W. M. Wardrop,

     To get a start on this subject I want to go back to the course of last year. The subject handed me for the talk last year was "Man-Building". To get at the matter of "Man-Building" we considered the question from the standpoint of the Southern Division and took note of the fact that it required 650 engines to run the Southern Division, about 17,000 cars and about 17,000 men. As we all know the engines and cars wear out, are occasionally destroyed and have to be replaced, and the increasing business requires us to be building new engines and cars. For exactly the same reasons we have to build new men to fill these jobs.

     The question before the meeting was how to go about that. The matter of man-building is the question of how to provide the right men for these jobs. That led us into consideration of the kind of men we wanted to build. If you want to build a machine you must know what it is to be like when it is finished; what it will do; and have prints made of it; from which it is built. For that same reason we should know what kind of men we are trying to build. That led us, as a logical step, into considering the scheme of doing the work. The program that we had laid down for us, was that we wanted 17,000 men, all working at the same composite job, not working at cross purposes, but all working toward the same end.

     Then we considered the printed pamphlet issued by the secretary's office. This pamphlet tells us how many officers of the company there are, what relation they bear to each other, and how their work is handled, so they do not all do the same thing at the same time, but that they fit into the general scheme. A continuation of the subject is contained in the back part of the book of rules. It prescribes the scheme of doing things in the operating department so that each man will perform work which will fit in with the work all the others are doing, and thus prevent confusion.

     The next step was the question of raw material from which to build a man; do we have a man who has had some training in railroad work, or do we have a green-horn or tender-foot; and have to train him, or mold him, so that he will fit into one of these 17,000 positions on the Southern Division. We introduced the question of what it is necessary to do with that man, assuming that we caught him when he was young. It seemed to be the agreement, without very much argument that the time to teach a man how to railroad was when he was just out of school. Get the man who has not been engaged in any other business whose mind was not gummed up with something else. Teach him the things we want him to know and train him under rules that have been proven.

     There were a few fundamentals which the Wilmington Club agreed upon, in the way of training and handling men. Some of the principles that were laid down were that in hiring new men to teach them the work we should make just as careful a selection of material as we do when we build a machine at the shop. You all know that in building a machine, some of the raw material selected may be defective or unfit for the part it is to play and you do not use it. You throw it out. It is equally desirable when you come to building a man to fit some job that you size up the raw material and treat it in the same manner as you would the raw material for a machine. You may find a flaw in it. What might be a flaw considered from a railroad standpoint would not be a flaw for some other purpose. Some young man misses his calling and gets on the railroad by mistake. It is only kindness to tell this man that he is not fitted for the railroad and to find something else before it is too late. We discussed the scheme of hiring men on probation until the foreman convinced himself the man would be, or would not be, a success in the position assigned him, before he let him go.

     The discussion was carried to the extreme and it was pretty well agreed that in this matter of handling men in large numbers it was desirable for the man who had a force working for him, never to admit to them there was any higher authority than the boss. If the boss had instructions from his superior he did not have to tell his men. If the men want to know something they ask the boss. Some things he can answer out of his head, and for others he must go to his boss. It is not necessary for any foreman or superior officer to tell the men working for him what was answered from his head or what he must find out from his superior. So much for the question of man-building.

     When the program was made up for this year, I was informed that I was invited to make a speech at Baltimore and one at Harrisburg on the subject of "Organization".

     This reminded me of the fellow who played in a rural volunteer band during the late war. As you know every community had a band during the war. Some never had a band before, but during the war they all had bands, and every time a new liberty loan was put over they got the band out and had a parade. This rural band was one of these which had been organized, without uniforms and they had just finished a tune and one of the players wiped the spit off his whiskers and asked his partner "What will we play next" and his partner said "Yankee Doodle" and the man said "Oh Gosh, I played that last time".

     If I were a professor I would take a dictionary and define the word "Organization", or if I were a Theologian I might take my text from the 12th Chapter of Romans: "For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office" and build up a sermon around that. Everybody knows what a mob is. Anybody knows that a mob never did anything useful. A mob is about the most useless things I know of. I wish you would hold that idea awhile until I draw another parallel. Lately when Baldwin's built a lot of engines for us, Mr. Smith over at Altoona told me he was shipping them about everything they required to build the engines, and that if they had a gang down there to put them together we should soon get the engines,. You all know that car after car of that material went from Altoona to Eddystone to build the engines. Suppose there is enough material in one of these cars to build one engine, but the car caught fire somewhere and burned up out here in the yard. You have nothing left but a car of scrap. There would be nothing useful about that. If on the other hand, you assembled those parts and put them together according to the print and put the same amount of heat in the proper place, you could do something useful with that material. That carload of material was nothing more than so much scrap; however, it could become a very useful machine when the various parts were properly related and heat applied where it would do some good.

     That carload of stuff had exactly the same relation to the finished engine, which was capable of being very useful, as the mob has to the organization. Take the various parts of a mob and produce a definite part of the work from each of them, and you have converted it from a mob into an organization; in the same way as the pile of scrap becomes a machine. That is what I mean when I say "Organization".

     Sometimes the word "Organization" is used to mean a machine. Ordinarily when we say machine we mean an inanimate assembly of parts, but when we say "Organization" we mean a machine made up of men, each with a prescribed relation to all the others. A mob, as you know, has a great deal of strength but does not do anything useful. When that mob becomes an organization it has no more physical or mental force than when it was a mob, but it becomes a useful organization, because each member has been assigned some definite part to perform. It is that matter of building an organization that we came here to talk about.

     In comparing an organization with a machine the definition of an organization would apply almost as well to machinery, because in any machine, each part has its proper relation to the other parts and as long as it stays where you put it, the machine is a success. The organization is the same, except that each part is a man. A man does not ordinarily like to be considered as a machine. When a boy is looking around for an accupation, someone will often warn him against going to work for any big corporation. They say an organization is a machine and they tell him that he will become a machine. He will lose his individuality and personality to become a part of a machine. Nobody wants to become a machine. I think there is a loose screw in that argument. If you undertake, in the shops, to build a machine or an engine, every member or part is selected on its merits. You use one kind of steel for the fire box and something different for the other parts of the engine. Each member assembled for that machine has individuality for the part it is intended to occupy in the complete arrangement. An organization built out of men, requires the same care in its construction to see that each part, which is a man, has the characteristics to fit that part. There are no two men alike; probably no two jobs alike. Fit every man into the job he is best fitted for, and he can retain his individual characteristics and make them applicable to his place in that job. He should not feel that he has become a machine any more than the steel, brass and wrought iron in an engine have become the same thing because they are organized together for a common purpose.

     There are a great many schemes of organization; different plans of relating men to each other, to accomplish the job which is too big for one man to do. As industry expands organization becomes more elaborate for the same reason that men are physically and mentally just the same size they were a thousand years ago. We have engines on this railroad three times as big as they were within our own memory, and the men who plan them, the men who built them and the men who operate them are just the same size as the men who built, the men who fired and the men who ran the old ones. As the thing erpands and the job gets bigger it requires more men to carry on the work. The more men you have on one job the more elaborate and thorough the arrangements must be made to keep them from working at cross purposes.

     The growth of our own railroad organization is a good illustration. Years ago the location of the towns had something to do with the size of the organization. Each division was, generally speaking, the length of an engine run; the distance an engine could go without having the fire cleaned. Since the railroad was built the traffic has increased a thousand per cent, but a great many of the division limits are the same as when the railroad was built. I would hate to venture on assertion as to how many men were on the Middle Division fifty years ago, but the superintendent, whoever he was, knew all his men intimately and called them by their first names. Such a thing is out of the question with the number employed on the Middle Division today. The organization or inter-relation of the men so they will all work together for the same end has become complicated. The superintendent now has his divisional staff, the train master has certain men reporting to him, the Road foremen has certain ones reporting to him, the master mechanic, division operator and supervising agent all have their forces. All these men together are doing today just what the superintendent did all himself, 50 years ago. These was not much danger of his getting mixed up in his duties because he did everything himself. Now there is a large staff doing what one man did then and there must be some scheme so that each does will fit in with what the others do.

     You don't need to confine yourself to the railroad for that illustration. Fifty years ago all of our business activities, both industrial and commercial, were conducted on a much smaller scale. It required much less of this organization than it does now. In the industrial world a man would make his wares with his own hands and sell them himself. He was the whole show; workman, manager and salesman. There are today in this country many establishments which started in that manner. That man had a son and he took him on as a helper, and as the business grew he took in other members of the family until it was practically a family affair. There are organizations which grew in one family and expanded as the family expanded until there were good jobs for two or three dozen members of the third and fourth generation. As soon as there was more work than one man could do, there had to be some understanding, which work each one was going to do. Each respected the responsibility of the other so that when it was finished it would fit together according to the plan.

     It is the same with the organization of today. If several gangs, or several departments are going to work on a job, and one doesn't keep step with the others, the whole machine gets out of joint and your organization goes to pieces. When the activities of each unit exactly fit with what is being accomplished by all the others just as though one person had done the whole job, then you have perfect organization.

     The simplest form of organization is one man and a helper. Less than this is not organization. In that case the man does the planning and the helper merely performs part of the physical work. That is an organization provided they have an understanding between them and the one is boss of the other and so regulates his activities that things accomplished by each will fit in with the other. Another form of organization is where there are two partners in a business. There is very little difference between one--man--and--a--helper, and a partnership. In one case one man is boss of the other, in the partnership neither is boss but the same necessity for understanding between them still exists, so that one partner does not work at cross purposes with the other.

     The next simpler form of organization, is when the job gets too big for two men and you have to have a gang. With a gang, one man is the boss and may not do much of the work himself. If he regulates the assignment of duties in the gang so that each man accomplishes his part in step with all the others, and the product of each individual fits in with all the others, the foreman has made a success without personally doing much of the work himself. Of course it would be foolish to talk longer to you gentlemen about the organization of a gang.

     The next more complicated scheme of organization is when you get a job too big for a gang and you have to have more than one gang. Your master mechanic knows about how far you can go with one gang. After that there must be more than one gang and when you have more than one, you must have more than one boss and the problem repeats itself. Somebody must be the head that keeps these gangs correctly related, just as the gang foreman keeps the individuals regulated. I call that a general foreman. The first time I talked about this at Wilmington all departments were represented and when I say general foreman, I do not mean a man who has the title of general foreman, but one man who has charge of more than one gang. The gang foreman keeps individuals in step; the general foreman must keep gangs in step with each other.

     Maybe a good many of you have had the personal experience of being just as patient as you could be in trying to teach some person how to do a certain job and after trying every way you knew you finally gave up in disgust, took the job out of his hands and did it yourself. It was much easier to do it yourself than teach the other fellow how to do it. What happens in the blacksmith shop, for instance? That piece of wrought iron would not care very much who beat it with a hammer, whether it was the man or the foreman. What would happen if the general foreman became disgusted with the gang foreman, as the gang foreman does in directing his men? Therefore, a successful general foreman requires very different characteristics from the man who may be a successful gang foreman. He is keeping in touch with and adjusted to the work, not men, but gangs. The fellow who reports to him, of course, is an individual but is the man in charge of the gang and as soon as you jerk the reins out of that fellow's hands, as he jerked the piece of work out of the hands of the individual workman, you have started demoralization. When the men in the gang sees the general foreman take a job out of the hands of the gang foreman they lose respect for the gang foreman, and his usefulness if not shattered, is lessened by that operation. I say, for that reason, that the general foreman is an executive officer. I mean that the general foreman must have executive ability of a very different kind from that required of a gang foreman, and I have seen the mistake made, that because a man was a successful gang foreman it was assumed that he would be a successful general foreman, and when he was tried he was not, for the reason that he was very good at anything up to the limit of what one man could carry in his head. When was carried in three heads he could not handle, and therefore it was in nobody's head, and the organization was a failure.

     A big thing like the railroad requires a very complicated organization--a very far reaching organization. Shop organization is, or can be very much the same at the various points because the shop has the advantage over several other parts of the railroad, in that the men are all together. If the master mechanic would like to talk to the men about something, he could get them all into the erecting shop and talk to them all at once. There are a lot of other departments where that cannot be done. It is impossible for the train master to talk to his men all at once; the railroad would be at a standstill while he was doing it. It is just as impossible for the division engineer, the supervising agent or the division operator. A great many men in these departments on the railroad are long distances away from their bosses and that fact requires a particular kind of organization. Anything as big as a railroad must have an elastic and ever expanding scheme of organization, so that as the thing gets bigger and bigger and the men don't get bigger, enough more men can be taken on and systematically used to accomplish the increased work. In working that out, several different schemes of organization have been devised. The two outstanding schemes are the divisional and departmental.

     The Pennsylvania Railroad is an example of the divisional. The system is cut up into divisions and each division is in charge of a superintendent. The superintendent is responsible to the public and the owners of the railroad for the operation and maintenance of the property. That makes each superintendent more or less of a Czar in his own territory. He is in charge of everything pertaining to the running an upkeep of that division. The radically different scheme of organization is the departmental, which obtains on the New York Central. There is a man on the New York Central in their scheme of organization who has the title of superintendent and has charge of the operation of a certain stretch of railroad but he has nothing to do with keeping it in order. The track is kept in order by one department, the equipment is kept in order by somebody else and all the superintendent has to do is run it. People will talk by the hour as to which is the better scheme but it seems to me that it does not make so much difference which scheme you adopt of the two mentioned, as it is to make sure that everybody understands it the same way and lives up to it. That is the question which is so often overlooked. It is a great deal more important than the selection of the scheme. One scheme may be inferior to another as laid out on paper, admittedly so, but if a railroad or some other industrial concern were to adopt the inferior scheme and everybody lived up to it and they all played the game with each other, they would get better results than the industry who adopted the better scheme and then played fast and loose with it and did not pay much attention to see that each man was in step with the others, or whether he was not.

     About nine years ago the division engineers on the old lines west of Pittsburgh were having a meeting in Chicago. They invited me to make them a speech. This was a great concession on their part because they conscientiously believed that anyone who has been brought up in the transportation department was a "rough neck"--and I had been a train master although I was superintendent of the Western Division at the time. Here is a copy of that speech and I am going to read it to you because it illustrates the negative side of the argument. It points out the benefits of good organization by showing the failure of any organization through disrespect of its requirements. It defines organization in a back-handed manner, like the dutchman's definition of salt. He said, "Salt is what makes potatoes taste bad when you don't put any on". Here is the speech. If the style of it seems a little crude or unfinished, you will realize that it is nine years old and I have learned a good many things in the meantime.

Mr. President and Gentlemen:

     It is not only a very great compliment, but it is a manifestation of extreme liberality when an association like yours--composed of technical men--and which has spread upon its minutes a resolution cutting out the "rough stuff"--invites itself to be addressed by one whose training has been in the transportation department. In fact, a high officer of your association was good enough to tell me only last evening that, having been a train master, the engineers looked upon me as nothing but a "rough neck"-- pure and simple.

     We all feel--in a general way--that the train master and the division engineer have very few problems in common, but I want to show you that the most important duty of each is the solution of that problem which presents itself to both of them.

     Your job is to maintain the company's property. The train master's problem is to maintain the movement of the traffic. The duty which is common to both is to maintain the organization.

     The enemies of the division engineer are the agencies which damage or destroy the physical property. These may be anything from prairie fires to cloudbursts--most engineers preferring the temporate zone between dry and wet.

     The train master's foe is anything which hampers the free movement of the traffic.

     The common adversary is the pest which undermines or destroys the organization and this is the fellow I want to talk to you about. He bears the same relation to our organization as the moth to the garment, or the anarchist to the government, and for want of a better name, is known as the "Pet Pig". This name was devised by an officer of the B. & A. Division (a friend of Mr. Hawley's) who, in describing its significance, offered as an illustration the case of the old sow who died when her children were in infancy and was accompanied by thirteen of them to the grave. The remaining pig had to be brought in-doors and was nourished by artificial means. Lacking an appreciation of decent treatment it formed, early in life, the habit of pursuing members of the household from one room to another and intruded itself into domestic situations and conferences where its presence was not desired.

     Before going into a description of the "Pet Pig" or a study of his habits I want to say something about the way in which we use the word "Organization". Every member of the Pennsylvania family is proud of and brags a good deal about our scheme of organization, and sometimes our neighbors brag for us. A friend of mine who is an officer on the Erie Railroad said one time in a meeting at Youngstwon--that there were but two great organizations in the world--the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Catholic Church. Any of us will demonstrate by the hour to a New York Central man the advantages of divisional organization over the departmental, and yet most of us have a very loose, if not altogether vague, contemplation of the real significance of the word.

     The dictionary says that an organization is "The systematic union of individuals in a body, whose officer, agents and members work together for a common end". An organization is, therefore, a machine. Most men do not want to be like machines and diligently guard themselves against the formation of mechanical habits. This feeling is perhaps what tempts us to disregard the fact that the organization is a machine and that success or failure of the machine is precipitated by very much the same causes as produce efficiency or demoralization in any other machine.

     A yard engine is a machine. It is also an organization because its "members work together for a common end". The function of a yard engine is to convert the energy which has been stored away in coal into draw bar pull. The force starts in the fire box, passes through the boiler, the dome, the dry pipe, cylinders, the rods and the wheels before it becomes tractive effort. If any one of these members violates the printed organization the engine becomes immediately useless and is towed to the shop.

     The blue print which describes the organization of a yard engine distinctly states that the driving wheel reports to and receives its instructions from the side rod. The book of rules, which governs the method of your department, just as plainly says "The track foreman reports to and receives his instructions from the supervisor". Why then is obedience to one of these statements pronounced "success" and the other "red tape"? I would like to prove to you that one is just as vital as the other; that a departure from the terms of either proposition means that the members no longer work together for a common end and that, therefore, the machine is no longer an organization.

     Supposing that while the yard engine was working, the rear driving wheel should become possessed of the human tendency to insubordination and should decide that, although the side rod was more polished than he, still he received a better all-around education in the machine shop and that he would therefore discontinue receiving his instructions as prescribed and report directly to the fire-box, who was his next neighbor and who was the original source of the instructions at any rate. Such action, as you will know, would immediately reduce the efficiency of the yard engine to zero. Why then do we permit it in our organization.

     Returning to the pet pig--he needs hardly now to be described as I believe you have recognized him He is the fellow who wants to be in good standing with his boss's boss; he is the kind of a person who prefers to have the quality of his work and his availability for a promotion judged and passed upon by some authority less intimately acquainted with him than his superior officer. He has various other ear-marks. Sometimes he is a liar, sometimes he isn't ; but he is never the kind one could call a reliable source of information. You have all met him many times, although perhaps the name "Pet Pig" is new to some of you. I knew one of them one time who was married while working on the corps. The superintendent was the only man on the division who was invited to the wedding.

     Now that I have identified for you the germ which infects organization, I should like each one of you to ask himself whether he is stamping out the disease or assisting in its spread. When we institute a search for the transgressor we too often look down the line instead of into the mirror. How many of you have a foreman who is so loyal that he will confidentially slip you choice bits of information about which the supervisor knows nothing? Then information may be very valuable to you but I am here to say that it is never worth what it costs. Your acquiescence in that way of doing things will either encourage a man who is already a "Pet Pig" at heart, or will make one out of a good man who intends to be loyal. but who may have been badly trained; you can't afford to keep the "Pet Pig" you already have, let alone making any more.

     I have heard division engineers weep and wail because the program for the whole month's work had been upset at a conference between the superintendent and the supervisor on the hind end of the parlor car, at which the division engineer himself was not present. It may have been a coincidence, but the engineer who wail the loudest is often the one who hands off the most notes to the track foreman. You are all very ready to admit that the organization is demoralized when the man who should report to you reports to some one higher up. Is it less demoralizing for the foreman to report to the engineer than it is for supervisor to report to the superintendent? Surely things that are good in our printed organization do not become bad by merely putting one's shoe on the other foot.

     The answer if that the "Pet Pig" is a stumbling block and a menace to the organization, no matter what may be his rank. We cannot afford to keep the ones we have an we cannot afford to make any more. This is not a religious discussion, but I am just orthodox enough to believe in a judgment day, and I am just mean enough to believe that when court adjourns on judgment day the "Pet Pig" will be found sitting between--and hand-cuffed on one side to the Kaiser of Germany--and on the other to the man who robbed his baby's bank.