EFFICIENCY* IT IS the kind of work in which a man is engaged which determines for him the special meaning of the term efficiency. The success of his efforts may depend wholly upon the quantity of his output or it may depend upon its quality. Quantity! Quality! Upon these two hang all the laws of efficiency. Mere quantity is the measure of success for the man who shovels coal or digs in a ditch. Even the best of us have a considerable amount of pure hack-work to do, but as we go up the scale of human activity, quality counts more and more. The conditions of life when one can do work of the highest quality, demanding imagination, insight, vision, and creative power, are higher than the conditions when merely the maximum in quantity is demanded. The higher the quality of the work, the greater the nervous cost of it, and the more highly perfected must be the machine that does it. The conditions for efficiency in the case of *From "The Efficient Life," by Luther H. Gulick. Doubleday, Page & Co. Copyright, 1906-'07. the ordinary day labourer are not complex. His work is that of a coarse machine, turning out, like a grain thresher, a great amount of production relatively low in grade. His efficiency is but little disturbed by constant feeding upon indigestible victuals, by frequent carousals, by a dirty skin and bad air. Low-grade production does not need a high-grade organism. But if under conditions of special stringency you press the day labourer to the utmost of his strength, one of two things happens. Either he goes to pieces and becomes useless; or his machinery alters, developing into something more highly organized, which requires more delicate care and which rebels more certainly under abuse. The conditions of health for him -that is to say, of "wholeness," of normal powe are more complex, more exacting. The coarser the machine, the more easily it maintains its balance. There is a criterion of ef ficiency for the threshing machine, but it is not that of a high-grade watch. Men have in a few days developed ideas, formulated plans, written poems that were worth more to mankind than a lifetime of work whose value was estimated in terms of quantity. The health of the thinker, of the financier, of the executive genius, demands a momentary alertness of all the faculties, an ability to grasp, to originate, to carry out, a trained perception |