Three men were placed at the foreman’s desk of a growing factory.  Each had technical knowledge enough to run a plant three times the size.  But all failed.  The first was an autocrat, who tried to boss from a pedestal, and the men didn’t like him.  The next was a politician, whom the men liked thoroughly—­which was his shortcoming, for he tried to run the place as they thought it should be run.  As for the third, he tried to run it on nerves, to do everything himself, to be everywhere at once.  He didn’t fail, really—­he snapped like a fiddle-string.  By that time working tension was relaxed and production wabbling on the down-peak.  Nobody knew who was in charge, or what would happen.

Then along came a fourth candidate, with an abnormally developed bump of expectation.  He knew how to approve and encourage.  Sometimes he said pleasantly:  ‘I knew you could do that, Bill,’ Again, he put it ironically:  ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’  But his strong point was expectation.  With apparent recklessness he gave out work two sizes too large for everybody.  If a subordinate was a No. 7 man he handed him a No. 9 job as a matter of course, and usually the latter grew up to it.  The politician had tried this same scheme, but introduced it backward.  Taking a No. 7 man into a corner, he told him impressively that he was a No. 9 and promoted him on the spot, and warned him to say nothing about it to anybody else.  Then the man tried to swell to fit the office instead of growing to fit the work.  But this fourth candidate made everybody see that doing No. 9 was more creditable than just being it.  So everybody became interested in the work, and nothing else.

There was another suggestive point.  Taking charge after three foremen had failed, the factory was naturally full of nasty cliques, each with its unhealthy private interest.  The new man broke up these cliques by introducing a new interest so big that it swallowed all the little interests, like Aaron’s rod.  That interest was to turn out work of such quality and in such quantities that the factory could get contracts in competition with an older rival, and provide steady employment.

That this faculty for putting people under obligation is more the man than a method, however, is shown in one of Daudet’s delightful little sketches, the story of a head clerk in a French Government bureau who, on getting a fine promotion, wrote home to his father describing his new chief’s homely appearance with light-hearted raillery.  Next morning on his desk lay his own letter, initialed by his chief.  It had been intercepted by the secret service.  The chief allowed him to suffer in apprehension one day, and then told him that his indiscretion should rest between themselves.  ’Try to make me forget it,’ he said, and the incident hung like a dagger over the clerk’s head.

Some time after, the latter caught one of his own subordinates stealing from the cash box, and repeated his superior’s tactics, even to the formula, ‘Try to make me forget it.’  With tears in his eyes the subordinate thanked him for his clemency—­and a few days later, rifled the safe and fled!  The moral of which seems to be that, if the clerk had been enough of a judge of men to use his chief’s method effectively, he would never have fallen into the asininity of writing such a letter.