5. The Executive Life

The American society of the mid-twentieth century has created a distinct character known as the corporate executive, who has recognizable habits of dining, wining, loving, politicking, and job-hunting, and recognizable problems in the identical areas.

Herewith several observations, pro and con, on this character and his way of life, some of which I suspect will intrigue and others will infuriate you as they have {and still do) me.

What Long, Wet Lunch?

We're having a tempest in a martini glass in Our Town about the alleged increasing length and wetness of the businessman's lunch. "Today the average executive's afternoon meal lasts at least two hours, often stretches to three hours/' front-paged the New York Herald Tribune recently, adding that "not only has business lunching gotten more lengthy, it has also gotten wetter (mainly with martinis)."

"This may be known, some day, as the Era of the Long Lunch," editorialized The New York Times famed "Topics" column a few days later, and ever eager to dig deep down, The New York Times man speculated whether future historians, seeking reasons for our failure to maintain our lead in the 1950s and 1960s, might not "lay part of the blame ... at the foot of the luncheon table." Fiddlesticks!

At the risk of tweaking newspapers with power to squash this lone female into the cracked ice at the bottom of a Scotch Mist glass, I suggest the research of the Herald Tribune and the Times leaves much to be desired. For serious studies made over the years by responsible sources of this feature of executive life in America brand as nonsense the popular notion of the business lunch as a long, leisurely, wet feast. Instead of querying a few Manhattan restaurant men, these surveys have covered favorite luncheon spots across the country—in Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh as well as New York-checked hundreds of executives, and investigated the how, with whom, and where of the executive lunch.

With a dry throat, I can report on the basis of these studies that the average time spent at lunch by the American executive is one hour and a half, portal to portal. Even occasion luncheons rarely run beyond two hours. When they do, in almost every instance the executives are working as hard as at the office.

Heavy drinking at the executive lunch is strictly out. One drink, quite possibly. A second may be ordered but hardly touched. The percentage having more than two is picayune. Most top executives who have a drink at lunch don't want it. An over­whelming number who do have a drink take one only because a customer or a client at the luncheon is drinking.

A host at a businessman's lunch offers a drink as a courtesy. If his guest turns it down, a patter going something like this almost always follows: "I'd like one but it makes me sleepy in the middle of the day. You go ahead, though." Or "Funny thing, after hours I enjoy a drink as much as anyone, but during the day . . ." Frequently, the host then says, "Me too," both are relieved, and the conversation gets down to business. (I know, I've heard the patter and used it myself hundreds, maybe thou­sands, of times.)

Lunching in the executive dining room in the plant or office building is on the rise and these luncheons are not only limited in time but also are usually dry. A delightful story about a giant New York bank is that only once in its history has it served a drink in its executive dining room. That was when the late Pope Pius XII visited the United States as Cardinal Pacelli. The bank decided on that single occasion wine should be served.

In Wall Street lunch generally is early and short.

A dreadful custom that seems to be spreading is the breakfast conference, starting at 8:00 a.m., ending by 9:30. Says one re­luctant participant: "Imagine a man taking a drink at that hour! He'd be tagged as an alcoholic before the day was over."

Now having submitted a report on the basis of the surveys of others, I add a personal note—and I've been working my way through the business lunch for enough years to qualify as an expert. If any of us ate and drank the way the Herald Tribune and Times suggest we do, we long since would have slid out of the business world—and probably the world itself.

How To Lose Friends with Finesse

If you have a job in a fair-sized office and you win a promotion, here's how to handle your new caste problems "gracefully." Con­tinue at first to accept invitations to the homes of employee friends who now are your subordinates, but "reciprocate only with group invitations. Then don't accept at all." Work out a set of logical excuses for not joining the group at lunch or coffee breaks. Begin to miss the social activities of your department-bowling, card sessions, etc.—occasionally, then frequently. Give your friends in the office every chance to break away from you. They know you can't remain part of the old gang. Assuming you are a husband, allow your wife more time to pull away from friendships among those who are now your subordinates. She doesn't understand office protocol as you do, needs to make the transition more slowly. Break away gradually, but eventually re­duce all contacts to office hours. Recognize the simple fact of office life that the higher you go, the fewer friends you'll have in the company.

"Caste" won't be found under "C" in any filing cabinet, but it's everywhere in the office, according to a study by Modern Office Procedures. The old business legend that "a company is one big happy family" is a threadbare tradition, mocked by the deeply entrenched caste system. Companies say the legend, print it, lip-serve it, but don't believe it. "They don't because they can't afford to. When companies drop the barriers of caste, it costs them money."

Of course, I've always known that an office caste system exists in American businesses, but I'd never thought of it as anything rigid or general, and I certainly hadn't considered it among "the best hidden, vicious modern day management tools." Apparently, though, MOP's survey of company attitudes on caste reveals, "Nearly all companies willingly have an office caste system, make no moral judgment about its ethics, defend caste almost in terms of company survival. . . ."

Is the caste system considered "good"? Yes—and essential. One department head told of an accounting manager having two close friends working for him who were inefficient and resented by other workers. "Their sloppy work lost three customers and $40,000 of business. I told the manager to crack down. He wouldn't or couldn't. I don't know which. So I fired the two workers. And I fired the manager too. He refused to learn where his job began and friendships ended."

Does the caste rule go beyond the office? Definitely to the wife and to children also. Said one personnel man, "Parents don't say to kids 'you're too good to play with Johnny now,' but the father's new title and income make Johnny undesirable." Asked whether this wasn't vicious, the personnel man shrugged. "Maybe."

What happens when a company tries to break down the sys­tem? According to one executive queried, "Bad feeling . . . petty personality fights . . . severe back-biting. . . ." After trying the idea, the executive declared, his company "completely reversed. ... I imagine we're now the most caste-ridden company you'll talk to."

Old hands in management are fairly immune to the "callous dictates of caste," says MOP, but it's hard on the newly promoted employee who shrinks from ending treasured office relationships by just "cutting them off." If this includes or will include you, set your chin, hold your nose, and use the guides at the start of this report—"based on the composite experience of many manage­ment men"—to help you drop your friends with finesse.

How Much a Letter Costs You

During the past six weeks, I've received four letters from a top executive of a big industrial corporation commenting in detail and with varying degrees of acidity on some of my recent reports. I've just made a rough calculation that each of his letters to me cost his company at least five dollars, and perhaps triple that if he's as expensive an executive as I suspect he is.

In this period, I've answered each of his letters with a short "thank-you-but-I-think-you're-wrong-cordially." Succinct as my answers have been, I've just estimated that each has cost me a minimum of three dollars and maybe twice as much.

For the average cost of an average business letter written in our country today has hit an all-time high of $1.83, according to a new breakdown of business letter expenses by the Dartnell Office Administration Service of Chicago. This is 56 per cent more than that same business letter cost as recently as 1953.

Startling though that $1.83 statistic is, I think it's modest for most business offices, for it assumes the person dictating the letter gets only an average sales correspondent's salary, the stenog­rapher typing it gets only an average starting salary, and the costs of materials used are only average. In most American offices "average" is a slippery word applying to someone else's firm. I may be ultraconservative even with my estimates of five to fifteen dollars for each executive's letter and three dollars plus for each of mine.

Whatever the statistic, it represents an expense most business firms could cut without any trouble. The fact is that the typical American business firm sends out thousands of letters in a normal year. When you tag each at two to three dollars, this, as Dartnell says, "becomes a cardinal part of the budget." The fact is that many of the letters are utterly unnecessary and as a spokesman for Dartnell remarked when I queried him on this, "When they recognize the direct and indirect costs involved, certain concerns undoubtedly could curb excessive costs with only a bit more attention to their letters." And the fact is that costs of business letters are not going to level off. Office salaries are rising steadily. Postal rates are increasing.

But the cost of each letter can be slashed by some common-sense procedures. Here's how Dartnell takes chunks out of that $1.83.

Dictator's time, figured at $110.00 for a forty-hour week and an average of seven minutes for each letter. Can be cut 10 per cent by shorter letters and the use of dictating machines.

Stenographic cost, figured at $73 for a forty-hour week and an average of twenty letters a day. Can be cut 33 1/3 per cent by centralization of typing, use of efficiency desks, chairs, electric typewriters.

Cost of materials, such as stationery, carbon paper, and the like. Can be cut 15 per cent by use of better quality paper but smaller sizes where possible and more economical printing.

Mailing costs, can be cut 20 per cent by use of modern ma­chines not only to save labor but to reduce losses due to pilfering of stamps.

By means of these and similar savings, Dartnell calculates that over forty-five cents can be cut out of the $1.83. And even if you don't follow these money-saving hints, awareness of what each letter cost should make you consider carefully the number and length of the ones you write. You might achieve the greatest savings by not writing letters that should not be written anyway.

Pay-Offs in Business

Exactly how widespread is the pay-off in business today? Are pay-offs by businessmen to prospects, customers, and influential associates, in the form of cash, goods, vacation trips, and lavish entertainment, on a bigger or smaller scale now than five years ago? Are under-the-table deals among businessmen seeking profit­able favors from each other the commonplace thing in our land?

Presidential assistant Sherman Adams admitted that he was "imprudent" in accepting favors from his friend, Bernard Goldfine. The New England industrialist said that he has "a very long list" of people apart from politicians and government officials to whom he gives gifts. The Adams-Goldfine relationship is the sort of thing which makes nation-wide headlines. Scandals over a deepfreeze or a free hotel suite, over a mink coat or an oriental rug can and do play vital roles in national elections.

But let's get away from the politics of it and into the aspects of influence seeking which are part of the business scene every hour of every day of every year in this country. Some of the answers to the questions I've just posed have just been uncovered by a responsible poll of sales executives who know as much or more about current business ethics as any other group.

More than one-third of the sales executives report that they have lost business when they have turned down pay-off requests. Although this is a minority, it's a hefty one—and the odds are many of the executives polled weren't nearly as frank in their answers about giving pay-offs to buyers as they could have been.

A full 52 per cent of the executives said their salesmen are getting as many demands—or hints—for pay-offs from buyers of their products as five years ago. And 18 per cent said the pay-off situation is worse than it was back in 1953. The balance of 30 per cent, though, reported "less frequent" requests for pay-offs, which may be a sign of modest improvement.

The big reason for the pay-off is to break into the prospect's firm; the second key reason is to obtain a larger share of the business; the third is to keep the business the salesman has.

What struck me hardest after studying the results of this poll was the unspoken implication that influence seeking among businessmen is even more widespread than a cynic might have guessed. One of the sales executives actually said that combating under-the-table deals is "my most important long-range problem." So well entrenched does the practice appear that I can give you, as a result of the poll, the "best" way to go about it.

The form of pay-off most preferred by the prospect or customer is merchandise—46 per cent. The next most preferred is cash— 40 per cent. The third is a hotel on the cuff, including vacation spots. When merchandise is preferred, the most desired gifts are guns, whisky, hand tools, sporting goods, personal gifts, radios, and TV sets. When the prospect or customer can be influenced in a variety of ways, the leaders in the pay-off parade are lush entertainment, dealer service without pay, personal gifts, rebates at end of year, and free vacations.

In some fields the business gift is open trade practice—and the businessman who tries to buck the practice is begging for a punch in his pocketbook nerve. The Internal Revenue Service has recognized this in its regulations and rules governing income-tax deductions for business gifts. In other fields the practice is not so openly acknowledged, but there are few areas in which an individual in position to give favors, to place buying orders, or to exert influence is not actively wooed.

Perhaps the very extent of the pay-off in private business life explains why congressmen have received comparatively few letters from the public about the Adams-Goldfine revelations. But if any of this has shocked you, here's a modicum of cheer: The poll "does not indicate that our public or business morals have de­teriorated in the past five years."

How To Handle Love in the Office

Maybe you met your wife or husband through the office. Yours was the kind of honorable office romance on which all corporate managements look benignly, even though your work output may have slumped while you two were mooning about each other. Or maybe you're a bachelor or single girl hoping that through the office you'll meet someone you can marry. You also may be confident that your corporation won't discourage or prohibit your kind of dating, and if your boss were asked a direct question about this, he'd probably smile and say, "We believe in marriage."

But there is another kind of "Love in the Office" which is "The Skeleton in the Business Family Closet." This is the illicit love affair between two married employees or between one mar­ried and one single employee. This is the office relationship which most employers hate to admit even exists, a subject which has long been taboo despite the fact that it is one of business's most explosive personnel problems.

In a bold and imaginative editorial venture, Modern Office Procedures recently completed what it calls "the first study-in-depth" ever made of the subject "in the hope that business will realize the urgency of the problem." Upon obtaining a copy of the study, I immediately phoned Harrison R. Johnson, the editor in charge of the project in Cleveland, to ask the background. "We worked on it for more than six months," he said, "making ex­tensive surveys among personnel executives, office managers, and clerical employees in companies not only in Cleveland but also in Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Fort Wayne, and Buffalo.

"We found a peculiar reaction to our questions. At first, the inclination was to deny that they'd ever had an experience with office romances. When we would press, they would open up and relate affair after affair. It's the hidden evil in office management. Executives who are extremely money-conscious about everything else won't recognize the money costs involved in an illicit love affair until they are forced to action. Then what they do is often too little and too late."

There was the case of a husband who stopped a personnel supervisor in a lobby filled with people to shout, "Your company is wrecking my home! Somebody here is going around with my wife!" Company officials hastily called a meeting at which the husband made his accusations and the employees concerned con­fessed the romance. "The company, stung by this public airing of misconduct, retaliated in anger. It fired both employees on the spot, then sulkily retired to view the damage. Score: one shattered home, two humiliated and jobless people, one withered company reputation."

There was the case of the office staff which was split wide open over the romance of two married employees, with some saying they wouldn't work with such immoral people and others saying it wasn't anyone's business what people did. The executive wanted to be fair to the employees and the company. As he dawdled, seeking an equitable solution, the office simmered, morale sagged, work suffered. "From a dollars and cents viewpoint this executive was negligent, because by doing nothing he de­moralized the office."

What do company officials do when they are forced by office gossip or a call from a suspicious wife or husband to face the fact of a troublesome, potentially damaging affair? Some take the "ostrich attitude." One official summed up this attitude with this story. "One of our married junior accountants started going out with a typist. There was gossip about it. We ignored it and the whole affair soon blew over." Did the romance affect their work? "No, it didn't last that long." What if it had? "We'd have fired them." Both of them? "Both of them. We don't tolerate any interference with the company's business." The ostrich atti­tude obviously is maintained only up to a point. When the company's interests seem at stake, out go the employees.

Other corporations adopt a more ruthless attitude from the start. A purchasing agent, married, began to make frequent visits to a secretary in another department, also married. Their work fell below par. Their supervisors warned them. "There was no improvement. The company transferred the girl to another build­ing and issued a second warning. Work output stayed at low levels. The company fired both employees." Most companies adopting the ruthless approach don't bother with transfers and give only one warning before they fire.

But these approaches apply only at the lower levels. When an executive becomes involved in a romance, the double standard goes into effect with a vengeance. While a few big companies are so anxious to protect the reputations of their firms that they'll fire a management man at the hint of an affair, most are reluctant to sacrifice a valuable executive because he "finds himself in a compromising position."

So? So, the policy usually is to arrange an "easy and informal" session among management men to tell the executive "there's a rumor going around about you that you ought to know" and to let him handle it from there on.

A fascinating point brought out by the survey is that only one company of all those studied had a definite policy on this. When an employee is hired, he's told plainly that the company has no interest in his romances unless conducted during working hours. If the employee violates this ban, his supervisor talks with him and reports in full to the personnel director. Should the affair continue, the personnel director discusses it with the employee, questions him about his family life, and if there is dissension at home, he tells the employee to go to a family or marriage counsel­ing organization for help.

This may seem shocking interference by a corporation with an individual's privilege to conduct his life as he pleases. But the trade publication apparently approves it as a way to improve office efficiency, control costs, maintain morale, etc. Anyway, it also has a set of hints on how to handle the professional office gossip and office Romeo. (Final hint: fire them.)

Whether these disclosures will have any effect on Love in the Office, I haven't the vaguest idea. But they certainly should pound home one warning: If ever you get involved and if you want to keep your job, keep your work up to par!

Nepotism in Business

It just happened to come up at a cocktail party. I was half listening to a couple of successful industrialists talk business when one of them caught my attention by exclaiming: "Boy, it's a crime what's going on at—" and he named a manufacturing company known throughout the country.

"What's going on?" I asked as I saw the other nod agreement.

"Don't you know? It's being strangled by the boss's family. Before he retired, he loaded the management with his sons and nephews—and not one has an ounce of brains in his head. They've dragged the company down to the point where even in this boom, it's running in the red."

"And nothing can be done about it," added his companion. "Now that you've brought it up, I'll tell you my group tried to move in last year, but it was no go. The boys have it sewed up. It'll be a race to see whether the company or the relatives die first." The conversation shifted then and I promptly forgot about it, until I received from the American Institute of Management the first study I've ever seen of nepotism in American business and I realized this is one big story of which I wasn't even aware.

What is nepotism? The word goes back through the political and social history of Western civilization. Webster's New World Dictionary defines it simply as, "favoritism shown to relatives, especially in appointment to desirable positions." In business it is the practice of placing relatives in positions within an organiza­tion without primary regard to their merit. While the AIM properly emphasizes that nepotism isn't a synonym for "bad management," and many other factors contribute to a firm's success or failure, chronic nepotism, it insists, has these dangers: It places an artificial limit on the choice of men for top positions in the company. It sets up standards for selection of executives which are entirely unrelated to the interests of the organization. It subverts the rights of the actual owners, the stockholders.

There is "no value or excuse for nepotism in a publicly held company," the Institute states flatly—and then it makes the in­triguing point that the practice actually could be illegal because it well may violate the "fundamental legal doctrine that a director of a corporation occupies a position of trust . . . and he cannot obtain any personal advantages at the expense of the corporation."

Comments the AIM rather wryly, "Certainly the presenting of a position high in the firm to a relative is a personal advantage."

We abhor the practice at the highest level of our government; only one son and one grandson of a President have ever become President of the United States. But I admit I haven't been aware of the great power of nepotism in business, and that probably goes for most of you. Now what I'd like to see—along with the AIM—is a real test of the legality of nepotism in a publicly owned company in the courts. I wonder who'll be bold enough to submit one of the many horror histories of business nepotism to its first major court trial?

. . . Four years after the report you've just read was written, I wrote the following:

Despite your howl of indignation over the latest revelations of the extent to which Senators and congressmen have relatives on the public payroll, the custom will remain as entrenched as ever. And one coldly realistic reason it will remain so is this: Nepotism is much, much more deep-rooted in this country than you probably are aware. It is much, much more widespread in American industry and commerce than in Washington.

You, the voter, may be outraged when you learn that a fresh­man House member from Indiana has both his wife and his front porch on the Government payroll, that a freshman Rep­resentative from Iowa had put his nineteen-year-old son on the payroll at $11,873 a year even though the son was a part-time university student. (Due to the uproar, the lad's pay has now been cut in half.) You may be startled at the conservative estimate that a full quarter of our Senators employ relatives in some capacity.

But how you feel as an individual voter isn't likely to alter matters much unless powerful local groups organize to demand a change. And that is not easy to engineer when a fat percentage of the members of most local groups are themselves practicing nepotism on a grand scale.

Of course, there's one vital distinction. A relative on a congress­man's staff gets paid with public funds, our tax money. A relative on a corporation payroll gets paid out of the earnings of that corporation. Having made that distinction, here are some facts about nepotism in this antidynastic democracy of ours which may raise your eyebrows a bit.

A survey by Fortune of the top executives of 175 of America's largest corporations back in 1957 revealed no less than 55 per cent of the companies had relatives in management jobs in the same company. A study of 23,000 companies by the American Institute of Management back in 1955 uncovered only a handful of companies—a picayune twenty-eight—with stated policies against the employment of relatives. An earlier study of 8,000 executives by Professor Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen at the University of Chicago disclosed that two of every five men whose fathers were key executives and three of every five whose fathers owned large businesses held jobs in their fathers' companies.

Although the subject usually is obscured by a thick wall of embarrassed silence, so prevalent is the practice in industry that Fortune was able to identify four degrees of nepotism. There is out-and-out nepotism. In this case, a relative gets a top job even though he has little or no experience and no evident qualifica­tions. There is nepotism-plus-training. In this case, the executive starts his relative in a beginner's job with the aim of grooming him for the top. There is nepotism-subject-to-company-veto. In this case, the relative gets hired because of pull but he must measure up or he'll be fired. There is nepotism-vindicated. In this case, the relative gets the job through pull but he proves himself to be a man of great talents.

The congressmen whose nepotism has been publicized are now defending themselves by claiming their relatives are qualified for the jobs, they need assistants whose loyalty is certain, there's nothing immoral about it anyway, and so on. And industrialists offer much the same defenses. The explanations may not impress you any more than they impress me—but the hard fact is that since Pope Callistus III originated the term five hundred years ago by awarding cardinal's hats to two of his young nepotes (nephews), nepotism has flourished. The tempests about it flare up in the teapots and then subside, flare up and then subside-just as is happening right now.

And four years from now, the odds are a similar anecdote or scandal will inspire me to write another with new figures but the same moral. . . .

How To Beat the Brain-Pickers

This year, over 1,000,000 job seekers at America's biggest, most reputable corporations will take a battery of personality tests before they are hired. If their personalities don't "pass," they'll not be given the privilege of a paycheck. Another 500,000 already employed will have their personalities "evaluated" to determine whether they should be promoted, shelved, or fired. Whatever the results, these will join the 5,000,000 Americans whose lives and livelihoods already have been affected by the personality test­ing mill.

For personality testing, only a fad in World War II, has now been parlayed into an industry grossing twenty-five million dol­lars a year. A full 60 per cent of our major corporations and countless smaller ones use the tests to measure everything from our emotional stability to latent homosexuality, to decide the fitness of individuals in categories ranging from file clerk to company president. If the holy-roller fervor over personality test­ing continues, it is estimated that within five years, almost every one of us—salesmen, truck drivers, pilots, executives—will have to get the approval of the professional testers to get and stay at work.

What are these personality tests? If you're old-fashioned-meaning you got your first job by fighting for it and you've ad­vanced by simply working hard and persistently—the tests may be news to you. But read on. . . .

There are about one hundred and fifty published personality tests in use by industry today. Firms of the caliber of Westing-house, Johnson & Johnson, Celanese Corporation, and Borden Company use them to test new applicants. Firms of the stature of Sears Roebuck use them to evaluate people already on the payroll.

There are two basic types of tests. The most common is the question-and-answer type which is scored like any exam. (Sample questions to weed out neurotics: "Do you feel that nobody loves you?" "Do you hate more than four people?" Better answer "No" on both or you're out fast!)

A second variety is the supposedly cheatproof "projective" test and these "employ supposedly clinical techniques fresh out of mental institutions where they were invented to diagnose psy-chotics." (Illustrations: The draw-a-man test, stories of what you see in uncaptioned pictures, sentence completion teasers, even the famous Rorschach ink-blot test.)

"There is no doubt that the tests are a threat to every wage-earner," says Martin L. Gross, who has made a year-long study of the situation. But Mr. Gross clearly detests the whole concept and, with what I found comforting insolence, he suggests how you can "learn to beat the probers—with reasonable success—at their own head-hunting game." If you're subjected to the tests, here are a few how-to-beats:

(1) Admit little or nothing about your own weaknesses, for "your scores are compared with those of a great many liars before you. . . . Everyone understands you, you are loved to distraction, you like almost everyone."

1. Before answering "interest" questions, keep in mind that "although you love the ladies, you dislike anything they like, and vice versa. . . . Remember, your virility is at stake."
2. You are a "get-up-and-go" and "strong-backbone" American—but you have these native American traits "in moderation."
3. You are near perfect but not perfect. You're no saint, you're just superior, good, calm, truthful.
4. Reveal as little of yourself as possible. "Complete your sentences with socially acceptable, routine answers."

Is there any hope that industry's enthusiasm for the personality test will fade? Mr. Gross thinks that, "as the number of people who can beat the testers grows, industry's faith in test results will diminish," and he sees some encouraging signs of disenchant­ment among industrialists and active resistance among employees to take the tests. And I see a hopeful sign in this disclosure itself, which should do a good job of infuriating any red-blooded, girl-loving, get-up-and-go man who ever claimed to be a stable, healthy, normal American.

Bosses Out of Work

A well-dressed man in his early fifties walked into the New York headquarters of a management consulting firm last week. He was ushered into a partner's office and invited to talk about himself. "He just didn't know how to go about it, he was in a state of shock," the partner recalls. "He either smiled vaguely or stared at me when I made a suggestion. He just wasn't taking it in."

Why? Because until last week, this man was the $ 30,000-a-year treasurer of a New Jersey printing firm. His company now has been bought out and he has been let go. After a lifetime with one corporation, he's looking for a job and his morale is shot.

The entire top management team of one of the nation's best-known air-conditioning companies recently held secret meetings with another firm which specializes in getting jobs for executives. As a result of the meeting, the general manager has quit to go to a steel company, the manager of manufacturing has moved too, the controller is negotiating for a new position.

Why? Because this air-conditioning company has been merged and it has become only a division of a giant concern. "They all want out," said the head of the placement firm. "They figure there is a ceiling now on their advancement, they expect their budgets to be cut. They're demoralized."

Merger!

This one word explains the development of a new and balloon­ing group of job seekers in the $15,000-$ 100,000-and-up salary range. It explains why countless thousands of top-grade men who have spent their entire careers with one company suddenly are finding themselves on the job market. It explains their bit­terness, befuddlement, and often panic.

The wave of mergers and consolidations which has been sweep­ing over our country since the early fifties is without parallel in American history and it continues unabated. Every day dozens of new mergers are announced between corporations, every day the trend toward bigness in business is accentuated. And when two companies merge, many executive jobs—particularly in sales and finance—are duplicated. Many men who had been bosses in a small company are downgraded in a big one.

"About one out of five of our calls now are from executives out of jobs because of mergers," estimates Ann Hoff, partner in the New York management placement firm of Hoff, Canny, Bowen & Associates. "A few years ago, the number wasn't more than one out of twenty-five."

"Just under 25 per cent of the executives we have interviewed in the past twelve months are victims of some type of merger or sale or are men who have seen the handwriting on the wall and are anticipating such developments," says Lon D. Barton, presi­dent of the Chicago executive placement firm of Cadillac Asso­ciates. "I don't like to see this trend."

"Our function is to find men for management and we keep our eyes on companies which merge or are rumored to be merging," adds Ward Howell, head of the New York executive recruiting firm of the same name. And Mr. Howell told me of one recently merged company which has just discovered it has "two identical sales forces selling to the identical trade. No question of what is going to happen there."

In today's atmosphere, the trend toward mergers is not going to stop. What should an executive do when he hears his company is merging? Mr. Barton thinks that at the whisper of the word, "He should take to the corporate hills and fast." Miss Hoff dis­agrees and says, "He should take a calculated risk, first see if he can fit into the new setup." Mr. Howell believes he hasn't much to worry about if he is under fifty-two, but if he is over that age, "Well, it's liable to be tough."

And what happens to the executive who can't relocate? If he can swing it, he tries his own business and hopefully succeeds. Or—it's panic and heartbreak. The economic story of corporation mergers often has been told. Behind it lies this story of what it means to the human beings involved.

In Chapter Ten you'll find more on this question of mergers and their impact on our form of society. What mergers mean to us as a nation as well as to us as individuals directly affected, properly belongs under the heading of the problems we'll have to face, whether we want to or not.

A Job Expert's Advice to You

Across the table from you is the president of one of the top executive recruiting and management training firms in America— a man whose fees for counseling on a single job range to $1,500 for an individual, to $10,000 and more for a corporation. You have the privilege of asking this specialist for specific, practical advice about yourself, for guides to job success which he has developed over years of studying and guiding the careers of thousands of outstanding industrialists. What are some of the provocative and original pointers he would give you?

"Take the line of least resistance when you are starting out. Do what you want to do. Feel yourself out in your job between twenty-two and twenty-eight, set your goal and try to determine your ceiling by thirty-six, consolidate your position between thirty-eight and forty-two, then while you continue to improve at your career, enjoy the years of 'realization' to sixty-five.

"If at thirty-eight to forty, you feel you are at a dead end in your corporation, thoroughly explore your organization to be sure this is really so. If after the exploration you do find you are at a dead end, move. Don't confuse loyalty with inertia or fear. . . ."

Speaking to you in the above sentences is John L. Handy, the sixty-six-year-old head of the New York, San Francisco, and Paris firm of Handy Associates, and indisputably among our country's leading specialists in executive placements. I went to see Mr. Handy to ask him questions about jobs I figured you might ask if you had the opportunity—and the fee—to get his advice in person. Here are other basic rules I culled out of our long talk-rules which can be of great value to you, no matter what your age or occupation.

(1)        In the first five years of your job career—say from twenty-two to twenty-eight—try to find out what you want to do, what you want to be. In these years, you well may make several job changes, because you are testing yourself.
Says Mr. Handy, "It's a curious fact that even executives in the highest salary brackets stumble when I ask them those two questions: 'What do you want out of life?' and 'What do you want to do?' Yet, it is immensely important that the man who wants to be happy and successful in his job answer these questions from the start."
(2)        At thirty, sit down and think hard. Take a piece of paper
and a pencil, write down honest answers to such questions as
these: Where do you want to live and where would your wife
be happy? How much money will you need to earn a year, six
years, ten years from now to meet the standard of living you want? What will bringing up your children cost you? "When you have answered these questions," Mr. Handy explains, "you'll have a much clearer concept of your goals. If a man finds he'll be happier in a small company in the South than a big one in the North, hell have a key guide."

1. In the next period—say to forty—you should be preparing yourself consciously for what you want to be. In these years, appraise yourself on "the qualities for success" which Mr. Handy lists as drive, responsibility, ability to communicate, ability to think, ability to get along with people, health, and good character. And it's sound in this period too, to get an appraisal of yourself from the man for whom you work. "Don't be afraid of the boss. He knows you, for he has worked with you."
2. At the forty-to-forty-two age bracket, says Mr. Handy, comes a dangerous phase of "cyclical restlessness," when a man often mistakenly switches jobs. At this age too, Mr. Handy urges you to sit down quietly, think hard and honestly about your goals.
3. Then after forty-five, you enter the phase of consolidation —years when you should be broadening your goals, achieving fulfillment, laying the basis for a rewarding life after retirement.

This is pitifully brief, but over and over during our talk, Mr. Handy came back to the questions you should ask yourself at the start, through the years of climbing, and at the peak: What do you want out of life? What do you want to do? Just giving us those deceptively simple questions and challenging us to live by our answers is about as important a job guide as any I've ever received.

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