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Building an Organization 



The secret of nearly every business success is this: a perfect 

 orgauizatiou. 



A mail may have a womlerful iilea. He may have a splendid 

 proiluct. He may give his customers "jood value. Yet if he lacks 

 the right kind of organization to exploit the idea, to prove the 

 product and to serve his customers as they want to be served — 

 and as they must be served if they are to remain his customers — 

 his business ship will hit the rocks of bankruptcy and go down in 

 the muddy waters of commercial oblivion. 



"He knows how to organize," is one of the best things that 

 can be said of any business man. Andrew Carnegie attributed 

 much of his success to the fact that he knew how to pick good 

 lieutenants. No big or successful concern can be run on the one- 

 man idea, and the sooner the head of the establishment dispels this 

 impression the bettor for him and the business. The right system 

 is to select the best man for each place, whether it is making the 

 lumber or selling it, and hold him responsible for results. Any 

 other system means that the boss will be constantly overwhelmed 

 in a mass of details that subordinates could just as well dispose of, 

 and will be unable, on account of lack of time and lack of brain 

 capacity, to give the really big and important things the atten- 

 tion they deserve. 



There is a certain hardwooil manufacturer in a leading market 

 who knows logs and lumber, and ought to be one of the most suc- 

 cessful men in the business. Instead, he is barely making a living, 

 and has never gone ahead the way he might have been expected to 

 do. The reason is that he is always running into sections of the 

 business where his services are not needed, and trying to lay 

 down rules regarding the smallest details. It is fine to have a 

 griisp of the little things, and to know that every detail is going 

 to l>e handled just right; but when a lumberman immerses himself 

 in them, as this one does, he has no time left for anything else. 

 The result is that he sells his lumber without knowing anything 

 about his markets, about consumption and about new fields for its 

 use. He is "practical" in the sense that he can deal with the 

 material itself; but he is impracticable because he has failed to 

 grasp the larger phases of his business in a firm and intelligent 

 manner. 



The man with an organization back of him, or, more accurately, 

 in front of him, directs them as a general directs an army. He 

 knows his men, their capability and their limitations; and he in- 

 creases their duties and their responsibilities just as rapidly as 

 they can take care of them. On the other hand, the members of 

 the organization realize that they are parts of the big machine; 

 not merely men with jobs, working haphazard, with no future and 

 no possibilities ahead, but playing the big game of business with 

 t'verv opportunity to show what they can do. 



It is not easy to build up an organization. That is why so few 

 people succeed in the task. They either try to do it all them- 

 selves, and make the rest of the people in the business, from the 

 sawyer to the sales manager, mere automatons and errand-boys, 

 or they fail to select the right men for the work that is to be 

 done. Sometimes, having gotten good material, they fail to de- 

 velop it. The tonic of promotion and the spur of criticism are 

 used at the wrong time or not at all, and the organization conse- 

 quently lacks the "pep" which it must have in order to produce 

 results. 



The head of a certain big hardwood house in a southern city has 

 that wonderful thing called executive ability. In other words, he 

 is an organizer. If he could be persuaded to enter politics, he 

 would soon know every precinct captain by his first name, and 

 would have a card system of all the voters, showing their past, 

 present and prospective affiliations, and what they could be "sold" 

 on. As it is, he has applied every up-to-date idea that has come 

 down the pike, from cost accounting to the training of salesmen, 

 to his business, and the results show that he has applied the prin- 

 ciples involved in them correctly. He has an organization that is 



at once the envy and the despair of his competitors. They know 

 that the salesmen of this house are right on their toes all the time, 

 and if there is any big business lying around loose it will be 

 mighty hard to get there ahead of those fellows. The reason they 

 never seem to loaf or to go to sleep on the job is because the 

 boss, while never prodding with a sharp stick nor shoveling out 

 praise indiscriminately, always knows what each man is doing, 

 and can discuss the intimate details of his territory and the pros- 

 pects of each individual customer in a way that warms the cockles 

 of each salesman's heart. 



One of the cardinal principles of this man's business philosophy 

 is that an organization must be built up from within instead of 

 without. His plan has been to "catch 'em while they're young," 

 and to train them along his lines. He gives every man a thorough 

 course in the lumber business, starting him in minor positions in 

 the office and yard, and giving him every opportunity to work 

 ahead as he shows ability to take care of bigger jobs. In this 

 way his men become familiar not with a part or one phase of 

 the business, but with it all. There are half a dozen men who are 

 in line for the leading positions of the house, and who could take 

 care of any emergency, no matter how important. 



Here is an example of how the thing works: 



A young college man applied for a position. The lumberman 

 looked him over carefully, considered his mental and physical 

 qualifications and decided that he would do. He gave him a job 

 in the mill, so that he could see the lumber business from the 

 beginning. After tallying lumber for a while, and learning the 

 fundamentals of inspection and grading, he put him in charge of 

 the mill office, where he handled costs and production figures, and 

 got a view of the fact that manufacturing has to be done within 

 certain limits of expense in order to be financially successful. All 

 this time the boy was learning, crowding his head with facts and 

 knowledge, some of it unassorted, but all of it likely to be useful 

 later on. 



Then he went into the office and became assistant to the sales 

 manager. He saw what the problems of selling lumber are, and 

 helped to handle correspondence as he became familiar with the 

 situation. Finally he went out on the road to take a new terri- 

 tory, and found that he knew more about lumber than a lot of the 

 salesmen who had been soliciting consumers for years. He didn 't 

 try to make a show of his special knowledge, but he demonstrated 

 on many occasions that the consumer could rely on him implicitly, 

 and he made use of his mental equipment not only to sell stock, 

 but to help the customer, killing two of the best birds ever 

 brought down with a single stone. 



The head of this concern was asked why he wanted to bother 

 with youngsters who would require years for development, the sug- 

 gestion being that ready-made salesmen are so numerous that they 

 can be picked up whenever they happen to be needed. 



' ' Not on your life, ' ' he replied. ' ' There are, it is true, some 

 people who seem to think that a salesman is a salesman, and that 

 if a man has been on the road selling boots and shoes, we will say, 

 he is thereby qualified to go out and dispose of anything else, from 

 asbestos on through the list. Lumber is regarded as a simple little 

 proposition that anybody who can approach a buyer in the proper 

 spirit can handle, and I've had lots of applications from men who 

 had sold advertising and life insurance, tinware and jewelry, and 

 who thought themselves fully qualified to get on the job with a 

 stocklist and a pleasant smile, and represent me in dealing with 

 the lumber buyers in this part of the country. 



"However, that's not my plan. I am perfectly willing to admit 

 that to sell lumber one must be qualified as a salesman, and must 

 be prepossessing in appearance, know human nature and be able 

 to stand the hard knocks of road work and come up smiling. But 

 I think that the men my house sends out must be lumbermen first 

 and salesmen afterwards. I would rather trust to sending out a 

 man who knows my stock and my service thoroughly, even if he 



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