Chapter XI THE NINTH PRINCIPLE: STANDARDIZED CONDITIONS
(Harrington Emerson - The Twelve Principles of Efficiency)
"HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR"
"HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR"
THE larva, grub, or worm crawls from the egg and its existence is governed by the accident of its birth site and surroundings. Usually it stays where it was hatched, eats and grows, and it arouses neither enthusiasm by the interest of its life nor admiration for its beauty. It is elementally dull and prosaic, for it has neither standardized itself to command conditions nor standardized conditions to suit itself. At last, having reached the limit of its growth, it passes into the pupa or chrysalid state of coma, and emerges, physically, spiritually and mentally a different individual. Who would recognize in the purple emperor butterfly the caterpillar of its previous existence? The butterfly is as beautiful as the worm was repulsive, as mobile as the worm was slow, a creature of the sunlight and sky instead of the shadows and of the earth.
The water-beetle is the lord of the elements. It runs on land with speed, under the water it is one of the quickest and most graceful of swimmers, and through the air it is the fastest of flyers; it seeks its food in the water, it emerges at dusk, and after dark flies toward the moon, or to its destruction in some electric light. More perfectly than any other creature it has standardized itself to play with and command all the elements but fire.
The spider, not so standardized to earth, water, and air, as the water-beetle, has not to the same degree conquered the elements. The beetle swims, runs, flies without effort because its ancestors had aspirations and early achieved victory. The spider works consciously, much as men might work. She drops from a height, not with wings to sustain her, but holding on to a thread made for the occasion, strong and elastic. In mid-fall she can stop, the factor of safety being nothing, yet I have never seen the silken thread break. She can regain, if she wishes, her exact starting point, or, reaching the ground, can cut loose and run. The spider would disdain as clumsy a suspension bridge, for she constructs a canopy whose outlying guy stays have, in proportion to her length, greater reach than the span of the Brooklyn Bridge, whose strength in proportion to construction is greater than that of the best steel wire. The balloon spider, if at all interested in human balloons, must despise them! She, on a calm, sun-lit summer day, will spin out a filament which, warmed by the sun rises straight into the air. Whether the spider, like the soaring birds, first locates an upward air current and then spins her thread, or starts an upward air current though the warmed molecules adhering to the thread I do not know; but in any case the filament rises, rises, until the spider knows it will lift her, and then loosening hold, she soars skyward to be swept by some upper air drift miles away in a few hours, her relatively great weight carried upward and sustained by a thread weighing not the hundredth part of what she weighs. Standardized conditions there must be of almost inconceivably delicate adjustment, of sunlight, of calm, of length and make of thread.
Both soaring birds and balloon spiders and many floating seeds and spores use directly the heat of the sun to sustain them. What bird ever soared at night or upward through a fog?
There are other insects that have solved deeper mysteries than either the water-beetle or the spider. Men can run on the earth, not as well as the beetle ; they can swim, not as well as the beetle; they can glide through the air, not as well as the beetle; they can climb down or up ropes, not as readily as the spider; they can stretch suspension bridges not comparable to the canopy of the spider; they can soar in balloons, not as safely or as conveniently as the balloon spider — for these are all mechanical operations. But the firefly produces light by a chemistry of whose laws and operations we have no grasp. The firefly has not standardized itself to the daylight. It wanted light when it was night, not general, diffused and impersonal light, so it creates in the velvet darkness the momentary and intermittent personal flash, for the moment making itself the centre of the visible universe. It not only refused to acquiesce in the standard light of day and darkness of night, but it remade the conditions of the universe to suit itself.
This is not all of the marvel. The firefly and the human both have eyes, and in these eyes are minute nerves which make us aware of light and interpret to us the shape and color and distance of all the outside world.
There are, therefore, two distinct methods of standardizing conditions — to standardize ourselves so as to command the unalterable extraneous facts, earth, water, air, gravity, wave vibrations; to standardize the outside facts so that our personality becomes the pivot on which all else turns. With the living example of the beetle who commands earth, water and air, with the example of the firefly, which, without effort makes light where there was none, with the lesson of our own eyes which have given us a beginning of command of infinite space and time, shall we fear to attempt standardizations of conditions now but dimly conceivable?
The easiest way for any individual to live his own life in fullest measure is either to standardize himself to suit the environment or to standardize the environment to suit himself. The horse and other animals stay where they are in winter and grow thick and long fur to meet the rigors of the climate. The bird of passage changes itself not at all, but suits the climate to its taste by picking out the one it wants and going to it. Either way is an easy way, but man, the youngest of nature's brood, has attempted to satisfy great wants without standardizing either himself or the environment.
To build the Great Pyramid absorbed the lives of 100,000 men for 20 years, and it is the greatest monument of inefficiency the world bears because condition of building were not standardized; yet the Egyptian builders had eyes which reached out and recognized, through billions of miles of empty intervening space, the groupings of the stars. Without sweat on our brows, nor callosities on our hands, supplementing the same human eyes with telescope, with spectroscope and with camera, we tear the distant stars apart, we dissect them, we drag them into light out of the depth of darkness, we assist at their birth, trace their lives and predict their extinction. Thus, at last has man begun to make himself
infinite and the universe small.
In the building of the pyramids, of the Parthenon, and of St. Peters, man followed a law-less fancy and not an efficiency need, or the work and time and expense would not have been so lavish for so small return. Man has, in fact, until very recently remained in the larval state. He put on clothes to keep out the bitter cold, but little further advanced than the Tierra del Fuegan who shifts a patch of fur between his naked body and the wind. He huddled over a fitful fire to banish the cold, and these two feeble steps upward in the adjustment of self and the conquest of environment were almost all. At best, until recently he has tried to imitate the beetle and the spider rather than imitate the firefly. He invented shoes that he might travel along the rough trails, he invented skates that he might glide over the ice, he invented
boats and sails that water and air might carry him. But at last he has awakened.
Roads were built that a barefooted multitude might travel in slow comfort. The distance from Paris to Bordeaux is 323 miles, and this the fastest walker once covered in 114 hours and 42 minutes, or at the rate of 2.8 miles an hour. Even after a standardized path had been created it took many generations before a bright mind evolved the idea that a revolving wheel would be more adapted to the road than alternating footsteps, so we had the roller, the cart, the wheelbarrow, and at last the bicycle was perfected; but even this last step took three generations. In the bicycle man still used the alternating swing of the legs, but he propelled himself nearly seven times as fast, so that Huret made the 323 miles in 16 hours and 45 minutes, at the rate of 19.8 miles an hour. But why should a man use his own efforts ? He cannot trill his legs as he can his fingers, and even if he could, the leg cannot push much harder than 200 pounds. He had already used steam to propel locomotives on their more mi-nutely standardized road, so he finally attached an explosive reciprocating engine to his road vehicle, an engine capable of making 1,200 strokes a minute for each of four, eight, four-teen, cylinders, as compared to the 140 strokes of each of two legs ; an engine capable of kicking 100 pounds per square inch for as many inches as the piston surface has area, as against the man's total power of push of less than 200 pounds. So that in his cushioned seat, with mere pressure of hand or foot, Gabriel, in the race from Paris to Madrid, made Bordeaux in 5 hours 13 minutes, or at the rate of 62.5 miles an hour. In this race the automobiles were con-fined to the road, the road was narrow, the people many, so a number were killed. Why there-fore be bound by the limitations of a road? Captain Bellinger, on an aeroplane, makes the same trip in 5 hours 21 minutes, actual flying time, at a speed of 60.35 per hour. Flying speed will soon be 80 miles an hour and already the French mathematicians are pointing out that many of the present difficulties of flight will vanish at the higher speed.
In the meantime, however, because conditions have been standardized, instead of building pyramids nearly 500 feet high in 20 years, our skyscrapers go up 600, 700, 800 feet in 10 months; we tunnel through mountains and, laughing at wind and wave, we send a floating palace, larger than St. Peters, through the ocean from continent to continent at the rate of nearly 29 miles an hour.
The principles under which the methods and practices of efficiency are grouped have been compared to the skeleton framework of a dome. The ribs of the dome are the principles, but the first layer can be started with one part of each rib in place, and with filling of various de-vices to complete the circle. As layers are added the ribs rise until they come closer together and at last coalesce. Some ribs may be carried to the top, others may stop part way up, their burden carried by others. In this series of essays each of the earlier ribs has been separately carried to the top, so that now there is less space for the later principles, much of their duty having been transferred to the principles already in place. To maintain reliable, immediate and adequate records we must have standardized conditions; to put in schedules we
must have standardized conditions; so the standardizing of conditions should precede schedules. But unless we have already adopted ideal schedules, how do we know what conditions, and the extent to which they must be standardized? Also, unless we have ideals as to standards, how can we create a high schedule?
It is perhaps because schedules and conditions react so on each other that progress is so disappointingly slow. We make a mean little schedule and meanly standardize conditions to suit. Francis Galton points out that the Basutos in Africa have the greatest difficulty in finding oxen fit for the forespan. The ox who stays in the centre of the herd is not the one struck down by the lion ; so through many generations the independent bulls and cows have been eliminated until it requires careful watching to select, and careful training to develop, a calf capable of walking ahead and leading the others.
In human affairs, however, when we are on any schedule there are some who are not afraid to beat it, although the herd puts up a clamor that the effort is killing and should be pre-vented by combination. Perhaps the effort is temporarily killing; but ultimately some progressive soul aspires to a yet better schedule, and instead of foolishly trying to beat the record under the old conditions, restandardizes the conditions and thus makes an advanced schedule easier than the former schedule.
Records are again broken by effort, far less at its maximum than on the old schedule, but nevertheless discountenanced by the conservatives, until conditions are again restandardized and effort is still further diminished. Who has the harder time, the runner who precedes the cavalcade of an Oriental magnate, or the engineer of our fastest trains ? Who puts forth the greater effort, the peon who twelve hours a day carries load after load of ore in sacks on his back up a notched pole out of a deep Mexican mine, or the fireman who for two hours and a half between New York and Albany, calling it a day's work, shovels coal for the fastest train ? In the locomotive runs across Arizona where oil burners are used, even the fireman's work, usually so hard, has been converted into watching the water glass, watching the smoke, and with his fingers turning on and off water and oil supply.
The grub acquiesces in the obvious ; and until the last century, all but very few men acquiesced in the obvious. By force of ancestral habit this acquiescence is still the curse of most of us. Our ideals, our schedules, have been and are too low instead of too high. The 18-hour trains between the two largest American cities are on the highest regular long-distance schedules thus far attained; but on an open speed-way not comparable to the steel track in smoothness, an automobile with its little engine, and one man guiding, ran faster and longer, so that in comparison 18 hours seems slow; and, quite surely somewhere, some time — perhaps in China or Africa — Brennan's gyroscope car on a monorail, indifferent to both grades and curves, shortening distances one-fifth, will do in 8 hours what now takes 18.
In planning for standardized conditions, it is difficult not to skip the present and plan for the future; but even in the greatest American plants, the conditions imposed by an ignorant and inefficient past are accepted, schedules are toned down, and painful effort crowds out intelligent control. In one large plant where the heaviest and slowest piece took only 40 days for completion, the managers acquiesced for many years in a 9-month schedule, and after much special work felt pride instead of humiliation in a 6-month schedule. A 15-day schedule for general repairs to a locomotive is considered fast time and the average is more nearly 30, but if the time for each item is separately entered in a summary, it is hard to discover why 3 days would not be enough.
The battleship "Kansas" of the American Navy under an eminent efficiency commander went into dry-dock, water was pumped out of the dock, hull cleaned, scraped, painted, rudder post repacked, and the vessel floated again in less than 24 hours. For a steamer immediate repairs are otherwise important than for an isolated locomotive. The railroads, on the other hand, show marvelous speed, generally of the main-strength order, in clearing away a wreck or an earth slide or opening a snow blockade.
If a large publishing house could have freed itself from its own entangling traditions, it could have added a million dollars a year to its net income. The organization was tried out on some insignificant minor matters; it hesitated and balked and trembled for six months over what elsewhere was put into operation in six days and could go into operation in six hours, so the larger plans were not even submitted to it. A great superintendent of another plant had uncontrollable fear of boats of any kind; an-other large and successful manufacturer had fear of the subway in New York and could not be induced to go below ground. Similar fears overcome occasionally even the most wideawake men, and often the main obstacles in the path of progression are not the real and tangible difficulties, but the imaginary specters that terrorize and paralyze some part of the soul.
Ideals of standardized conditions are not Utopian, but are immediately and intensely practical, but ideals must precede selective action. The Greek sculptors in their studies took a hand from one, a foot from another, the torso from a third, the face and head from others, and aggregated them all into an ideal ; but this ideal existed in the mind or the sculptor could not have selected.
Who can tell why one hand is beautiful and another not, why one curve is pleasing and an-other disturbing? We recognize some forms of beauty as unerringly and without previous personal or race experience as we recognize that one note harmonizes with another.
It is far easier to demonstrate and to prove experimentally the value of standardized conditions than it is to prove beauty, especially for the small advances that are immediately possible, because all these advances are in successful operation somewhere ; but often it is easier to break away from all traditions, to put the eye in the point of the needle, to load the gun from the breech, to write with both hands, to photo-graph instead of drawing, to make half-tones instead of engravings, to pick cotton by a whirling serrated pencil instead of with fingers, to turn over 640 acres of land with gang plows hitched behind mechanical tractors, than it is to improve on the old way.
The artist must have aesthetic ideals, the musicians, musical ideals ; but the man who would bring about standardized conditions, either in himself or in his surroundings, must have conceptions of time, of effort, of cost; he must instinctively recognize that for each operation there is one combination of these three that is best for the ideal result. That ideal result may be an embroidered scarf which the lady with unlimited time, simple materials, and graceful, soothing effort has wrought. The ideal result may be the destruction of an enemy's battle-ship, twelve million dollars sunk in five minutes, by guns loaded, accurately aimed, and fired so as to hit, at the rate of two salvos a minute. Time minimum at whatever cost and effort !
In our individual lives, in our shops, in our nation, what are we trying to accomplish ? Are we taking too much time, is it costing too much, are we squandering our strength? Are we standardizing conditions so that time will not be wasted, so that money will not be thrown away, so that effort will not be in vain?
Ud 12.11.2021
Pub 3.10.2013
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