38 Cooperation in Agriculture 



herein lies the vulnerable spot in the average farmers' 

 cooperative business association. There are two extremes 

 in the methods of managing a cooperative organization of 

 farmers : one is the method in which the manager be- 

 comes an arbitrary dictator in developing and executing 

 the policies of the association similar to the method in 

 many stock corporations ; in the other, the directors es- 

 tablish the policies and execute them through a clerical 

 assistant. Either system is almost certain to fail in the 

 end. Neither is founded on principles that are adapted 

 to a farmers' cooperative organization. 



Between these two extremes lies the successful method 

 of management. The manager who succeeds is he who 

 holds the confidence of the directors and the interest of 

 the members, who utilizes the suggestions of the directors 

 and of the members and who shapes them into a working 

 policy, who acts on matters of policy only after the ap- 

 proval of the directors, and who, at the same time, takes 

 the initiative in the development of a progressive, con- 

 structive business policy for the directors to adopt. On 

 the other hand, the manager who fails to hold the confi- 

 dence of the directors or the members, who becomes a 

 dictator of the policies and thereby drifts away from the 

 spirit of the organization, or who is merely a clerk to carry 

 out the undeveloped business policies which a board of 

 directors acting alone is likely to develop will invariably 

 fail. 



Again, from the standpoint of the association itself, 

 no cooperative organization can succeed if the directors 

 are unwilling to place its business management in the 

 hands of a strong, aggressive, thoroughly experienced, 



