Derrick Bailey's Blog

The Danger of Specializing Too Early

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:49:46 +0000

A great many young men think they have found a quick and easy road to success by concentrating their minds wholly on the jobs they happen to hold.

It is perfectly true that a business man must not underestimate the importance of details.

But it is also true that large success is always built upon a clear understanding of basic principles.

The common fallacy that it is best for a man—especially a young man—to confine his thought and studies to his own specialty has in many instances proved ruinous. It is easily possible to specialize so much as to lose all sense of the importance of a broad, well-balanced business training.

We all know the lawyer who is wrapped up in his quibbles; the accountant who sees nothing in business but a maze of figures; the advertising man who is so fascinated by “cleverness” that he forgets to try to sell goods; and the technical man who knows nothing about the commercial phases of his engineering problems.

Such men cannot take their places among the higher executives because they know little or nothing of business outside their own specialty, and they cannot know even that thoroughly while their general outlook remains so narrow.

The Phenomenal Growth of Advertising

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:32:16 +0000

by KOMUnews under CC BY

In olden times the dailies carried only a very little advertising—a few legal notices, an appeal for the return of a strayed cow, or a house for sale. It is only within the past fifty years that advertising as a means of bringing together the producer and consumer began. And, curiously enough, the men who first began to appreciate the immense selling-power that lay in the printed advertisement were “makers” or “fakirs,” of patent medicines. The beginning of modern advertising is in fact synchronous with the beginnings of the patent-medicine business.

Even magazine advertising, which is now the most profitable and efficacious of all kinds, did not originate until February, 1860, when “The Atlantic Monthly” printed its first “ad.” “Harper’s” was founded simply as a medium for selling the books issued from the Franklin Square House, and all advertisements from outsiders were declined. George P. Rowell, the dean of advertising agents, in his amusing autobiography, tells how Harper & Brothers in the early seventies refused an offer of $18,000 from the Howe Sewing Machine Company for a year’s use of the last page of the magazine; and Mr. Rowell adds that he had this information from a member of the firm, of whose veracity he had no doubt, though at the same sitting he heard Mr. Harper tell another man about the peculiarities of that section of Long Island where the Harpers originated, assuring him the ague prevailed there to such an extent that all his ancestors had quinine put into their graves to keep the corpses from shaking the sand off.

Before the Civil War it is said that the largest advertisement that ever appeared in a newspaper was given by the E. & T. Fairbanks Company, and published in the New York “Tribune,” which charged $3000 for it. Now the twenty large department stores alone of New York City spend, so it is estimated, $4,000,000 a year for advertising, while one Chicago house is said to appropriate $500,000 a year for publicity in order to sell $15,000,000 worth of goods. Those products which are believed to be advertised to the extent of $750,000 or more a year include the Uneeda Biscuits, Royal Baking Powder, Grape Nuts, Force, Fairy Soap and Gold Dust, Swift’s Hams and Bacon, the Ralston Mills food-products, Sapolio, Ivory Soap, and Armour’s Extract of Beef. The railroads are also very large general advertisers. In 1903 they spent over a million and a quarter dollars in publicity, though this did not include free passes for editors, who, I may parenthetically remark, thanks to the recent Hepburn Act, are now forced to pay their way across the continent just like ordinary American citizens.

Assume Mastery Over Your Audience

admin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:06:00 +0000

by TheSeafarer under CC BY

In public speech, as in electricity, there is a positive and a negative force. Either you or your audience are going to possess the positive factor. If you assume it you can almost invariably make it yours. If you assume the negative you are sure to be negative. Assuming a virtue or a vice vitalizes it. Summon all your power of self-direction, and remember that though your audience is infinitely more important than you, the truth is more important than both of you, because it is eternal. If your mind falters in its leadership the sword will drop from your hands. Your assumption of being able to instruct or lead or inspire a multitude or even a small group of people may appall you as being colossal impudence—as indeed it may be; but having once essayed to speak, be courageous. BE courageous—it lies within you to be what you will. MAKE yourself be calm and confident.

Reflect that your audience will not hurt you. If Beecher in Liverpool had spoken behind a wire screen he would have invited the audience to throw the over-ripe missiles with which they were loaded; but he was a man, confronted his hostile hearers fearlessly—and won them.

In facing your audience, pause a moment and look them over—a hundred chances to one they want you to succeed, for what man is so foolish as to spend his time, perhaps his money, in the hope that you will waste his investment by talking dully?

Is the Customer Always Right?

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:11:38 +0000

by John Drake Flickr under CC BY-ND

Courtesy is restful. A nervous frenzy of energy throughout the day leaves one at sunset as exhausted as a punctured balloon. The fussy little fellow who fancies himself rushed to death, who has no time to talk with anybody, who cannot be polite to his stenographer and his messenger boys because he is in such a terrible hurry, is dissipating his energy into something that does not matter and using up the vitality which should go into his work. He is very like the engine which President Lincoln was so fond of telling about which used so much steam in blowing its whistle that every time it did it it had to stop.

The Orientals manage things better than we do. “We tried hurrying two thousand years ago,” a banker in Constantinople said to a tired American business man, “and found that it did not pay. So we gave it up.” There is always time to be polite, and though it sounds like a contradiction, there will be more time to spare if one devotes a part of his day to courtesy.

But there is danger in too much courtesy. Every virtue becomes a vice if it is carried too far, and frank rudeness is better than servility or hypocrisy. Commercial greed, there is no other name for it, leads a firm to adopt some such idiotic motto as “the customer is always right.” No organization could ever live up to such a policy, and the principle back of it is undemocratic, un-American, unsound and untrue. The customer is not always right and the employer in a big (or little) concern who places girls (department stores are the chief sinners in this) on the front line of approach with any such instructions is a menace to self-respecting business. America does not want a serving class with a “king-can-do-no-wrong” attitude toward the public. Business is service, not servility, and courtesy works both ways. There is no more sense in business proclaiming that the customer is always right than there would be in a customer declaring that business is always right, and no more truth.

No good business man will argue with a customer, or anybody else, not only because it is bad policy to do so, but because his self-respect will not allow it. He will give and require from his employees courteous treatment toward his customers, and when doubt arises he will give them (the customers) the benefit of it. And he will always remember that he is dealing with an intelligent human being. The customer has a right to expect a firm to supply him with reliable commodities and to do it pleasantly, but he has no right to expect it to prostrate itself at his feet in order to retain his trade, however large that trade may be.

Too little has been said about courtesy on the part of the customer and the public—that great headless mass of unrelated particles. Business is service, we say, and the master is the public, the hardest one in the world to serve. Each one of us speaks with more or less pitying contempt of the public, forgetting that we ourselves are the public and that the sum total of the good breeding, intelligence, and character of the public can be no greater than that of the individuals who make it up.

Understanding Social Forces

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:50:57 +0000

by haylesyable under CC BY

Some four years after the strike the business head of the firm testified in a public hearing that he should scarcely know how to conduct his business without the organization which now obtains for dealing collectively with labor. He also in the same hearing expressed the view that a large employer is a trustee of the public, responsible for the measure of public welfare in which his business results; and this man, remember, is not a reformer or even a radical, but just a successful business man.

In this bit of labor history there were, no doubt, many fortunate but uncontrollable factors which, otherwise combined, would have brought a less happy result. But two things stand out: first, the laborers listened to wise counsel—they were well led; and second, the employers, when they consented to make an agreement, gave the plan adopted their genuine support. Combining good citizenship with business sense they were able to understand the new social influences that make the formulas of 1880 a poor gauge of efficiency factors in 1910. They are now enjoying the benefits of their willingness to learn.

The effect of social forces is seen under different circumstances and from an entirely different angle in the present halting policy of American railroads. Here, in addition to other social elements in the question, is the fact of definite government control. This circumstance has accustomed railway managers to look at both the internal and the public factors in their success. A number of years ago, before Mr. Justice Brandeis became a member of the Supreme Court, he pointed out, as many others have since done, that the railroads were looking too much to the government factor, and too little to the economy and effectiveness of their own internal administration. Even though we concede this point, it is still clear that the highest efficiency of our railroads must wait upon a clarification of policy with respect to the great social fact affecting railway operation—the fact of government control. We may not approve the precise manner in which the railroads respond to this fact, but obviously they cannot be efficient and ignore it.