Help Yourself By Helping Others

( Originally Published 1908 )

The Down-and-Outer

LITTLE hotels often feature their clerks.

Small tailors proudly put forth their cutters. But a big business is built by many earnest men working together for one common end and aim. It is planned by one man, but is carried forward by many.

A steamship is manned by a crew, and no one particular sailor is necessary. You can replace any man in the engine room of the Furst Bismarck, and she will cross the ocean in less than six days, just the same.

In an enterprise that amounts to anything, all transactions should be in the name of the firm, because the firm is more than any person connected with it. Clerks or salesmen who have private letter-heads, and ask customers to send letters to them personally, are on the wrong track.

To lose your identity in the business is one of the penalties of working for a great institution.

Don't protest—it is no new thing—all big concerns are confronted by the same situation.

Get in line! It is a necessity.

If you want to do business individually and in your own name, stay in the country or do busi- ness for yourself. Peanut stands are individualistic; when the peanut man goes, the stand also croaks. Successful corporations are something else.

Of course the excuse is that if you send me the order direct, I, knowing you and your needs, can take much better care of your wants than that despised and intangible thing, "the house. "

Besides, sending it thru the Circumlocution There is something more to say t First, long experience has shown that "the saving of time" is exceedingly problematic. For while in some instances a rush order can be gotten off the same night by sending it to an individual, yet when your individual has gone fishing, is at the ball game, or is sick, or else given up his job and gone with the opposition house, there are great and vexatious delays, dire confusions and a strain on vocabularies.

This thing of a salesman carrying his trade with him, and considering the customers of the house his personal property, is the thought of only 2x4 men. A house must have a certain fixed policy —a reputation for square dealing—otherwise it could not exist at all. It could not even give steady work and good pay to the men who think it would be only a hole in the ground without them.

In the main, the policy of the house is right.

Don't acquire the habit of butting in with your stub-end of a will in opposition to the general policy of the house. To help yourself, get in line with your house, stand by it, take pride in it, respect it, uphold it, and regard its interests as yours. The men who do this become the only ones who are really necessary. They are the Top-notchers— Hundred-pointers. The worst about the other plan is that it ruins the man who undertakes it. For a little while, to do a business of your own in the shadow of the big one, is beautiful—presents come, personal letters, invitations, favors, is Mr. Johnson in! By and by Johnson gets chesty; he resents it when other salesmen wait on his customers or look after his mail. He begins to plot for personal gain, and the first thing you know he is a plain grafter, at loggerheads with his colleagues, with the interests of the house secondary to his own.

We must grow towards the house, and with it, not away from it. Any policy which lays an employee open to temptation, or tends to turn his head, causing him to lose sight of his own best interests, seizing at a small present betterment and losing the great advantage of a life's business, is bad. The open cash-drawer, valuable goods lying around not recorded or invenoried, free and easy responsibility, good enough plans, and let- 'er-go policies, all tend to ruin men just as surely as do cigarettes, booze, paste-board and the races.

The man who thinks he owns "his trade," and threatens to walk out and take other employees and customers with him, is slated to have his dream come true. The manager gives in—the individualist is then sure he is right—the enlarged ego grows, and some day, the house simply takes his word for it, and out he goes.

The down-and-outer heads off his mail at the post-office, and for some weeks embarrasses customers, delays trade and more or less confuses system, but a month or two smooths things out, and he is forgotten absolutely. The steamship plows right along.

Our egotist gets a new job, only to do it all over again if he can. This kind of a man seldom learns. When he gets a job, he soon begins to correspond with rival firms for a better one, with intent to take his "good-will" along.

The blame should go back to the first firm where he was employed, that allowed him a private letter-head, and let him get filled with the fallacy that he was doing business on his own account, thus losing sight of the great truth that we win thru co-operation and not thru segregation or separation. The firm's interests are yours; if you think otherwise, you are already on the slide.

The only man who should be given full swing and unlimited power is the one who can neither resign nor run away when the crash comes, but who has to stick and face the deficit, and shoulder the disgrace of failure. All who feel free to hike whenever the weather gets thick would do well to get in line with the policy of the house.