202 ANNUAL REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



is the key to success in conserving the resources of the national forests 

 and making them of the maximum puhHc service. 



The most important task in national-forest administration is to 

 build up a field personnel which is qualified by the mastery of their 

 jobs and by their training in responsibility to act vi^ith dispatch and 

 efficiency on the ground. The demands of the public upon the 

 national forests are constantly expanding, both in volume and variety. 

 The capacity of the field organization of the Forest Service must 

 keep pace with the size and scope of its job. This is partly a matter 

 of legislation and appropriations. More largely, however, it is a 

 matter of selecting and training field personnel and of bringing out 

 and utilizing the best which men have in them, under the driving 

 power of responsibility. 



One of the major efforts of the service is to put into full effect a 

 plan of personnel management which wall accomplish these results. 

 Its chief features are: 



1. The careful selection and systematic training of forest guards, 

 the temporary summer force from which qualified rangers can largely 

 be recruited. As far as practicable the guards selected for summer 

 work on each national forest are given at least three days of intensive 

 training, under experienced rangers, in the technique of forest-fire 

 detection and suppression. 



2. Raising the qualifications of permanent rangers in education 

 and experience and bettering such qualifications, after men enter 

 the permanent ranks of the service, by every possible form of training 

 in the duties to be performed. This includes winter correspondence 

 courses in such subjects as forestry, range management, fire pro- 

 tection, and national-forest aims and policies, together with group 

 conferences of rangers and supervisors, and training camps for the 

 intensive instruction of limited numbers of men imder the best 

 experts in the service. 



3. Increasing the force of technically trained foresters and grazing 

 experts to the fullest extent consistent with other financial demands. 



4. Requiring each ranger and forest supervisor to plan his work 

 ahead, each year, with a view to economy in the use of time and its 

 expenditure upon the most important tasks in sight. The annual 

 work plan for each administrative unit can not be an inflexible or 

 cut-and-dried afl^air, conforming to uniform and prescribed rules. 

 It is a weighing and listing of the jobs to be put through each season, 

 in the order of their urgency, by the officer immediately responsible 

 for getting them done, with the guidance and oversight of his su- 

 perior. Each work plan covers the specilic tasks of a specific ad- 

 ministrative unit and group of men. No two of them are alike. 

 Each must be adapted to the needs of the local situation. Each 

 must determine the standards of performance in individual duties or 

 undertakings which may be justified in meeting the needs and putting 

 through the work of the unit as a whole. Left largely to their own 

 initiative and responsibility, as our field officers must be, and con- 

 fronted with more to be done than can be accomplished, systematic 

 planning of the use of time is the best guaranty that the efforts of the 

 organization as a whole will be most Fruitful. 



5. Making clear to each field officer, grade by grade, the scope of 

 his own responsibility and holding him personally accountable to his 

 superior for making good. The stimulus of personal responsibility 

 with its call for individual resourcefulness and pride in results must 



