conservatism and circumlocution. Some things we do much better than the
government. There are things the government does much better than we
do. For example, an officer of the corps of engineers in the Army does
his own disbursing. He controls all the component functions of his
particular activity, including supply and purchase. He is checked up
after the fact by an auditor in Washington. A railway cannot pay most
of its bills until six or seven persons sign a voucher. Number seven
signs perfunctorily because Number six did. Number six likewise is the
cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that caused the voucher in
the house that Jack built. It all comes down to some responsible man
who handled the matter in the first place. Why not trust him, and
perhaps one other, checking them both after the bill has been promptly
paid? A bank check is validated by only one genuine, creditable
indorsement. If drawn to bearer or to self, only one signature is
necessary. I am optimistic enough to believe that you will live long
enough to see railways follow the example of the banks and the
government and pay a legitimate bill with one, or at the most two
signatures. When this is done, however, I trust that due notice will be
given, so that the seismograph stations may have fair warning. If all
the old time auditors turn over in their graves at the same time, the
earth will tremble and the shock will be too great for delicate
instruments.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER XVIII.
ORGANIZATION OF THE IDEAL RAILROAD.
Spokane, Wash., August 5, 1911.
My Dear Boy:--Someone has asked me how far up and how far down the
principles of the unit system and the chief of staff idea can be
applied. It is too bad the answer is so easy. Otherwise we might
inaugurate a guessing contest and offer prizes. The unit system is
applicable to every phase of modern organization. When its principles
are better understood, you will see develop in the great financial
centers some such important title as vice-chairman, in order that rank
and authority may be conferred superior to that of the presidents of
the constituent properties. Both the chairman and the president need a
senior vice-chairman and a senior vice-president, respectively, to act
as chief of staff. The New York Central once had a senior
vice-president, W. C. Brown, and the St. Louis & San Francisco created
the same position for Carl Gray. When these two able men became
presidents, their former positions were discontinued. Puzzle: Find the
reason. Answers to be sent to the Puzzle Editor, Louis D. Brandeis,
Boston, Mass.
A prominent railway executive, who is also a distinguished bridge
engineer, said to me, "You must be patient until railway people can
measure this big idea in their own little half bushels. I did not see
it clearly until I thought it through in terms with which I am
familiar. I reverted to my graphic statics and measured organization as
a bridge truss. This showed the chief clerk as a short ordinate between
the longest, the head of the unit, and next longest, the official
second in rank. We would never design a bridge that way, for the short
ordinate in between would break under the strain. You interpose the
chief of staff and diminish your strains logically to suit the
decreased resisting power. Why don't you show the old telegraph men and
the electric people the same idea in terms of things with which they
are most familiar? They should see that you can not step down your
potential through an undersized transformer."
Railroad administration is usually said to be divided into four real
departments, namely: the executive, including legal and financial, the
traffic, the operating, including maintenance and construction, and the
accounting. Most railroads place each of these departments in charge of
a vice-president. I think that this is usually a mistake. Experience
has demonstrated the practicability of the same man being a division
master mechanic, for example, and at the same time performing some of
the broader duties of an assistant superintendent. Likewise an
assistant general manager can act as the head of the mechanical bureau
in the general office. When we reach so high as to go beyond the heads
of real departments we find our old friend, volume of business, and his
bastard brother, unbalanced administration, to demand more balance
wheels. The unit has become of too large a size for a single governor.
If you don't believe this, watch somebody try to transfer a bureau,
freight claims, for example, from the department under one
vice-president to that of another.
When I incorporate and organize that ideal railroad it will have a
president, a senior vice-president and as many other vice-presidents as
may be necessary. The vice-presidents will be real assistant
presidents, not heads of departments. Each will be an expert graduated
from some particular department. Such graduation will depend more upon
the man being big enough for a vice-president and possible president
than upon the department itself. Since volume of business warrants
separation of the financial and the corporate from the legal, and of
passenger from freight traffic, I shall have seven departments, under
seven general officers, namely, the general inspector (who will also be
the comptroller), the secretary, the general treasurer, the general
manager, the freight traffic manager, the passenger traffic manager,
and the general counsel. Each of the seven departments will have its
own office file. All of the vice-presidents will have one consolidated
office file in common with the president.
Trusting that these few lines will restrain you for a brief period,
which is Boston & Albany for hold you for a while, let us consider the
application of the unit system to a humbler sphere, that of roadmaster
or track supervisor, who is the head of a highly important sub-unit of
maintenance organization. The roadmaster's clerk is usually paid less
than a section foreman. As a result such clerk is either a callow youth
looking for speedy transfer or an old man married to the job. In the
latter case, after one change in roadmasters the clerk probably
dominates the office. He puts so much fear of paper work in the minds
of the section foreman that few aspire to be roadmasters. Instead of a
clerk, why not have an assistant roadmaster, a real understudy,
promoted from section foreman at a slight increase in pay and
allowances? Get the working atmosphere of the section into the
roadmaster's office. Perhaps some of the section foremen are not
relatively as stupid as certain superiors who take snap judgment on
possible qualifications. Some people deny the necessity for a
roadmaster's office. Is it not rather difficult to hold a man
responsible without giving him access to first hand records of
performance? An assistant superintendent or an assistant general
manager can and should come to his own headquarters where there are
clerks to furnish him necessary information. A roadmaster away from
division headquarters cannot gain such contact without deserting the
subdivision for which he is responsible night and day. He cannot well
take the section foreman from work to compile statistics.
When the word superintendent is eliminated from all higher titles so
that it means the head, and a real head, of an operating division,
there will be a bigger return for that item of operating expenses known
as "superintendence." If the notion still lingers that operation is
merely train movement, and that it is enough for a superintendent to be
a high class chief dispatcher, the idea of real management can be
driven in by calling the head of a division a "manager." In such case,
the title general manager would have a logical meaning. The title
district manager would fit the case where subdivision into such
territorial units became unavoidable.
When the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph were invented the
Greek language was consulted and new words were scientifically coined
to express a new necessity of linguistic expression. The automobile and
the aeroplane are founding whole families of new words. As society and
industry become more highly organized it may be necessary to coin new
words to convey the full idea of the rank and duties of the human
elements in a large organization. Critics of the unit system deplore
the uniformity of titles as tending to merge individual identity. This
is not the fault of the system but of the poverty of the English
language which lacks varying terminations of root words to express
different shades of meaning. If necessary to meet this view helps can
be sought from such highly inflected languages as Greek and Esperanto,
and new words coined. Thus the same word with a slightly different
ending would mean, "assistant superintendent in charge of maintenance
of way and structures as classified by the Interstate Commerce
Commission," or, "assistant superintendent in charge of maintenance of
equipment, including an allowance for depreciation at the legal and
constitutional ratio of sixteen to one, expiating the crime of 1873 and
glorifying the Hepburn Act of 1906."
Many practical things in this world escape attention because they are
so close as to be inside the focal distance. The persons most concerned
are often too close to a proposition to observe what should be
distinctly obvious. I uncover my headlight to the fellow down East who
recently showed us all that green flags can be replaced by the night
markers. For the over-specialization of perishable day indicators he
substituted the all-round day and night marker. The supply people
should not kick at the decreased demand for their product. They should
be thankful, rather, that railroad officials did not wake up sooner to
changed conditions. The new practice is worth the price of admission if
it only serves to do away with the delay and inconvenience of loading
and unloading the time-honored and cumbrous train box which still roams
wild in some regions covered by the Spokane rate decision.
Among the other simplifications which time will bring is a logical
method of designating extra trains. To-day we tell a man that an engine
number means little, because the train indicator says that it is train
so-and-so. The numbers on the engine and on the train indicator are
different and have no relation. To-morrow the engine runs extra and the
two numbers must be identical. When we adopt the train indicator,
should we not banish numbers from the outside of our engines and
tenders? Should not the number be inside the cab to be consulted for
reports and statistics, including the train sheet? This would mean that
extras would be numbered consecutively in a series higher than the
numbers on the regular trains. Extras, like regular trains, would lose
their running rights in twelve hours. In this connection, did you ever
figure that, except possibly in the case of extras, the distinctions
"A.M." and "P.M." are superfluous on train orders? Should P.M. come
before the order is fulfilled, the A.M. train is dead.
The proposed change would force regular trains to be numbered in lower
series, regardless of divisions and branch lines. This would make for
safety. The more figures in a number, the greater the possibilities of
error in reading a train order. A man is much more likely to confuse
2347 with 2345 than 47 with 45. If the motive power bureau must
recognize the high numbered union for classification purposes, let us
avoid having the blooming series federate with the train dispatcher's
order book.
The magnificent distances of this western country are reflected in
increased difficulties in railway operation. Perhaps no branch of the
railway service is more affected thereby than the dining car service.
American travelers, as the colored soldier said about the Cubans, are
the "eatin'est lot of people." The long haul for cars and supplies
renders supervision more difficult and deficits correspondingly
greater. The dining car man on most, if not all, western roads is
attached to a losing game. When poverty comes in at the door, love
flies out at the window. The dining car superintendent is kept busy
retaining the affections of the management in the face of red figures.
A dining car is about the most complex proposition in its operation
that we have on the railroad. It will be the hardest to bring under the
supervision of the division superintendent and his assistants. The
difficulties of so doing are many, but are not insurmountable. The
dining car, because it moves on wheels, is an incident to the
manufacture and sale of transportation. It is not, as a few dining car
people suppose, merely a traveling hotel to which the railway is an
incident. Originally the dining cars were under the passenger traffic
department. Later it was realized that they are logically a part of
operation. So they have been placed under the general manager and his
subordinate, the superintendent of dining cars. We say nonchalantly
that the superintendent and the train conductor can instruct the
so-called conductor of the dining car. Let a passenger conductor report
a dining car conductor. The former's superintendent will probably find
himself helpless to defend his man against the momentum of a
correspondence bureau located in the general offices. As a result, the
superintendent and the passenger conductor soon lose interest. They are
not looking for trouble and possible censure. The outcome is long-range
supervision of a centralized activity. The man in charge of the dining
car should be called steward, because he cannot conduct a car even to a
side track. He should be under the control of the train conductor, whom
the superintendent can hold responsible for the entire train performing
proper public service. A good, honest passenger conductor can secure
and retain more business for the company than two traveling passenger
agents. The conductor cannot do this if the dining car man is unwilling
to send promptly a pot of coffee to the shabby little sick woman in the
chair car whose daughters are going to buy tourist tickets next year.
In the days of simpler organization the good old passenger conductor
would unload on the prairie a short-sighted sleeping car or dining car
man and let the latter walk home. Because this cannot be done to-day is
one of the reasons for the lack of initiative on the part of the train
conductor. The lack of courtesy sometimes shown by employes is not
infrequently the fault of heads of would-be departments whose tenacity
for departmental lines leaves subordinates with an unbalanced notion of
the necessity for real courtesy and consideration. Bowing and scraping
do not alone constitute politeness.
One of the best dining car superintendents in the country is Tom
Clifford of the Erie, a graduated division superintendent and passenger
conductor. Because they are general officers, the dining car
superintendents of the future should be assistant general managers, and
should come up from the grade of division superintendent, in order to
acquire a more comprehensive knowledge of operation. Just how to work
out all the details is, I confess, perhaps the hardest operating
problem that I have yet tackled. Pullman employes have a home terminal
and a home district to whose superintendent certain reports are made
and complaints referred. This works well, although Pullman cars may run
over several of their superintendents' districts. The fact that dining
cars run over more than one division is not of itself a sufficient
reason for the employes being under the immediate direction of a
general officer. Volume of business, density of traffic, shortness of
runs, and other causes may warrant varying applications of the
underlying principle. Above all, we should avoid those hard and fast
rules which even the Medes and Persians never attempted to make
applicable to dining cars.
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.
LETTER XIX.
THE ENGINEERING OF MEN.
Chicago, August 12, 1911.
My Dear Boy:--As the old order changeth, yielding place to new, the
last of the feudal barons among the chief engineers are passing. Bold
have been their conceptions, faithful their performances and great
their achievements. Their work has developed those splendid types of
manhood which are characteristic of the futile struggle of nature
against art, of the wilderness against civilization.
Partly because of better intellectual training, partly because of the
rush to complete additions and betterments and partly because of the
inborn tendency of human nature to over-specialize, the construction
men of most railways have frequently put it over on the so-called
operating men. Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war. As
civilization advances the struggles of a railroad are less against
physical nature and more against sociological and political conditions.
This advanced stage makes for altruism and comprehensive coöperation.
The problem of the construction engineer becomes harder when his work
is interwoven with the necessities of everyday operation. A
manufacturing plant can sometimes shut down during a period of new
construction. A railway, however, cannot store its product,
transportation. Some car wheels must be moving all the time. It
follows, then, that construction must yield to operation rather than
operation to construction. Again, from the nature of a railway,
construction is a component of operation, and the whole is greater than
any of its parts.
During the period of rapid expansion the construction men were kept "on
the front." Here is another bet that our predecessors overlooked.
Instead of amalgamating construction with operation and developing a
corps of all around men they sacrificed the future. The result is two
sets of specialists lacking sympathy with each other's difficulties.
The point of convergence is the company's treasury, which pays
unnecessary bills. Sometimes these are in the form of a duplication of
work train service; sometimes in idle equipment in which the
construction bureau retains a proprietary interest on days of idleness.
The construction people may be awaiting material or men. Meantime
_my_ work train cannot be used by the superintendent for maintenance
purposes. The chief dispatcher has so little sympathy with new
construction that the young assistant engineer dare not let go of _my_
engine lest _au revoir_ may mean good-by. Another delightful but
expensive duplication occurs frequently in the matter of stores. Look
around and see how many separate stores your construction bureau is
maintaining, some of them within a stone's throw of a well stocked
permanent store.
After defying a few times the official lightning our wise construction
Ajax learns to make his estimates large. Having beaten his own figures
he exclaims, "Behold how much money I have saved the company."
Comparisons of costs in construction work are much more difficult than
in operation. This inability to control disbursement through the
discipline of statistics should be met as far as possible by the most
careful organization. Extravagance and waste in maintenance and
operation are bad enough. In construction they are worse, because
capitalized and bearing an interest burden for innumerable years to
come.
All positions have their inherent temptations. The young engineer in
charge of construction is tempted to nurse the job because when it is
finished he may be laid off. Whether he yields or not, it is a poor
kind of organization that places the temptation before him. Too
frequently the construction engineer costs the company money because of
his unfamiliarity with maintenance conditions. Experience in
maintenance would help him in construction. Before being entrusted with
authority an engineer should have experience in both maintenance and
construction, regardless of the branch in which he may have happened to
start. Check up your new branch lines and see how much money being
charged to maintenance could have been saved if the construction people
had better appreciated operating conditions. See how many side tracks
and water tanks are on curves. Never investigate a collision without
considering faulty construction and location as factors.
One of the easiest ways to save your company money will be to
reorganize your construction activities. When you decide upon some new
line, be it a branch, a second track, or an extension, call a cabinet
meeting of all your assistants. Let the supply assistant of your grand
opera troupe know at which stand you are to play. Call in the
superintendent of the division concerned, with his maintenance
assistant. Tell the superintendent that he will be responsible for the
new work subject to the instructions of your construction assistant.
Let it be understood that the work will be under the direct charge of
his maintenance assistant, that the equipment will be looked after by
his mechanical assistant and the material and supplies furnished by his
supply assistant. Throw the whole official momentum of the division on
the side of the new work. Under the old order of things the division
people do what they are told in helping out the construction, but no
more. The proposed organization will beget that extra individual effort
which is relatively as profitable as the farmer's extra bushel per
acre. At this same cabinet meeting let your superintendent nominate a
junior assistant to act as understudy for maintenance while his leading
maintenance man is treading the construction boards. If, when the job
is over, any scrimping has to take place it will not be the
construction man who has to drop back. Two years hence the maintenance
assistant will not give you the old song and dance about poor
construction causing excessive maintenance, because he himself built
the line. There is, of course, a danger that this maintenance assistant
will be extravagant in construction for the sake of a future record in
maintenance. You have two checks against this, one through the
efficiency of your construction assistant and the other through the
division accounting bureau, which should handle additions and
betterments as separate accounts.
Once upon a time I ran across a contractor grading a new line. His
organization, the most efficient that I ever happened to see in any
line of activity, made that of the railway for which he was working
look like thirty cents. He made the grading camp the unit. Each of his
sixteen camps was in charge of a foreman who controlled his own
commissary, his own timekeeper, his own blacksmith and his own animals
and equipment. The first duty of the foreman was to supply his men with
grub and his animals with feed. Normally this took two wagons. If he
happened to be near the base of supplies he used only one team and put
the other on a plow or a scraper. If he happened to be clear at the
front he might have to borrow another wagon and use three teams for
supply. The point is that he kept all of his teams working all of the
time and never ran out of supplies. The railroad would organize a
department of wagons, a department of plows and a department of
scrapers, and the foreman who kicked the hardest would have the most
grub, even though somebody else was short. These foremen were jacked up
if they used poor judgment in accumulating supplies and had too much on
hand when the next move came. No clerk at the base was allowed to cut
the requisition of a foreman. The resident engineers of the railway in
charge of the several staking and inspection parties could not procure
railway commissary supplies without the O.K. of a clerk in the
so-called boarding house department.