The Ghost in the White House Part 22

XI

PHILANDERING AND ALEXANDERING

By philandering I mean fooling oneself with self-love.

By Alexandering I mean going to one's Alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person--or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself--and ask to be done over--now one subject and now another.

Nearly all men admit--or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. They rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect.

This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and ill.u.s.trates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks--another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way.

There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself.

Self-criticism.

Asking others to help--one's nearest Alexander.

Self-confession to oneself.

Self-discipline.

Asking others to help.

The way to keep from philandering with one's own self-love or with one's own group or party--is to look over the entire field--the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision of action and fit them together and act.

In getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally--_i.e._, so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one's way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter--screwed up into self-confession to others.

I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand.

It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees--get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do.

It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal--men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way--who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick.

XII

THE FACTORY THAT LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT

There is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, I wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I know him--and as G.o.d and his workmen know him.

Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own.

In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him.

Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with something in them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on--or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim--into his office.

Jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men.

The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail."

The President lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what Jim had said to him about himself--that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten--so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it.

Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteen or twenty more men followed with details.

This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In those that followed the President and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. The meetings were held on company time--at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked.

No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to Jim.

I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first went through this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day--employers and workingmen--are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another.

Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative--be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own cla.s.s, which it thinks Labor ought to.

Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and grat.i.tude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years.

The first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man--install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do.

It looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do.

First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew--who knew anything--knew the people could not do.

This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself.

He took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they were in a new world before night.

The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked best about the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discovery I made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom I met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in America.

Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door.

Here's to Jim, of course.

But after all not so much credit to Jim. There are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door.

The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help.

Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them.

Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once.