At the head of the organization there are the three brother partners who inherited their original interest in the great business from their father, the late Isidor Straus, who, with their mother, lost his life in the supreme catastrophe of the sinking of the _Titanic_. In 1914 they acquired Nathan Straus' interest by purchase. These men, Jesse Isidor, the president, Percy S., the vice-president, and Herbert N., the secretary and treasurer, are its triple head and front. While each has trained himself to be a merchandise specialist of the highest order, there is none that knows the details of Macy's better than his brothers--they share equally in the supreme authority that directs the business. Directly responsible to them, in turn, is its general manager, its merchandise council and its advertising and financial departments. As I write these paragraphs, the great chart of the Macy organization lies upon my desk. It is a vast and fascinating thing. With the lines extending upon it here and there and everywhere from the box which holds the triple-head, branching and rebranching here and there and again, it looks not unlike a giant map; a chart, if you prefer to have it so. And so it is, a chart upon which the steersmen of so vast and so responsible an enterprise safely pick their course upon a seemingly unending journey. "Government by draughting-board," sniffed an old-time business man to me once, when I was trying to explain to him in some detail how a great steel manufacturing plant of the Middle West attempted to accomplish its huge job, economically and efficiently, by the use of graphic charts. And he added: "I'd like to see _myself_ held down by blue-print authority." To which, after all this while, I should like to reply: "I should like to see a concern, as big and as successful as Macy's, operated without a careful charting of its always difficult path." Yet, as a matter of hard fact, Macy's, any more than any other big and well-planned business organism of today, never binds itself to go blindly and unthinkingly upon the lines of the charts--and nowhere else. The real trick of executive direction seems to be to know when to follow these lines and when more or less to completely disregard them. Rule-of-thumb can never again overcome the rules of averages, of percentages or of economic laws. But the rule of wit and of human understanding can ofttimes be used to temper this first group and sometimes with astonishingly successful results.