HOT SKETCH NO. 23 WHEN MENTAL LEECH MEETS MENTAL LEECH THERE was a temperamental manufacturer who used to come down to the office after a thick night in the Loop and unleash a long low growl about the lack of Initiative among his men. “There isn’t a kanoop among them,” he said, “that has the originality of a tadpole.” On a certain day, not unlike any other day in this particular establishment, the Sales Manager poked his nose gradually into the Boss’s office, and, sniffing the Boss within, squeezed cautiously into the room, scraping the nap all off his courage as he did so. “Will you please be so kind as to tell me,” whispered the Sales Manager, “if this little ginger-up letter to the Road Rats meets your approval?” The Boss grabbed the letter, shot a lightning glance at it upside-down, and rammed it back into the Sales Manager’s hands. “Rotten!” he said, “Lacks originality—pep! No punch in it!” “Thank you,” replied the Sales Manager mildly. “I’ll see if I can not embody some of the points of your constructive criticism.” And he oozed out of the room again. In came the Advertising Manager, walking on his ankles so as to not make any riotous disturbance. “I was just thinking—” he began. “Impossible!” sneered His Gentle Bosslets, putting his heels up on his glass-topped desk and lighting his eighty-seventh cigarette since breakfast. “I was just thinking,” continued the Adv. Mgr. affecting to ignore the suggestion but failing miserably from the knees down, “I was just thinking that maybe it might not be a bad plan, perhaps, to paint New York next month, please.” “NEVER!” roared the Boss. “Never in a thousand years. The painted bulletin is no good—never was. Poster’s the thing! I’d rather post New York for one month than paint it for forty years at half the price.” “Very good, then—shall I go in for that?” “Not on your life. I’ve just decided on a newspaper campaign.” “Thank you,” said the Adv. Mgr., backing out of the room and falling over a few chairs and things on the fairway. When the intruder had vanished, Commander Boss got up, ran his long temperamental digits through his top-fringe and pounded out into the manufacturing department where he proceeded to raise from fourteen to sixteen separate and distinct kinds of scarlet hell for the general lack of initiative and commonsense around his plant. Things went on in this happy homelike fashion until one fine warm Spring day when Brigadier Boss up and booted the whole bunch of bungling department heads into the great Out of Doors and set about to effect a re-organization. “What I want is men who do THEIR OWN thinking,” he said, and he began telephoning and writing and wiring and advertising all over the country for A-1 Initiativers. In due time he got them and called them all into his office and passed the cigars and explained how he wanted each man to run his own Department just as if it was his own business, exercising merely ordinary judgment and commonsense.