Mind Your Own Business

Have you so much leisure from your own business that you care for other people’s affairs, and nothing about those which affect yourself ? — TERENCE

I

ONE thing that is wrong with business is that business men do not attend to it. What I really mean is that they do not attend to their own business. This may offer a clue to an important factor underlying our present crisis.

Practical demonstration that a man can do one thing well does not by any means constitute evidence that he can do everything well. And yet, because of the possible prestige of their names, it has been the fate — or shall I say the temptation? — of many business men to take on so many responsibilities one after another outside of their own offices that they have ended up by doing nothing permanently well or thoroughly good; and, what is more serious, by having neglected their own immediate jobs in factory, store, bank, or whatever the business unit may happen to be.

Take the example of a certain executive — general manager of a large business with several thousand employees and an annual turnover of many millions of dollars. Through his job he became known some years ago as an efficient organizer. He won the respect of the leading citizens of his community. No sooner had he gained this business recognition than he was asked to become member or chairman of one board and committee after another, until today he finds himself involved in so many different responsibilities that he cannot possibly find the time or energy — to say nothing of the varied knowledge and skill required — for the satisfactory fulfillment of any of them. Naturally — and most significant — the problems of his own business can hardly receive the sustained and concentrated attention which these trying times demand.

Look at his calendar for a typical day.

He comes to his office to read his mail; but how can the pressing needs, say, of the large philanthropic federation of which he is president be put aside? To take them up, however, as he feels he must, means to deal with the operations and finances of a large social work organization comprising some twenty separate agencies spending nearly a million dollars a year, coping with complicated problems of child care, family welfare, health, character building, and, in these depression days particularly, the very serious problem of finding money to meet the tremendously increased relief load.

Or the Port Authority, of which he is chairman, may be confronted with a knotty situation that must be handled without delay. Let a strike of longshoremen arise to threaten our shipping, as happened last year, or let questions of freight differentials, adequate docking and other port facilities, relationships with transatlantic and coastwise companies, appear on the calendar, and who will say they shall not occupy first place there? After all, the promotion and administration of one of America’s metropolitan harbors are matters of prime importance.

Then surely the emergency unemployment fund of his city can put forth its demands upon his time with all the overwhelming force of immediate urgency. There is no gainsaying a committee appointed to dispense three million dollars raised by his city this year for unemployment relief, and for subsidizing the various social agencies staggering under the heavy burdens of the depression.

Even his lunch periods cannot be set aside with any assurance for conferences with business associates. As likely as not the Mayor or the Governor may have arranged a luncheon for a distinguished visitor, or for the discussion of some vital civic matter. Should he attempt to be excused from attending, the responsibility of a socalled ‘leading citizen’ is a not too easily refuted argument. Nor are the calls of such a deliberating body as that appointed by the Governor to study the relationship of railway trunk lines to his district easily set aside. For the economic life of his community depends, to a large extent, on adequate and equitable railroad facilities. Accordingly he finds himself considering with his committee colleagues whether they shall have one or more trunk lines enter his city. Shall they approve the attempt of one railroad to buy into another? Shall they endorse the merger of several lines?

There may be one or another directors’ meeting called for that day by any of the several corporations on the boards of which he serves. In some instances, the corporation will be operating in the same field as his own business; in others, it may be an entirely different field. But in all he appears at meetings as board member to consider closely the reports of officers, to help formulate decisions upon important matters of general efficiency, of expansion or contraction, of wage rates, prices, and dividends.

And certainly the continuing demands of education cannot be denied their place on a civic calendar, crowded as it may already be. He is a member of the board of trustees of the publiclibrary system. He attends its meetings. Here he enters an academic field — to consider budgets for the purchase of books, curriculum, the ratio of fiction to non-fiction, the scope of lectures and recitals in these days when municipal budgets must of necessity be cut.

Thus does he spend his days — busy days which take him from one activity to another, each important in itself, yet seldom related to the next, and almost never directly related to his own job.

A few years ago, in the heyday of prosperity, such a range of activities would have made a man look like a very successful business man. To-day candor compels one to describe it as a confession of impotence and incompetence.

I make no argument that such activities do not constitute an eminently important programme for any man. I offer it for consideration here only because I feel that it suggests a clue to a vital failure in our present social organization. For it seems to me selfevident that no one human being can do all these things, or even a fraction of them, and do them well. In my own opinion, if such an executive carried full-time responsibility to his business job, he would be rendering an adequate public service. Instead, he tries to divide himself among a score of organizations. For even if physical working time is entirely incapable of such subdivision, one knows that the problems which lie before him for decision can absorb his mind and heart, even when meetings cannot be attended.

The results are inevitable; he does not perform his duties in his business with any approach to his own standard of performance for them; nor can he feel that he is as good an administrator of social work, transportation, or education as he would want to be even if he had the talent and the training for these specialized fields.

II

This whole individual experience symbolizes in my opinion a general policy which the American public has carried to dangerous excess. We are tending more and more to draft for important public responsibilities a few business men who already carry upon their shoulders the heavy burdens of their own office.

Consider as an outstanding, yet none the less typical, example of what happens straight down the line the case of Mr. Owen D. Young, who has rightly earned the distinction of being one of our most useful citizens. His regular job, and the one from which, I assume, he draws his chief income, is the chairmanship of the Board of the General Electric Company. Obviously his position involves tremendous responsibility. Here is one of the largest corporations in the world, transacting each year hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business, not only in this country, but in all parts of the globe. To direct the administration of this huge industrial empire would seem job enough for even a man with the calibre of Mr. Young.

Now let us see what has happened to him. There is hardly a problem that comes up in this country, whether it be commercial, industrial, financial, educational, or international, that is not put to Mr. Young for solution. He is asked not only to formulate a programme, but to give his time and effort to carry it through. He has been obliged to spend weeks and months away from his own desk on public matters. He is summoned here, there, and everywhere.

Knowing some of the requests put to him, I am amazed how little respect people have for his time. I very much question whether anyone could do what Mr. Young is expected to do. Only God could do it.

Mr. Albert H. Wiggin furnishes another striking example of this same extraordinary American practice. Mr. Wiggin started as a modest banker in my own home town, Boston. By arduous devotion to the problems of banking, he has advanced to the head of the Chase National Bank, the largest in the world, with resources of about two billion dollars. (I wonder how many of us realize what two billions mean!) Yet just when he holds down this job, involving, it would seem, enough responsibility, often detailed responsibility, to absorb every working moment of even such an able man as Mr. Wiggin — just at the time when he is needed most in his own institution, the public summons him to multiple service in national and international realms.

I cannot help feeling that if it is necessary for the Chase National to have Mr. Wiggin as its chief executive officer it cannot at the same time spare him for these absorbing excursions into affairs of state. True, the ultimate direction of economic life may hinge upon our disposition of war debts and other international problems; but thousands of depositors, stockholders, merchants, and business men depend for the security and continuity of their economic life upon the management of the Chase National. I only mention this bank as an example. There are others like it.

I do not say, of course, that we must not formulate — and so on — some settlement of the problem of war debts, reparations, and tariffs; that we must not handle our communal task of civic and social responsibility. All I ask is: Why must we do these things predominantly through the same men whom we hold responsible for American industry and finance?

III

In short, the American public has built its leadership upon exactly that model which it is now criticizing so sharply in finance. We have not only ‘pyramided’ our financial structure, we have also ‘pyramided’ our leadership; and, in my opinion, ‘pyramided’ leadership is the more serious danger.

It is not hard to understand, of course, why leadership tends toward pyramiding; indeed, to be named to one committee leads to membership on the next just as naturally as one holding company can generate a pyramid. For our American model of leadership, like our financial pyramids and the house that Jack built, grows by its own momentum.

Let Mr. A be named to one committee, and the chain is started. When the second, in process of formation, looks about for an impressive membership list, it cannot help noting that Mr. A has already been in the public prints and the public eye through his connection with committee number one. If Mr. A is also known as a prominent and respected business man (and it is the reputable and successful business men of our communities who are still the best known of our citizens), the ‘leadership’ chain is not only started, but tightly linked about his leg.

Before Mr. A knows it, he will find himself, in the name of his civic responsibilities and his business position, a conscripted member of ten important, though perhaps unrelated, committees, with the urgent invitation to join the eleventh upon his desk. He has become a symbol of business and public service; he has been in the public eye and is generally known. He has become, in addition to a useful committeeman, just plain, good ‘window dressing.’

But if Mr. A is conscientious, he is continuously harried by the wellknown problem of how to get along with only twenty-four hours in a day, when an exacting business job and various civic, educational, industrial, philanthropic, national, and perhaps even international duties compete for each one of them.

If the very natural development of pyramided leadership is easy to understand, its dangers are equally obvious. No man, however great his native ability (and we must remember that ‘genius’ is a very rare quality), can carry several major, complex responsibilities at the same time. A general knowledge of many related fields every specialist in practical affairs should have. But the mastery of the complicated data required for responsible decision in such various matters as reparations, public finance, banking, social work, transportation, industrial relations, no one man can have, not only as long as he wishes also to carry his own business job effectively, but, indeed, as long as he remains a mere man. He ends by doing nothing as well as it can or should be done.

But even this is not all. By pyramiding its leadership, America does more than fail to obtain the best available talent for each job that needs to be done. It continues to expect miracles from men who have already made a proved mess of things. Perhaps the historian of the future will decide from his long view upon the whole of society that no particular group of men can be held responsible for the collapse which we call the present depression. But he will find again and again, in the rolls of our day, certain names rising from the nameless mass. These men were as much the leaders of the business world as an individualistic economy can be said to have leaders. These are the men who spurred on the ‘new era’ of speculation, even when the judgment day they never suspected was around a much nearer corner than the prosperity they ever hail. Yet it is to these men that we too often look for guidance out of the morass into which they at least let us blunder.

Let a group of New York bankers and industrialists form a corporation to purchase bonds in the open market, and we expect the ‘barometers of confidence’ in Wall Street to register a feverish rise. Yet should we so soon forget how the tardy attempt of the Federal Reserve Bank to raise the discount rate just a few weeks before the deluge was openly defied by certain powerful individuals? Have our business and financial leaders shown such unerring vision and competence in their own field that we should rush to place the public business in their hands? Might we not more safely say, ‘Here, Mr. Business Man, let us see how much better than this you can do by minding your own business. Perhaps if we let you do just that, the public business, too, will be better tended. For you may find the way to save us from such business disasters, and we may find trained experts for specialized communal jobs.'

IV

The point I am trying to make seems to me to bear directly on the extensive discussion of central or coordinated planning during the past three years. For one thing, it should be clearly recognized that careful, precise planning within individual industrial and commercial concerns is a primary prerequisite for successful coördination. Could anyone say now, with the evidence of the past three years before us, that even the most intelligently led of our business corporations had really achieved the security that is derived from scientific planning? Yet the most efficient welding together of inefficient parts can hardly produce an efficient whole! Moreover, careful planning within individual plants leads inevitably to a consideration of broaderranged problems.

If Mr. Owen D. Young, for instance, had been permitted to apply himself to studying his own pay rolls and personnel problems as profoundly as he studied the agenda of the President’s Second Conference on Industrial Relations, it is at least possible to wonder whether the General Electric Company might not have built up unemployment reserves before the depression. And if the General Electric Company and a score or more of our larger concerns had applied themselves to the task of establishing unemployment reserves, the whole question of stabilized employment would soon have come to the fore. More secure employment, plus the high-wage policy which was already winning a steadily widening endorsement, could have promised the continuing effective demand so essential to mass production, and therefore, necessarily, to mass distribution. The ultimate conclusion of such a chain of reasoning needs hardly to be pointed.

I am not saying, of course, that these things would have saved us from the present depression; it is, I fear, a more complex matter than that. But I do feel that they might have mitigated its severity and the suffering it has brought. I am sure that without them we can gain no insurance against other depressions after this.

V

To hold every business man socially responsible for his own business, however, is but one aspect of the total problem. For we are discovering that in our modern world, as in so much else, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When every business is responsibly and expertly managed, there will still remain problems of industry as a whole. And even when industry as a whole is running smoothly, we shall still have to deal with the no less important community interests of education, recreation, social organization, and the like, before we shall have covered the whole of the public business.

All I am urging is that, like business, ‘coördination ’ — or social work, or public health, or any of the multiple concerns essential to modern community life — is a specialty, a technical job, that requires the full, concentrated time and energy of the most talented of men. Just as we cannot have an efficient industrial world unless each industrial plant is well managed, just so no single plant can be completely efficient until the industrial world is organized as a whole. Similarly, no people can be completely secure until its humblest citizen is safeguarded from physical, mental, and moral injury.

The important thing to remember, and the one I am urging, is that each function — whether it be ‘coördinating activities,’ individual industrial management, or public affairs in their manifold ramifications — is a specialty with its own techniques and skills. No man can handle more than one of them in a truly responsible fashion. To pyramid leadership is to dissipate responsibility.

Our real task is to find for each socially necessary job the man best fitted to do it. If I, through natural bent, training, and experience, am a good banker, or manufacturer, or merchandise man, will it not serve the public interest best to let me devote full time to that job? Are there not other men who can be better than I the librarian, social worker, transportation expert, city planner, public-health administrator, and the dozen and one other functionaries that our present way of doing things may ask me also to be?

For we must recognize — and soon — that these public and civic functions are every bit as important as those which enter into the conduct of business and industrial enterprise. Men of ability and talent must be developed to give to their direction, as to business, their energy and intelligence on a full-time basis.

But to achieve this all-important end in American life the American public must acquire an entirely new attitude toward its public servants, whether they be engaged under private or under governmental auspices. We must train and develop professional men for these functions, technicians often of rare talent and ability, who will be responsible to the proper public bodies for their efficient conduct. We must hold them to their posts by paying them adequately, and by giving them that status and prestige which the public business deserves. When we remember the niggardly compensation we offer our educators, our government officials, our social workers, in comparison with what corresponding posts of responsibility draw in business, it seems to me to augur well for the professional spirit on which we must ultimately depend for high-grade public service that we obtain as fine communal officials as we do. When we finally give these posts the status of adequate pay and community respect, we can expect much in a field which exerts so important an influence upon our ultimate public welfare.

In these respects European countries have already progressed further than we. I need only mention the tradition in the civil service of England, which attracts the best of that country’s university men. You will not find the great industrialists of Great Britain constantly called away from their onerous duties to give weeks and months to public enterprise. The work is carried on by trained civil servants, operating behind elected officials responsible for public policy. There are, of course, negotiations which can best be carried on by non-official bodies and their representatives; there are others in which the advice and consent of such bodies will be desired. But just as, to cite only one instance, Mr. Montagu Norman, of the Bank of England, is constantly in contact with central banks of other countries, so we in this country should have that personnel in our Federal Reserve system which will enable this country to obtain expert representation in financial discussion and negotiations without our constantly calling big business men or bankers from their own responsibilities.

From time to time, of course, men may appear in the business world with talent so rare that other fields as well as their own can profit from their presence in them. Perhaps such men should be asked to serve the nation as a whole rather than individual business enterprise. Even for them, however, I should think it better if they actually left their business to devote full time to public affairs while someone else took hold of the responsibility they formerly carried. In this way private business will not suffer and the nation will be able to place responsibility squarely upon the men whom it honors with leadership.

I have always thought that the late Dwight W. Morrow well illustrated the advantages of such a procedure. He was a man of rare imagination and talent for public work. When the public call came, he divorced himself from his bank and other business affiliations. He devoted himself whole-heartedly to his public duties. The contribution he made in Mexico, and the contribution to the national welfare which we should have expected of him had he lived, are a measure of our loss through pyramided leadership.

VI

Our pathetic confidence in the business man which underlies our pyramided American leadership has its roots deep in human history. It is indeed a tendency in humankind to manufacture medicine men out of its own imagination, plus the magic of a success which may often arise from multiple external causes as much as from the power of the ‘magician.’ The attitude of the American public toward its business men during the past three decades has taken on something of this characteristic.

And too often, I am afraid, this natural tendency has been fed by clever ‘public relations experts.’ They, with the help of our press, have often created the legends, labels, and ‘leads’ that transform a good business man into a ‘master mind.’ ‘Shirt-stuffing’ carries its own measure of intoxication. But, as with all heady mixtures, the morning after inevitably dawns. If the public cannot yet recognize the truth, let us see ourselves truly for what we are — a group of men whom the depression reveals as failures in our own major responsibility. Let us ask leave to stick to our desks and see what we can do to retrieve business, while we relinquish gladly to other specialist hands major responsibility for the various communal tasks which, like business, demand full-time and expert attention.

However much we business men may participate in these community affairs as lay advisers, only when we succeed again in making industry profitable shall we be giving our best to society. Such a revival of successful business enterprise may, of course, demand in the coming years conditions different from those of the past. We may require a diversion of funds which formerly went into capital investments to higher wages and salaries, so that the productive capacity of existing capital equipment may be continuously absorbed. We may require coördination and control for industry as a whole. We may have to formulate new international relationships and programmes, new monetary policies. But we shall also need, as always, profitable business units capably and efficiently managed.

These units, basic to the whole of modern economic functioning, would seem to demand business men assiduously and devotedly ‘minding their own business.’