can do the work," say smart
young men in the "infant twenties" (and many others--there is no age
limit), "but I must have a man to look after the details."

The way to an executive position is through details. Work, plain hard
work, is the foundation of every enduring job, and the executive who
thinks he can do without it has a sharp reckoning day ahead. In most
places the executives have worked their way up slowly, and at no time
along the way have they had that large contempt for small jobs which
characterizes so many young men in business. They have been perfectly
willing to do whatever came to hand.

But after all this is said, the fact remains that an executive is
successful not so much because of his own ability as because of his
power to recognize ability in other men. He is--and this is true of
every executive from the president down--the servant of his people in
much the same way that the President of the United States is the servant
of the American people. This means that he must be readily accessible to
them, and must listen as courteously to them as if they were important
visitors from across the sea or somewhere else.

Many executives--and this was true especially during the war--have
surrounded themselves with a tangle of red tape which has to be unwound
every time an employee (or any one else) wants to get near enough to ask
a question. This is absurd. Sensible men destroy elaborate plans of
management and find they get along better without them. The Baldwin
Locomotive Works, which has a hundred years of solid reputation behind
it, has no management plans. "There is about the place an atmosphere of
work, and work without frills or feathers," and this is essentially true
of every business that is built to last. Look at the organizations
which, because of war conditions, rose into a prosperity they had never
enjoyed before. Most of them have collapsed, and the little men who rose
with them (so many of them and so much too small for their jobs) have
collapsed with them.

In the big reliable concerns, and the small ones, too, the high
executives are easily approached, especially by the members of the
organization. In many of the open offices--and open offices have done
much to create a feeling of comradeship among workers--the desk of the
general manager is out on the floor with the desks of the rank and file
of the employees with nothing to distinguish it from theirs except the
fact that there is a bigge