Cyclopedia of Commerce, Accountancy, Business Administration, v. 02 (of 10)American School of Correspondence
General
Cyclopedia of Commerce, Accountancy, Business Administration, v. 02 (of 10)
American School of Correspondence
Accounting; Business; Commerce
10. =Education on the Work.= As a general thing, men who take money for
their labor are more than willing to deliver a square deal to their
employer; and it will almost invariably be found that the more familiar
a man is with the difficulties and possibilities of his fellow─workmen,
the more efficient he will be himself. For this reason it has been
found highly satisfactory, in some lines of work, to change the men
around on the job. In a certain concrete building 12 stories high, the
upper stories were built in a small fraction of the time required for
the corresponding lower stories. The greater part of the extraordinary
increase in efficiency was attributed to the fact that the men were
so educated that a man at the top of the building knew how the men at
the mixer and in other parts of the job were doing their work, and
knew that the superintendent in charge was measuring the speed of the
deliveries from the hoist. The disadvantage of this method is that
it takes a long time to work up the efficiency. It is, however, an
admirable method for disciplining an organization.
=Discipline.= To the practical man, or to the intelligent student,
there seems to be no necessity for arguing in favor of _discipline_
as an essential to economical field work; but so large a percentage
of contract work in the field is badly disciplined, and the general
principles seem to be unknown to so many field organizations, that a
brief statement of them appears to be called for in this volume.
By _discipline_ is meant the cultivation of a spirit of:
1. Co─operation;
2. Obedience;
3. Responsibility;
4. Personal loyalty.
The subject will be discussed on the basis of _reorganization of work_,
because here the chief difficulties are met.
The three types of organization that are most clearly defined in the
way of discipline, are those of a _military nature_, _railroad work_,
and _factory work_.
On construction work, it is not feasible to introduce a military form
of discipline. In the first place, the penalties of the military
service are not permissible; and in the second place it is not
usually practicable to have so thorough a system of distribution
of responsibility; while in the third place the same men are not
here together for a long enough period to make military discipline
practicable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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