a
record for your office is necessary, and in such exceptional cases
state your wishes at the time. The farther down the employe the more
zealous is he to escape possible censure by preserving unnecessary
information. What we need is one complete record of a transaction
rather than so many partial records. Many of the telegrams sent from a
superintendent's office should, after sending, go to the main file
room for consolidation with related papers under a subjective
classification. It is more logical to file certain classes of messages
by days in date order. For example, messages relating to train
movements should usually be filed in date order since they are
supplementary to the train sheets of that particular day, and the date
would be the determining factor in tracing the transaction afterward.
These two distinct classes of messages should be filed, the one under
a subjective classification, the other under a serial classification.
The good, old-fashioned way of rolling together all the messages of the
day and cording them in a pile on the top shelf was all right in the
day of wood-burners, but falls short in this day of higher pressures.
Remember, too, that the telegraph office is a part of the same
establishment. Wherefore, make a carbon copy of every telegram that is
going down the hall to be transmitted.
If you wish to get real busy and cultivate patience, try to introduce a
uniform filing system in all the offices on the road. Every fellow will
tell you that the system in his office is best. The acid test is: "Will
your system fit the president's office?" and the stereotyped reply is,
"You see we are very different. Our local conditions are peculiar." So
it falls out that when the agent writes his superintendent about office
furniture, for example, the agent, if it is a big station, gives the
subject a file number. The superintendent gives it a second number. If
perchance the general superintendent, the purchasing agent, the general
storekeeper, the general manager, and the president should happen to
get hold of the papers, each office would affix a different number. You
might have on the same railroad as many as seven different file numbers
for the same subject. Remember that all filing systems are arbitrary.
Whether you designate office furniture as seven, eleven, twenty-three,
or forty-four, it rests in the breast of somebody to say what that
designation shall be. It is like numbering trains, cars and
locomotives, we take some arbitrary basis from which we build up a
logical classification. Formerly, trains, cars and locomotives were
given serial numbers in the order of creation. So were letters in an
office. Now the proposition is too big and we assign series of numbers
for classifications which are more or less self-suggesting. Any number
of men have tried to work out a filing system based on the Interstate
Commerce Commission classification of accounts. Any number of men have
soon encountered limiting conditions which seem to preclude a
satisfactory solution.
If you had time, I do not doubt your ability to work out the best kind
of a filing system, but you have not the time. If you had lived before
George Stephenson you might have invented the locomotive, but George
beat us all to it. If you had time you could work out a table of
logarithms, or a table of trigonometric functions. Life is so short
that it is better to use the tables that other people have prepared. By
the same token, if I were you, I would save my company money by
adopting Williams' Railroad Classification. It is an expansive, but not
expensive, decimal system suitable for everybody from the station agent
to the president. Among the roads that have taken it seriously are the
Baltimore & Ohio, the Delaware & Hudson, the Pennsylvania, and the
Harriman Lines, not such a puny lot. Others say of it as of the unit
system of organization: "We are watching its development with much
interest." In either case, if the stockholders and directors are
complacent, you and I have no kick coming as to the number of years
over which this inactive watchfulness may extend.
The manifest advantages of a uniform filing classification are the time
saved in avoiding duplication of numbers, and the practical familiarity
possible to officials and employes of all grades and locations. When a
man is promoted or transferred, he does not have to learn a new filing
system. Instead of the whole burden of filing being upon a file clerk,
everybody can be helping to preserve the integrity and insure the
efficiency of the system. It is not necessary to sit up nights and
memorize filing numbers. Take the matter seriously, and in a short time
you will unconsciously absorb the most important numbers, just as you
get trains, cars, and locomotives in your head. Officials frequently
have a disproportionate and exaggerated sense of the value of their own
time. They are paid to think from their presumably wider understanding.
If the official by one minute's thought can dictate the file number and
later on save several hours of search in the file room, it is his duty
to do so. All over the country file clerks tell me their troubles. The
burden is, "If you will get the officials to respect the files as much
as we respect the officials, it will all be easy." You know, my boy,
that there are a whole lot of things that deserve to be taken just as
seriously as we take ourselves. Consider this standard code of train
rules again. With all its defects and shortcomings it is a vital force.
Because it is standard it gains a respect as a result of lifelong drill
and discipline of employes, regardless of changes in location or
assignment. Therefore, standardize your files, and interest your
officials. Rank imposes obligation, or _noblesse oblige_, as the
French say.
It is a much easier matter to start a new filing system than is
generally supposed. Just begin. It is not necessary to renumber the old
files. Give new numbers to all the old stuff that comes in, and in a
month or two you will probably absorb nearly all that is of current
interest. Then store the remainder of the old stuff as a dead file
under the old system. Most of the old you will never need, but if you
do, as occasion arises, locate under the old system and transfer to the
new.
If you are putting up a new office building or re-arranging an old one,
try and locate the main file room next to the telegraph office. Or put
one over the other so that quick communication can be made by some such
device as a chute, dumb waiter, or pneumatic tube. Telegrams received
can then be hurried to the file room and related papers attached, when
desirable, without taking the valuable time of an official to send to
the file room for them. Here is a place for a really rational
conservation of official time. The effect of effort should be in
proportion to its intelligence and intensity rather than to its amount.
Experts long ago established the fact by time studies, and otherwise,
that flat, vertical filing cases are the most efficient and economical.
There are a number of satisfactory makes on the market. Like selecting
a typewriter, it is largely a matter of personal preferment. The way to
beat another man at his own game is first to sit in, play and learn.
Gamblers would become extinct if all men lived up to this advice. Most
railway officials regard organization as an exception to this precept
because, as I said before, nearly every man flatters himself that he is
a born organizer. Before you raise the stakes too high in trying to
beat another man's game of organization, better first sit in and play
it his way.
Do not be afraid to trust outlying offices, like those of your
superintendents, to run their own files. Have them inspected as often
as may be necessary to insure uniformity and efficiency. Do not forbid
their adding numbers as emergencies arise. Assemble these new subjects
periodically, say once in six months, for standardization, and amplify
the working numbers if necessary. You must allow for differences in the
human equation. Some men are strict constructionists, and some are
broader. Some men classify under a few subjects, while others subdivide
to a greater degree. You know the old story of the man who was indexing
and feared that something might be overlooked. So under the caption,
"God," he put the cross reference, "See Almighty God." Without a
retrospective study of actual performance you cannot well say just how
many sub-numbers shall be used in a given office, any more than you can
determine in advance how many train orders a certain dispatcher should
put out under the standard code. Among the advantages of using a card
index for running a file is that by counting the live cards we know the
number of subjects in actual use. This is not inconsistent with book
numbers, the book then being used as a reference encyclopedia from
which subjects are entered on cards as fast as each necessity arises.
Remember that while immutable principles must eventually triumph over
local conditions, much depends upon considerate application. The local
condition didn't just happen, but had its origin in some reason, good
or bad, perhaps once convincing but now outgrown. Sometimes the reason
is so vital as to be a principle in itself. In our beloved Southland
there are local conditions of society which do not obtain elsewhere in
this country. True Southerners thank God that human slavery has been
abolished. They are striving earnestly and successfully to adjust
conditions created in the birth pangs of a social revolution. Well
managed railroads like the Louisville & Nashville adjust their working
policies to these basic conditions. Nearly a decade ago Samuel Spencer,
as president, felt that the Southern Railway needed an infusion of new
operating blood and a rotation of types, both excellent things in
themselves, but, as experience showed, easily overdone and carried to
an irrational degree. With native talent at hand for the developing he
imported to the proud old civilization of his birth some rough and
ready brethren of the western prairies. These earnest men and their
followers knew how better than they knew why. They were long on art,
but short on science. Demoralization and wrecks, attributed to
inadequate facilities, cost the road much public confidence, cost the
stockholders hundreds of thousands of dollars, and finally, in an awful
tragedy, cost the able president his useful and honored life. Fate
accorded to outraged sociology and her smaller sister, organization,
terrible and undeserved retribution. For, barring this one mistaken
policy, Samuel Spencer was an earnest patriot and a constructive
railway statesman. As a youth he served in the Confederate army.
Through life devotion to his flag was a passion. As a man and a
gentleman his character was unblemished, his integrity was stainless.
Peace to his ashes. Success to the Southern. Its great traffic
strength, actual and potential, rests on the broad foundations laid by
Samuel Spencer. Prosperity to the railroads. By constant search for the
lessons of human efficiency to be drawn from such experiences as these,
they prove their broad claim to scientific management.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER X.
THE LINE AND THE STAFF.
Chicago, June 10, 1911.
My Dear Boy:--You have asked me to tell you something about line and
staff. The term line is used to indicate the direct sequence toward the
active purpose of the organization. The line officer exercises a direct
authority over men and things. He is the incarnation of administrative
action. The staff is supplementary to the line as equity is
supplementary to law. The staff officer is the playwright. The line
officer is the actor. The actor is usually too much absorbed with the
technique of his art to write new plays. The line officer, as such,
seldom originates new methods, because he is too close to his everyday
problems of administration to cultivate perspective. The ideal staff
officer has had experience in the line.
The line with a railroad--its fighting force, so to speak--is the
operating department. Because they are staff departments the offices of
the other three, namely, accounting, traffic, and executive, legal and
financial, can close from Saturday noon until Monday morning. The
operating department, being the line, keeps the road open and the
trains moving. Because of the poverty of our language, we now encounter
some difficulties of expression in explaining all the various
ramifications of line and staff. A staff department, because of its
size, may exercise line functions within its own interior
administration. Thus, the auditor organizes his office forces under
appropriate chief and subordinate officers who, within the accounting
department itself, exercise the authority of line officers. When such
accounting officers get outside their legitimate sphere and endeavor to
act as line officers in the operating department, expensive friction
begins. This feature I shall discuss with you later. Suffice it to say
that at present the hardest of all problems is to keep line and staff
in economical balance. Staff departments then may within themselves
exercise line functions. This grows rather from necessities imposed by
size than from inherent nature of function. The first staff officer was
an adviser and exercised no authority, except that of polite inquiry,
because there was no one whom he could properly command. So the line,
the operating department, soon grows so big as to require staff
officers within itself, people who have time to think out improvements
because they are not burdened with administrative responsibilities.
Hold tightly to this thought, my boy. The plane of differentiation
between line and staff usually follows a cleavage based upon size
rather than upon relative importance of function. The first line
officer needed no staff, because he had time to think as well as act
for himself. The first superintendent looked after the repairmen
himself. The first master mechanic came into being not because he was
so different from everybody else, but because the superintendent had
become too busy to do it all himself. By and by the master mechanic
forgot this basic fact and, unconsciously exaggerating his own
specialty, began to feel that the railway is incident to shops and
equipment rather than shops and equipment incident to the railway. The
last five years have witnessed a decided improvement in this
undesirable condition. Just at present the store department Indians are
the tribe most in need of being rounded up on the operating department
reservation for eye wash and vaccination against distorted perspective.
The operating department of a railroad is, or should be, a real
department, complete and self-contained. It consists of such important
component elements or branches as maintenance of way and structures,
maintenance of equipment, transportation, telegraph, signals, stores,
purchases, dining cars, etc. Let us not waste any time discussing the
relative importance of these components. Æsop centuries ago did that
better than we can. His fable of the quarrel among the organs of the
human body teaches us that while all are important each is useless
without the others.