superintendent of motive power, the superintendent of transportation,
the superintendent of telegraph, the general storekeeper, and the
superintendent of dining cars, are line officers exercising direct
authority in a defined sequence. Collectively they constitute, for
consultation, the general manager's staff. When all have the rank and
title of assistant general manager, this duality of function is the
more pronounced and valuable. For the feudal notion of unbalanced
components is substituted the cabinet idea of comprehensive
deliberation, unified administration and devotion to a common purpose.
(Anvil chorus: "It's that way on our road now.") Perhaps so, but if so,
what assurance have your stockholders and the public that the same
happy condition will obtain ten years hence? Each head of the nine
executive departments in Washington is a line officer running his own
department. At the President's cabinet table he becomes a staff officer
deliberating upon the problems of all. The attorney-general should be
called secretary of law, and the postmaster-general secretary of posts.
Then all nine would have the uniform title of secretary. The position
of secretary to the president, an assistant _to_ proposition, should
be abolished--usually I prefer the gentler expression, "title
discontinued." His duties should be performed by the secretary of
state, who is always the ranking member of the cabinet. In the first
cabinet, that of George Washington, the secretary of state, Thomas
Jefferson, was in effect, though not in name, prime minister and chief
of staff. Foreign affairs, then an incidental feature, are now so
extensive for a world power that we should have another department
under a secretary of foreign affairs, leaving the secretary of state as
senior to be the able righthand man of the president. Here again the
size of the proposition, the volume of business, is the proper
determining factor.
On a small railway the chief engineer as a line officer may be able to
do all the engineering himself. As the business grows he requires such
special staff advisers as an office engineer, a locating engineer, a
bridge engineer, a tunnel engineer, a signal engineer, etc. Some roads
make such engineers line officers by giving them extensive authority
over working forces. Usually I believe this is a mistake. It seems
better for these engineers to be real staff officers, thinking,
inspecting, warning, instructing (in the sense of lecturing),
improving, designing and perhaps sometimes installing, but never
directly operating or maintaining. The same general reasoning applies
to the mechanical bureau when the business of the chief mechanical
officer attains a volume necessitating the help of such valuable staff
officers as a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a testing
engineer, etc.
When the telegraph came to supplement the railway, men stood in awe of
its invisible effects. Soon the telegraph man said in effect, "This is
a wonderful and mysterious specialty which you fellows cannot
understand. Let me, the expert, handle it for you." So he segregated
unto himself a so-called department on the plea that it is so
different. By and by the division superintendents woke up to find their
telegraph hands tied. Appeals to the general superintendent or general
manager proved fruitless. So the division linemen usually report
directly to the superintendent of telegraph. They often stay around
division headquarters until the chief dispatcher is able to jar them
loose and get them out on the road. Then they go to the scene of
trouble, look wise and get the section foreman to dig the hole and do
most of the work. Why not, therefore, hold the section foreman
responsible for ordinary wire repairs in the first place? Let every
section house have a pair of climbers, a wire cutter and pliers with
whatever simple outfit may be necessary. If unusual troubles develop or
a line is to be rebuilt send the most expert help available, but while
on the division let such help be under the authority of the
superintendent. We need an expert at the top as chief telegraph and
telephone officer to tell us all how to do it. The volume of business
will usually warrant making him a line officer with the rank and title
of assistant general manager. He should not deal directly with
operators and linemen any more than a general superintendent under
normal conditions should instruct an individual conductor or a chief
engineer communicate direct with a section foreman. The integrity of
the division as an operating unit should be respected.
By and by the signals followed the telegraph. Once more the management
allowed the specialist to put it over at the expense of the good old
wheel horses in the regular line organization. The embryo signal
engineer said, "This wonderful and mysterious development is really
something different this time. It is absurd to suppose these stupid old
section foremen can learn anything about electricity." So the signal
engineer was allowed to build up a new department. He went out on the
ranches or in the barber shops and hired signal maintainers. A new
department is liberally treated because its activities are a fad for
the time being. These signal maintainers in a few months absorb so much
magnetism from the field of the signal engineer that they are qualified
experts to whom the rest of us must not say anything. They have easier
work, if not better pay, than the faithful section foremen of perhaps
twenty years' service. The old section foreman has a "savvy" of the
railroad business, an intuitive knowledge of the requirements of train
movement that it will take the fresh young maintainer years to acquire.
Then we wonder why it is so difficult to secure loyal section foremen.
Sometimes a belated effort has been made to let in the section foremen
on the signal game. It is difficult, however, to get the signal people
to take an appreciative and sympathetic interest in men who are not in
"my department." Therefore, to prevent your track forces being thrown
out of balance it will be better for a few years to keep the signal
engineer on most railways as a staff officer without permitting him a
line organization for operation and maintenance. Say to your
roadmasters and section foremen that they will, at the company's
expense, be given instruction in signals. When the signal engineer,
the expert, pronounces them qualified by examination or otherwise, let
them understand that there is a small automatic increase in pay.
Transfer to branch lines the few who prove hopelessly deficient. The
track laborer who can qualify to look after a particular signal is
worth a few cents more a day to the company and should be so advised.
If you start with the presumption that the man below is too dumb to
learn you handicap him and probably doom him to failure. If you make
him believe that he can learn what men of the same class around him are
learning, that you, his elder brother, are in duty bound to help him,
you will be astonished at the response of his latent intelligence. The
great managers of the feudal period were forceful drivers. The great
managers of to-day and to-morrow are great teachers, the greatest of all
experts, because they show the man below how to do it. Lots of men know
how. A good many know why. Comparatively few have that rare and
valuable combination of knowing both how and why. It is not a happen
so, but a response to the law of supply and demand, that men of the
Woodrow Wilson type are coming to the front in our political life.
Getting back to signals. On a road of more than one or two tracks, it
may be advisable to segregate your signals from your track. Here again
the dividing line is volume of business rather than fancied importance
of function. Signals are important, but so is the track. Each is an
incidental component of railway operation, not the whole operation
itself. On most railways the section foreman should be the responsible
head of a complete sub-unit for everyday maintenance and inspection,
including track, bridges, fences, poles, wires and signals. This may
involve giving him more help or a shorter section.
One of the problems of line and staff is to determine what is
intelligent rotation between the two. The line officer, dealing with
men rather than ideas, may get into a rut of practice which prevents
his seeing the beauty of the rainbow which the untrammeled staff
officer may be tempted to chase too far. Some officers succeed
brilliantly at originating or developing ideas in the staff and fail
miserably at handling men in the line.
True individuality about which men prate the most is that which is
understood the least. Our Army and Navy are insisting that before being
staff officers, all officers, except surgeons and chaplains, must first
learn to handle men by serving in the line; that crystallization in the
staff must be prevented by periodic rotation to definite tours of duty
in the line. The railway of the future will probably carry extra
numbers of line officials in the various grades that some may be
available for detail to the staff, that we may better co-ordinate our
studying and our working activities.
People say that our good friend, Harrington Emerson, able and sincere,
will unconsciously give the staff the best of it; while your old dad,
on an even break, will be found on the side of the line. If they are
correct, it leaves plenty of room for the other fellows in between. One
of the delightful foibles that make human nature so interesting and so
lovable is the inborn conviction of the average man that, "though H be
a conservative and K a radical, I am always the happy medium."
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER XI.
THE PROBLEM OF THE GET-RICH-QUICK CONDUCTOR.
Chicago, June 17, 1911.
My Dear Boy:--Not so very long ago the wife of a passenger conductor,
running out of a large southern city, sought the assistance of her
pastor, a noted divine. She was worried by the fact that her husband
was stealing the company's money. With a good woman's intuition she
knew that the wages of sin is death; that sooner or later her husband
would lose his job and his family its legitimate income. To her good,
old-fashioned, unspecialized conscience stealing is stealing, whether
called "embezzlement," "holding out," or "trouble with the auditor."
The fearless evangelist shortly afterward preached a powerful sermon
against stealing, and included passenger conductors in his warnings. So
incensed was the conductor in question that he announced his intention
of disregarding the protection carried by the clerical cloth and of
knocking the minister down. When the two met his bluff was called. The
conductor, not the minister, came to his knees, not in fighting, but in
prayer.
Here, my boy, is a canker sore that must be cured. Do not tell me that
the Order of Railway Conductors is alone to blame. Do not tell me that
in the lodge room the order side-tracks the eighth commandment for the
working schedule. Do not tell me that the order will expel a member for
any other offense rather than for stealing. Do not tell me that our
problem is harder and our revenue less because Ed. Clark, the grand
chief of an order thus lawless, was appointed by Teddy Roosevelt to sit
in judgment on us from the high throne of the Interstate Commerce
Commission. Tell me, rather, that we, the official class, are to blame;
that we must cease to dodge responsibility. We, the educated and
_entrepreneur_ class; we, the elder brothers of society and industry,
cannot shift the burden.
Please do not misunderstand me. There are many honest passenger
conductors. I have known them on the road and in their homes. Some
there are who deserve the more credit for withstanding temptation
because of sickness or extravagance in the family. There are, however,
too many dishonest passenger conductors. It is not enough for a man to
be honest himself. The complexities of modern life make him more than
ever his brother's keeper. He must not only stand for the right but
condemn the wrong. The Order of Railway Conductors must make the
American people believe that it is a great moral force for honesty in
all things. We, the officials, must help the conductors to bring about
this happy result.
The clerk for the corner grocer will not steal from his employer as
quickly as he will from a large corporation. The existence of a
personal employer brings home the moral turpitude by visualizing the
individual wrong committed. Coupled with this higher moral incentive is
the fear of detection through close personal supervision and interest.
In a large corporation we have to approximate to this condition. The
corporation, an impersonal creation, is vitalized by the men charged
with responsibilities. The problem of organization is to give maximum
effectiveness to this vitalization, to utilize to the fullest degree
the personal equations of those entrusted with authority. Many
railroads have lost control of their passenger conductors because of a
fundamental misconception of the principles of true organization.
On the early railways the superintendent was the only officer the
conductor officially knew. The superintendent, close to the president,
was interested in the revenue as well as the disbursement side of the
company's ledger. If the conductor stole, if the returns were short on
a day of heavy travel, the superintendent was among the first to know
it, and to preserve his own reputation, and thereby hold his own job,
promptly discharged the conductor. By and by some conductors graduated
into superintendents. This new condition brought a new temptation. The
conductor, if allowed to keep on stealing, and if favored with a run
where the stealing was especially good, could well afford to whack up
secretly with the superintendent. A few, a very few, superintendents
yielded to this temptation. Along came the auditor with his mistaken
theory that human nature can be changed and men made more honest by
being put in "my department." He said, in effect, "Take this away from
the superintendent, who is dishonest and busy with other things; let
this mysterious specialty of conductors' collections be handled by the
only honest department." So the superintendent was relieved from
responsibility for making his conductors render honest returns. He soon
lost interest in that feature. The roads grew, and superimposed above
the superintendent came first the general superintendent, and then the
general manager, both also relieved from this responsibility to which
the auditor clung with jealous tenacity. The conductor probably could
not have told what principles of organization had been violated. He was
the first to see the easier mark the company had become, the first to
profit by the serious mistake that had been made. He found that his
reports were checked by office clerks hundreds of miles away and
entirely uninformed as to current conditions of local travel. The
superintendent and the other division officials who rode with him and
knew conditions were powerless to check him promptly and effectively
because his reports and returns were going to somebody else over the
hills and far away. These officials, because somebody else was
responsible, did not seem to care very much. So the conductor stole
under their very eyes and got away with it. Anything like this which
begets a wholesale contempt for duly constituted authority is
demoralizing to general discipline. The labor unions are not alone to
blame for the spread of insubordination.
All men are students of practical psychology, whether conscious of the
fact or not. The conductor found that to hold his job he must do well
those things for which the superintendent and the division officials
were responsible. So the bigger thief the conductor became the more
careful was he about other duties. He was a crank on train rules,
perhaps, or made courtesy to the public his watchword. All of this
stood him well in hand. Sooner or later the spotter caught him and the
auditor requested the general manager to order his discharge. When this
got down to the superintendent or the trainmaster the conductor was
called in. Instead of being berated for a thief, if he acknowledged the
corn, the conductor was discharged, half sympathetically, half
apologetically. The division official would have resented the
imputation of harboring or encouraging a thief. To him the conductor
was an efficient, faithful employe, meeting all requirements of
service. If the conductor failed to please somebody else it really must
be the fault of that somebody or the system. This feeling was not
unnatural, since the detection came through a discredited channel, the
spotter. Rare are the circumstances where secret service should be
necessary. There is something inherently wrong in any system which has
to gain routine information by indirect methods. The detective should
not be necessary for checking the good and the bad alike, but only for
following up those who become manifestly bad or notoriously corrupt.
The most efficient system is that where open checking and inspection
are so thorough that temptation is diminished by the ever-present
thought of prompt and sure detection. This desirable condition cannot
obtain where the system makes such important officers as the
superintendent and the trainmaster unconscious attorneys for the
defense, sometimes openly advocating reinstatement of a thief. On the
contrary, from its impersonal nature, a corporation must be so
administered as to gain the moral effect of every available force for
right, to secure the help, however small, of every person connected
with the administration. Views of composite efficiency must converge at
a point sufficiently near to be of practical value, not so remote as to
be of only theoretical interest. No system is perfect. Under any
conditions the very size of a railway necessitates a trifling allowance
for peculation which creeps in. This can, however, be reduced to a
negligible quantity.
So completely has the old system broken down on most railways--there
are a few exceptions--that it has become a farce. It is a sad
commentary on organization that many roads are giving the passenger
conductor up as a bad job and putting on expensive train auditors who
usually are really not auditors, but collectors. They are called
auditors probably because they are under the auditor. It is a principle
of organization that the staff as such should never command the line.
The staff reviews, inspects, audits, studies, advises, suggests and,
perhaps, promulgates, but should never execute, except as a
representative of the line, the latter being responsible for the
results of operation whatever the operation may happen to be. The
accounting department is a staff department. When it was given charge
of a line function, fare collection, a principle was violated. Ultimate
failure of the system was therefore certain and inevitable. The train
auditor proposition fails to recognize this underlying cause. It
further violates principle, intensifies the evil and wastes more money
by increasing the number of staff men doing line work. Its direct
effects are vicious and its indirect effects are demoralizing to
discipline. How can the young flagman have due respect for his
superintendent or other official when he sees the train auditor come to
the rear platform and demand to see the pass of the official? If he is
an old flagman it is a little hard for him to see why he himself or his
friend, the old station agent, might not have been given this new job
with its fine pay. Like his superintendent the flagman may have been in
the service twenty or thirty years. The train auditor, only last week a
country hotel clerk, mayhap, flashes on them both as a would-be
superior being from a better world. Neither of the two can become very
enthusiastic in helping the train auditor to protect the company's
revenue.
It is an awful reflection for the conductors to meet, that, although
the railroads of this country are now spending hundred of thousands of
dollars for train auditors, they are more than getting it back from
increased collections turned in. Is not this more of a condemnation of
the old system than a justification of the new? Whether or not the
train auditor enters into collusion with the conductor, the former soon
learns how easy it is to beat the system. When he does break loose he
will be more reckless than the conductor. The latter probably had to
work for years as a freight brakeman and a freight conductor to get
where he is, and if he loses out may be too old to begin all over
again. The train auditor gets his appointment too easily to value it
very highly. Offsetting this is the fact that the train auditor is more
amenable to some discipline because, as yet unorganized, he can not
rely on the support of a labor union to secure his reinstatement. The
auditor also has the advantage of examining character from a wider
range of selection in choosing his train auditors. The train and engine
services have been so badly over-specialized, as I shall show you some
other time, that our choice is restricted to men whom the trainmaster
happened to hire as extra brakeman years ago. These slight advantages
in favor of the train auditor system have been given undue weight. We
are all too much inclined to dodge responsibility, to take the course
of least resistance and to pass it up to the other fellow. The company
pays the bill.
The railways of this country are wasting hundreds of thousands of
dollars every year by failure to make the conductors do their honest
duty. I would like to have you immortalize yourself by saving your
company its pro-rata share of this economic waste. The American people
at heart are honest, and barring a few dishonest traveling men who
short-fare conductors and train auditors with cash, will in the mass
support you and the Order of Railway Conductors in any intelligent
movement for honesty. On the other hand, if the people at large get an
idea that you are omitting to use all the moral forces at your command
they will organize some more special commissions to handle another part
of your business for you. Do not let the people get the idea that where
passenger fare stealing flourishes, freight claims increase because
some freight crews are robbing box cars, and expenses increase because
some officials are grafting.
If I were your president I would ask authority of the board of
directors, a staff body, to say, as a line officer, to you, also of the
line, that as chief operating official you are the only passenger
conductor with whom the executive and staff departments will normally
deal; that your tenure of office depends quite as much upon your
ability to prevent stealing as to prevent accidents. To the auditor I
would say that he is responsible for certifying to the integrity of all
components of your operations by proper examinations _after the
fact_; that he has access to all your accounts and records; that he
has no direct authority over any operating men; that all his
instructions must be in general terms duly approved by the proper
executive. Then he would be a real auditor instead of a chief
accountant. We would not have to call in the public accountant to do
our real auditing. You would be a real general manager.
Assuming that the proposition is up to you, then say to each division
superintendent that he is the only conductor on the division in whom
normally you will be personally interested; that the conductor will
send either the original or a duplicate of every report made by him to
the superintendent's office, addressing it impersonally, "Assistant
Superintendent." Let the superintendent understand that he and his
assistant superintendents when riding over the road on duty at the
company's expense must openly check the train just as they check train
orders. Pitch it on the high plane of self-evident routine duty for
duty's sake, above any thought of underhanded spotting. Give the
superintendent as many assistant superintendents and clerks as he may
need. Do not let him employ specialists for this one simple component
of operation. Have him bulletin train earnings by conductors that the
dear women may help the cause by sewing society discussion. Let him
have the community understand that some explanation is expected from a
get-rich-quick conductor. By this time it will dawn on the
superintendent and his assistants that their jobs depend upon the
prevention of stealing. Their unconscious sympathy with the thief will
vanish. Because they are close enough to the proposition to give
practical attention they will prevent stealing.
I am aware that passenger conductors often run over more than one
division. This presents no serious practical difficulty, although for
many other good reasons also it is better, when practicable, for
conductors not to run off the division. Pullman conductors run from
their home district over the districts of several of their
superintendents.