Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a
crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I
know that a man with only three day's worth of things ahead to live for
does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is
doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to
live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and
inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer
lever still, with thirty or forty years worth' of things he wants, all
crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so
even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a
new size and a new kind of man.
* * * * *
The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man
more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business
man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give
him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want
to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would
work better than paying him twice as much wages.
Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty times as
much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well--twice
as much work.
If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do three times
as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen
daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big
thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while
he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it
seems big.
The little man becomes a big man.
From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in
business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who
is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in
front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least
expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.
The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages
to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives,
to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is
the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace
in the twentieth-century business world.
Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at
least, in the great managers of employers?
You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move
down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven.
Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four
hundred girls swing off into each other's arms. They dance between their
machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work.
You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats
with flushed and glowing cheeks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account