It was this impasse that attracted me to career work more than a quarter of a century ago. There was something very backward in a system that fitted inferior men into good jobs because they were "the best men available," while superior men fitted themselves into inferior jobs because they were "the best jobs available."
I couldn't blame the executives who did the hiring. In their quest for men of ideas and ambition, they were using the best aptitude and intelligence tests their personnel people and psychologists could provide. What they wanted was a net to bring in the good men, but what they devised was a protective screen that kept out both the exceptionally good and the least desirable ones. Yet at least they were trying, and if the right individuals did not come forward to be interviewed and tested, it was not their fault. By right individuals, of course, they meant right for the company. Should a highly superior man pass the tests for a job beneath his abilities, the hiring organization usually was not going to discard him for being too good. That was the traditional rule of business talking again-"Get the best you can for the money."
I am all for good bargains as long as they are in merchandise and not human lives. My own idea is that a job is not a hammer, a typewriter, a sales counter or a desk to be manned, though an organization may feel it should look at it that way. To me a job is the whole individual, complete with his intelligence, past achievements, and ambitions for the future. If the company hires the man for his skill with hammer and nails and then keeps him there-the job has to be filled-though he may demonstrate greater skills in another field, both man and company are losers. Hardest hurt is the man, with his one and only career at stake. He is jeopardizing his progress while his employer is getting what he pays for while losing the man's potential to produce more.
What it boiled down to is that while no employer would think of using a giant tractor to push a little wheelbarrow, he was all too often using human beings on tasks that left most of their abilities unused, while at the same time bemoaning the scarcity of good men. Well, that was tradition again, presenting its usual unreasonable logic. Tradition says the employer must get the utmost efficiency out of his machines and the utmost efficiency out of the men on the jobs, and to that end all sorts of time studies and efficiency programs have been developed.
But if the man is not getting the most efficiency out of himself, that, says tradition, is his own look-out.
I looked over the advice provided by tradition to help a man look out for himself. "Grasp your opportunities," says tradition, about as helpfully as advising a drowning man to grasp straws. "Strike while the iron is hot," it says. "Break in," and "make good," and "get in the hay while the sun shines." It sounded like a lot of painful hard work to me, especially when my own idea of success was to be doing something you enjoyed doing well, to the mutual benefit of yourself and others.
In the library I found many books ready to help one achieve success. Inspirational books based on the lives of successful men who may or may not have been able to find their way around in our modern world. Books to restore self-confidence, books to send ambition soaring, books to keep you working through all of your hours of "spare time," books to renew your faith in the power of God. All were good books, and some were amazingly so. In fact, I found in them the encouragement to continue my research into what I came to recognize as their common weakness. They could help you if you knew where you were going, but no one of them could point out your way.
Having reached that point, I was brought face to face with a paradox: How to point out the way if the individual didn't know where he was going? I studied the psychological and aptitude tests that were assuming "voice of doom" proportions.
I could come to this conclusion. Psychological tests screen out, and do not screen in. The man who got the job too often was the last man "screened out," and there was no guarantee that he was the best man for the job, nor that he would like it when he got there. And the best of success books could only help the men who were already determined to get where they wanted to go, and hence were already half-way there.
At the same time, much though I might deplore men and women wasting their lives on jobs too small for them, I could see that the first move toward personal success had to be made by them. Even in enlightened industries and the number is increasing daily-where special courses and training programs were being offered to those with the ambition to advance themselves, the move had to be made by the individual. So why didn't they make the move, even when being nudged in the right direction by their immediate superior?
When I reached that question, I knew I was getting warm. The best training programs offered by a company are the programs best for the company. In that respect I agree heartily with the companies. I want companies to become more successful through training programs that make their employees more successful when, as is fortunately often the case, the programs do as much for the individual as for the company. And that brought up a fine point. The companies spend thousands of dollars on their programs, they have made scientific studies of them, and they try to know how many trained employees for what jobs they will get out of them. But how much of a study had the employee made of himself to discover, if he could, whether the program would lead him to lasting satisfaction or merely a promotion to ultimate frustration?
That question has now been answered by the thousands of case histories of successful men in my files. The schools can educate you, and the psychological tests can try to rate you, and the training programs can try to train you. Opportunity may lead you one way, and a "lucky break" may suddenly lead you in another direction. This, tradition says, is the way it always has been and always will be. Man, it says, is the pawn of fate, and his best laid plans are no better than those of mice. These are all external influences; leaving you little to say, and tradition would keep it that way.
