“Not a yap of them ever did a day’s work since he left college, and
couldn’t get out and sell a bill of postage stamps at 50 and 5. Instead
of planning for business, they make a business of planning. They
are always getting ready, but they never start. They are piffling
pollywogs on the plane of the Practical, but past grand masters in the
philosophy of Bunk.
“The reason they keep planning and organizing and systemizing all the
time is because they know they are nix glox on Performance. And plans
without performance are like teeth without jaws.
“Show us the gunk that is always laying the blame for his own failure
to lack of efficiency and system in his employer’s business, and we’ll
show you a gunk who is stalling for fair.
“For six months, come Yom Kippur, you have been ‘planning’ to bag a
little business, and if we kept you there for six years, or six hundred
years, you would still be planning. You are a planner and not a worker.
You can MAKE plans all right, but you could not EXECUTE one of them if
it laid its head on the block and handed you the axe.
“It isn’t your fault, Mr. Stall, that we have been slow to get your
curves. We are just like hundreds of other firms—just plain, ordinary
yappoos who would rather hire an outside man at $20,000 a year to do
nothing but plan, than give half the salary to an inside man and
have him perform. But now that we are ON, would you mind considering
yourself submarined and greatly oblige etc.”
_Lesson for Today:_ One bill of goods sold is worth more
than a dozen planned.
HOT SKETCH NO. 12
THE TWIN-SIX PHILANTHROPIST
A POVERTY-PANNED mill owner who had only been able to finger in a
bare ten million after twenty gruelling years of grimy grind at Board
Meetings and Stock-holders’ Seances, sat wearily at his flat-topped
Mahogany and heaved a long abdominal sigh at the hellward tendency of
the children of today.
“It’s all due to the Pernicious Activity of these agitators,” he said,
wiping away a great big humanitarian tear. “All that I am today I owe
to the hardships I suffered when a child.”
Here he turned on a few more big salty boys and then continued;
“Poverty is a blessing and an educator, and yet these here agitators
come along and want to take out of my mill the lucky children that are
having a chance through my bounty to become worthy citizens of this
great, glorious Republic of ours.”
He was just on the verge of adding a few trembling mushmellows about
the stars and stripes waving in the free, pure air of America when his
emotion got a hackenschmidt stranglehold on his large oily thorax, and
he couldn’t splutter it across.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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