fficiencies in many
commercial organizations which never reach the point of strikes and
lockouts. For some reason or other that lively germ, the walking delegate,
fails to get a foothold. Perhaps there would be a beneficial house
cleaning if he did. Discontent, dissatisfaction, unrest, and constant
changes in personnel load the body up with wastes, inefficiencies and
unnecessary expenses. Any employer who thinks at all, and who has any
basis for judgment as a result of observation, knows that what he desires
to purchase, when he pays wages, is not a prescribed number of days and
hours, is not a standard number of foot pounds of physical energy, but
rather human intelligence and human willingness and enthusiasm in the use
of that intelligence in his service. It is true that most employees do a
certain amount of physical work, but it is also true that the value of
that work depends entirely upon the amount of intelligence and good will
the employee puts into it. The employee who is doing work for which he is
not fitted and is unhappy and discontented is doubly inefficient. He is
inefficient because he is not well fitted for the work and could not do
his best even if he were perfectly satisfied and happy. And he is
inefficient because he is in a bad psychical state. With his mental
attitude, he could not do good work even if he were in the place for which
he was best fitted.

Efficiency experts maintain that the average employee in our industrial
and commercial institutions is only from twenty-five to thirty-five per
cent, efficient. Sixty-five to seventy-five per cent, loss in productive
power on the part of the forty million workers in this country constitutes
an almost incalculable sum.

Who is to blame for this loss? Are we not too intelligent, too well versed
in the laws of cause and effect and too courageous to try to blame the
Almighty for it or to lay it to the public schools or to hold the employee
accountable? As a matter of fact, no matter how we may try to shift the
blame, those of us who are executives know only too well that our board of
directors and stockholders hold us strictly responsible for results. What
they want is dividends, not excuses. They do not care to hear how hard it
is to find good men. They are not interested in the stories of employees
who are so ungrateful as to leave just when they have become most useful.
They will not permit you to shift any of the blame upon the shoulders of
the emplo