PUSH-BUTTON FACTORY — SHALLENBERGER 251 



built and secondly to a steady sale of the product. Consumers must 

 be educated to accept more standardized and in most cases completely 

 redesigned products. How well these requirements can be met will 

 determine the future of the automatic factory in many industries. In 

 this area may also lie the answer to whether or not automatic factories 

 will aggravate the fluctuations of our economy. Cutbacks will be 

 much more costly to the company, but will at the same time be less 

 likely to start a chain reaction of reduced purchasing power, for 

 there will be fewer workers to be laid off. At any rate, the auto- 

 matic factory offers as great a challenge to sales management as it 

 does to the engineers and to production managers. It is, in fact, one 

 of the great challenges to management of our time. 



Let me suggest that we in the West — and I believe the same may 

 be true throughout most of Canada — have the greatest challenge and 

 the greatest opportunity. For although we have less mass production 

 than the industrialized East, we are growing, and we are less inhibited 

 by sunk costs, by existing equipment, by existing plant processes, and 

 by vested management or labor interests. 



The automatic factory has a tremendous potential for increasing 

 our own standard of living and that of much of the world. It can 

 also shorten our workweek and increase our leisure. It can release us 

 from dreary, monotonous, unsatisfying repetitive jobs. It can 

 help protect us against those abroad who would undermine our econ- 

 omy. It is not the biggest tiling in our lives but it is certainly one of 

 the most important phenomena of our generation. Let us hope that 

 we are big enough to take advantage of the opportunities it offers. 

 Every one of us — engineers, management, sociologists, economists — 

 must read and think and discuss the subject at every opportunity so 

 that we can foresee and avoid the pitfalls, minimize the mistakes and 

 dislocations, and make an economic and social asset, not a Franken- 

 stein, of the push-button factory. 



BIBUOGRAPHY 



1. Technology and the concentration of economic power, by Theodore J. Kreps. 



Testimony before the Temporary National Economic Committee, Apr. 8, 

 1940. 



2. The automatic factory. Fortune, November 1946. 



3. Machines without men. Fortune, November 1946. 



4. Small parts inspection by automatic gauging. Iron Age, June 19, 1947. 



5. Cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener. New York, 1948. 



6. Grease goes on the gauges. The Lamp, Standard Oil Co. (N. J.), June-Sep- 



tember 1948. 



7. The first automatic radio factory. Fortune, August 1948. 



8. Ford handles by automation. American Machinist, Oct. 21, 1948. 



9. Mechanical muscles release manual labor. Business Week, Oct. 23, 1948. 



