Increasing Human Efficiency in Business
Walter Dill Scott, 1911
Why does the same person work at half strength in one team and give everything without any supervision in another? In 1911 the psychologist Walter Dill Scott questioned successful managers and tested their experience in a laboratory. The book is about six levers that raise people's output almost at no cost: imitation, rivalry, loyalty, concentration, earnings and enjoyment of work.
Who it is for
For managers, and for anyone who works with people or wants to get more done themselves and understand why a person's output depends on the surroundings, not only on character.
Many never discover their reserves of strength, because they have formed a firm habit of dropping the work at the first wave of fatigue.
The Reserve We Never Reach
Picture a long-distance runner. Soon after the start, fatigue weighs on him and it seems he has no strength left. If he stops, he goes home sure that this was his limit. If he keeps running, a second wind comes to him: the wave of fatigue recedes, and there is more strength than there was at the start.
The American psychologist Walter Dill Scott opens his book of 1911 with this image. Machines, telephones and steam turbines, he notes, have changed beyond recognition in a single generation, while the person who works them has hardly changed at all. Scott tested whether a person has a reserve. He set student athletes at exercise devices where they could give everything, and in the middle of the effort the trainer began to encourage them. Their output usually rose, sometimes by half. Those who were already quite spent went on working under the trainer's shouts until they reached their real limit.
Scott's conclusion is this: a person's strength is not a constant. It rises and falls according to laws that can be known. By his estimate, an ordinary person could do half as much again without harm to health. That is his estimate, not a measurement. Many, he writes, never learn of their reserve, because they are used to dropping the work at the first wave of fatigue.
How does one reach this reserve? Scott looks for the answer not in willpower but in inclinations that everyone has: in imitation, rivalry, loyalty, concentration, the attitude to earnings and the enjoyment of work. Next come his six levers, one to a chapter, and they will be useful both to someone who manages people and to someone who wants to get more done himself.
We Copy What We See, and Bad Habits Spread Faster
Twenty years before the book appeared, the best salesman in one company explained to his employer how he had developed his way of selling: the introduction, the demonstration of the car, the final arguments. To prove that the method worked, he offered to play the customer. Step by step he got the employer to admit how much the car would save him, backed him into a corner and sold him the car. The employer decided that if all the agents learned this, turnover would double within three years. “What you say is half the job, but what persuades is how you say it,” he reasoned. The slowest agent, watching the master, will learn this faster than the cleverest one will work it out for himself. The employer called the nearest agents in to watch, and so one of the first schools of salesmen in the country was born.
Scott sees here an imitation that was long thought to be a trait of children and animals. It can be conscious: we watch a master perform a figure on the ice and repeat it, or we fall into step with a faster neighbour. And it can be unconscious: yawning spreads, and an evening crowd quickens its step though there is nowhere to hurry. The unwelcome consequence follows: without meaning to, we pick up slowing down more easily, because effort is unpleasant in itself. One idler in a workshop can outweigh a dozen examples of diligence. Scott saw workshops where output could be raised simply by replacing those who were content to earn a living with people who wanted to earn as much as they could.
We catch most readily from those we admire, and from sociable, cheerful people. Such a person, if he works well, is especially valuable, and if he works badly, especially harmful.
What does Scott advise? Put a newcomer beside the best worker in the first days: he has nothing yet to unlearn, and he will take the right pace at once. A manager must be able to show how to do a thing, not only tell. Seat the best people where they can be seen. And choose your own surroundings: whoever wants to shake off laziness keeps away from the lazy, and whoever is learning French seeks out those who speak it fluently.
About the author
Walter Dill Scott (1869-1955) was an American psychologist, a professor at Northwestern University and one of the first to apply psychology to advertising and to managing people. He later became president of that university.
All books by this author: Walter Dill Scott
Terms from the book
- Washington
- Field
- Jones
- second wind
- Carnegie
- British Iron and Steel Institute: A professional society of British metallurgists, founded in 1869. In 1881 it asked Jones about the reasons for the success of American plants.
- handicap: A head start given to a weaker competitor so that the chances of winning are equal. The word comes from sport.
- quota: In Scott's book: the monthly sales volume the company calculates for each sales agent according to the population of his district. The agent competes against it as against a rival.
- house organ: A newspaper or magazine that a company publishes for its own employees: news of the firm, records and people.
- trade union: An association of workers of one trade or industry that makes agreements with the employer on pay, hours and working conditions.
- Ohio: A state in the northeast of the central United States.
- secondary involuntary attention: A term of psychology in Scott's time: attention that once took effort but, after long practice, holds on by itself, like an accountant's attention to figures.
- piecework pay: Pay for the amount made: for each part, sale or operation, not for the time worked.
- economy of pain: Scott's phrase for the old order, when people worked above all to avoid punishment and need.
- love of the game: Scott's phrase: absorption in the work itself, when a person labours eagerly, as in a favourite game, and not only for the pay.
All terms
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