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Fashions, Fads and Fancies
REVIEW OFFICE, CHICAGO, I I I . , JULY 16,
1928.
IT is a fact well known to the student of business and of industry
that fashion is as potent in these supposedly hard-headed circles as
it is among what Artemus Ward used to call the
"fair sect." There are modes, changes of style,
Giants'
sudden rushes from one extreme to the other,
Day
fantasy succeeding drabness, and drabness again
taking the place of fantasy. The transition from the extreme of
no legs at all to the extreme of nothing but legs has its parallels in
the business world; and business men are likely to be .no more ra-
tional in their blind following of fashion than the very flappers who,
by indifferent essays at typing and shorthand in their offices, obtain
(safer word than earn, in the circumstances) the money needed for
frocks, hats, shoes, cosmetics, stockings and chemises. One only
needs to think backwards a few years to bring to mind innumerable
examples of the rule of fashion in business and in. industry. Thirty
years ago, when the world first waked up to the possibilities of
large-scale production, the cry was all for combination as against
competition. The United States Steel Corp. dazzled the imagina-
tions of small-scale industry as the sun dazzles the gaze lifted in-
cautiously to its effulgence. From afar, in an admiration not un-
mixed with a certain fear, the public watched the huge maneuver-
ings of the giants, while the politicians of the opposition, seizing the
opportunity to strike much-needed poses of heroism, proclaimed
stridently and daily the immediate destruction of popular liberties
and the imminent establishment of a financial imperialism. Those
were the days when, at the name of Morgan, the Hearst papers
sounded the tocsin and Bryan shuddered in every Chautauqua
throughout the land. Those were the days of the Trust with a
capital T, at the name of which the timid shuddered and the bold
rejoiced. Those were the days when the wives of hard-boiled and
suddenly enriched manufacturers from the Middle West rilled the
corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria and provided for the cynical the
spectacle, not less diverting in being free, of new wealth trying
hard to look as if it were hereditary, and failing rather dismally
in the process.
foundation of a new art of Industrial Management, and which re-
main to-day the subjects of anxious study by such eminent tech-
nical bodies as the Taylor Society, immortalizing his name and
memory. But the thing itself, half grasped and half understood,
became overnight a fashion, and a veritable craze. Businessmen
tumbled over each other to engage "efficiency engineers." Char-
latans sprang up everywhere, to be installed in factories which they
were to revolutionize by the new methods. Losses were to be turned
into profits, labor was to be made happy, and industrial heaven was
to open up its golden doors without more than the very slightest
and most formal delay. Yes, Efficiency was a great fad, but
as a fad . . . who hears of it now ? Where, O ! where are the
Efficiency Experts of yesteryear?
O F course, Efficiency as a principle, elaborated along Taylor's lines,
has taught the world all that it knows of rational industrial manage-
ment; but the sober facts which engineers discuss,
tabulate and project in curves on paper have as
much relation to the mad fashion of the period
„ e
1910-1914 as the general and now accepted idea of
simple, beautiful and unhampering clothes for women has to the ab-
surdities of the flat-chested, Valentino-whiskered flapper mode of
the period 1921-4. Efficiency lives, just as Combination lives; but
neither is to-day the subject of a craze or of a boom. Each has been
coolly weighed and appraised and each has taken its due place in
the appointed scheme of things. But man, no more than woman, can
live without a fashion over which he can go mildly insane. And
already a new cloud shows faintly on the horizon. The High Pres-
sure Salesmanship, which succeeded Efficiency with a Big E, is
already receding into the wings and the spotlight is prepared for a
new occupant of the stage's center. Research appears. Gentlemen,
attend! Research is at hand. We are about to becom escientific.
Business, taking a tip from the laboratories, seeing with bewildered,
but admiring, eye the marvels exhibited by the Bell Telephone Co.'s
scientific staff, and hearing whispered rumors of even greater mar-
vels to emanate shortly from the caverns of General Electric, greets
with delight a new fashion. Hail the day of Science, hail the day of
exactitude and of certainty. Research has come.
T H E day of combination, as a raw principle, came and went. To the
hot fit succeeded a cold one. The vast economies, obtained by the
elimination of wasteful selling methods, were seen
Efficiency:
to carry with them the attendant disadvantages of
Capital E
a massiveness too great to be ignored and of an
unwieldy stiffnes which left many a loophole of
advantage to smaller, swifter and lighter-armed foes. It was the
Spanish Armada again, galleon against light-sailing shallop. The day
of combination as the great dominating fashion in American busi-
ness passed, and when it was definitely out of the picture, as its one
overshadowing color, men asked themselves, however they had come
to think, that because one or two great key. industries could erect
successfully vast structures of alliance, financially and executively
one, therefore the same example could be followed by every other
sort of industry. In those days we even used to hear about a Piano
Trust. How funny that sounds to-day. But so it was. So that,
too, died, and the whole fashion disappeared as quickly as the crino-
line, which vanished overnight. But no sooner were we out of that
wood than we were in another. With characteristically unanimous
suddenness men began to talk about Efficiency, Efficiency with a
large, a very large, E. The thing began with the work of men like
Taylor and Emerson, who set themselves to discover why labor was
so often dissatisfied in the face of increasing earnings and why,
also, financial economies arising from combination did not produce
better results in the way of net profits. Taylor discovered certain
principles in economy of labor effort and in materials handling
which, when he had elaborated and systematized them, became the
As a matter of serious simple fact, indeed, Research has come. In
every major industry research is a policy. The biggest industries,
whose leaders do not allow fads to run away with
Life
them, are definitely committing themselves to the
Or
establishment
of laboratories for the sole purpose
Death
of developing new ideas, improving old ones,
and turning the light of engineering upon the physical and human
problems of production. Research already has its victories. The
new Ford car, the electric refrigerators, the new phonographs, the
development of transoceanic telephony, these are but samples of
what is happening under the new auspices. And for us of the music
industries, here is a sign, and here is a warning. The very com-
petitors who to-day most formidably threaten us are definitely
committed to research, that is to say, to the development of new
ideas and the improvement of old ones, by the application of scien-
tific method. Now, this does not mean charlantry, or the produc-
tion of profit rabbits out of a magician's hat. It means money, hard
work, patience and faith. If we take it up as a fad, looking to the
name of the thing to supply the place of its substance, we shall make
fools of ourselves, and come to hate that after which we may all
soon be madly running. The music industries stand at a crisis, a
crossroads in fact. One road leads to scientific method, scientific
merchandising and prosperity. The other leads through apathy to
death. But only the car of Research can take us along the first
road.
W. B. W.
10