Things went on in this happy homelike fashion until one fine warm Spring day when Brigadier Boss up and booted the whole bunch of bungling department heads into the great Out of Doors and set about to effect a re-organization.
“What I want is men who do THEIR OWN thinking,” he said, and he began telephoning and writing and wiring and advertising all over the country for A-1 Initiativers.
In due time he got them and called them all into his office and passed the cigars and explained how he wanted each man to run his own Department just as if it was his own business, exercising merely ordinary judgment and commonsense.
Then he went on to tell them how the old herd had always passed the old buck to him, never doing anything unless they were told, fearing even to set down the total of a column of figures without first consulting him, and he wound up with a few Well Chosen remarks about Co-operation and Co-ordination and the old reliable shoulder-to-the-wheel stuff.
Everybody was happy and talky and full of pep and chest-out chatter, for be it remembered that each new Department Head was an Individual and not a Person, and could hold his own with the best bullers of bulldom.
And so they all adjourned to their respective stalls and started in their new work with enthusiasm, energy and enterprise, and any other snapful word that you could think of beginning with “e.”
Things went great and glorious for about a month when the Boss discovered that the new Superintendent had put in a lot of machinery in the manufacturing department that he did not approve of, and he proceeded to give the Supe a double-nutted Call Down that carried to Columbus, Ohio.
The Supe came back not unstrengthfully whereupon the Boss’s eyes flashed like a Zeppelin night-searcher, and the Supe remembering that he had seventeen children and a motorcycle to support, cooled down almost to a solid, and let the Boss rave on like a knight of Montana overcharged by a cabman.
Shortly after this explosion in the factory the Boss happened into the Sales Manager’s throbbing little office, and in the course of a high-spirited but not dangerous discussion on things in general he discovered that the S. M. had re-districted the whole territory and changed agencies right and left and down the middle.