Increasing Efficiency In Business | Page 3

INCREASING HUMAN EFFICIENCY IN BUSINESS
CHAPTER I
THE POSSIBILITY OF INCREASING HUMAN EFFICIENCY
THE modern business man is the true heir of the old magicians. Every
thing he touches seems to increase ten or a hundredfold in value and

usefulness. All the old methods, old tools, old instruments have yielded
to his transforming spell or else been discarded for new and more
effective substitutes. In a thousand industries the profits of to-day are
wrung from the wastes or unconsidered trifles of yesterday.
The only factor which has withstood this wizard touch is man himself.
Development of the instruments of production and distribution has
been so great it can hardly be

measured: the things
themselves have been so changed that few features of their primitive
models have been retained.
Our railroad trains, steamships, and printing presses preserve a likeness
more apparent than actual. Our telephones, electric lights, gas engines,
and steam turbines, our lofty office buildings and huge factories
crowded with wonderful automatic machinery are creations of the
generation of business men and scientists still in control of them.
_By comparison the increase in human efficiency during this same
period (except where the worker is the slave of the machine, compelled
to keep pace with it or lose his place) has been insignificant_.
Reasons for this disproportion are not lacking. The study of the
physical antedates the study of the mental always. In the history of the
individual as well as of nations, knowledge of the psychical has
dragged far behind mastery of tangible objects. We come in contact
with our physical environment and adjust ourselves to it long before we
begin to

study the *acts by which we have been able to control
objects around us.
It was inevitable, therefore, that attention should have been
concentrated upon the material and mechanical side of production and
distribution. Results there were so tangible, so easily figured. For
example, if the speed of a drill or the strokes of a punch press were
multiplied, the increase would be easily recognized. The whole country,
too, was absorbed in invention, in the development of tools to
accomplish what had always required hand labor. The effort was not so
much to increase the efficiency of the individual worker-- though many
wise and far-sighted employers essayed studies and experiments with

varying success--as to displace the human factor altogether.
As the functions and limitations of machinery have become clearer in
recent years, business men have generally recognized the importance of
the human factor in making and marketing products. Selecting and
handling men is of much more significance to-day

than ever
before in the history of the world --the more so as organizations have
increased in size and scope and the individual employee is farther
removed from the head and assigned greater responsibilities.
It is not a difficult task to build and equip a factory, to choose and stock
a