en 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,