Publix Opinion (Jun 13, 1930)

8 ORDER IS MAIN PREREQUISITE IN COMPANY (Continued from Page Seven) self, might honestly go back to his specific operation and take ~ stock of himself again and real_ ly might on the level inquire of himself whether he is growing with this picture that I am trying to describe to you and, if not, why not and what he ought to be doing in addition to what he is now doing to keep up with the parade. ‘Unless we run our entire insti ~ tution in that orderly manner that I have tried to describe to you I wouldn’t give you thirty cents for it with 1500 theatres, located in different cities, having different types of policies. Unless we maintain that centralized machine in an orderly fashion the very makeup of the business is such that we won’t be there very long to talk about it. To have your central organization function in that manner it is necessary for each and every human being, particularly department heads, to individually work in a fashion so that finally the field and the» home office and the home office and the field get that centralized thought and regular activity so that a spark reflects everywhere simultaneously and up we go as a whole, or down we go as we fail to get it. Manpower Comes First > To you managers particularly, I want you to know that I am much more interested in that development in you than I am in the number of dollars that you are turning in out of your operation, because if I am sure that you men are doing the right kind of a job by yourself and with yourself I haven’t any great amount of ap‘prehension about the dollars fol lowing. I think I can honestly look at you squarely and say that ‘in spite of the almost absolute authority invested in me _ there are very few absolutely individual decisions that I make because I want the opinion and the help and the strength of every fellow around me. When LI get two, or three minds, in addition to my own, on a given decision that I finally may have | with them to mold them. jing a great deal of patience with to make, and use them, then I think I’ve been smart. a Now I’ll reduce that right into your own situations. It is with that thought in mind that we de cided to break our business down all the time into smaller and smaller districts and give to each district a multiple supervision. It is no easy decision to make to plan to add district publicity men and district bookers to every dis trict, a great added expense per year with the travelers’ expense that goes with it. What we hoped to accomplish was that in each district there would be con stituted ultimately almost a complete cabinet within itself to bring to each man all of the aid and all of the help possible to make him a better man and to make his operation a better one. Know Your Organization I admonish every district manager, as well as every manager, that unless you avail yourself of all of this aid and unless you honestly use it, you are not going to get anywhere and if you don’t get anywhere with the speed this company is moving you are going to drop out. It moves too fast to carry any flat tires on any of its wheels. I don’t know how clear I am making these points to you that I am trying to make but I'll go over once more, if Imay, generally in this fashion. That is, this slogan ‘Know your > PUBLIX OPINION, WEEK OF JUNE 13rx, 1930 Organization’ is exactly that. That within your organization today exists a great and a varied kind of manpower. I expect each and every man in the company to do no more, no less than what I am willing to do. That is, to use every bit of . this organization in orderly and timely fashion, of course. — That, and only that, will make for a better company. — I started on the theory that the only boss anybody in Publix has is his conscience and I believe we are going to be able to navigate very successfully on just exactly that theory. Up to this point there has been no reason to deviate one iota from that thought. I feel just as I have in the past regarding this. Our boys realize the genuine, whole-hearted effort that’s being made to the best of each man’s ability. Opportunities Are Equal I am not at all impressed with the old time theory of show-business that out of the crowds the Lord sent somebody down to write a ticket in show-business and when that particular person died we would all be looking for jobs. If that were true then at least ninety-five per cent of the boys who make up this company, including myself, would be in another line of business. This business happened to be our business and with some determination we decided to be successful in it. So again I get back to the point I keep trying to make. This is your business. Your opportunities are equal; you will be given every opportunity you merit; while some of you sometimes may not move along with the speed that you individually might want to at that particular time, I can assure you that, with reasonable patience and a continued belief in your company, at the proper time your rewards will follow. | Patience Required | If I could really paint the picture of that group of boys that I -|found in New York, and most of them out in the field when I came to the company, I know that you would more readily appreciate these points that I am trying to make to you about you, yourself. It took a great deal of patience It’s tak every man in the field, and your home office has that patience, with a great, great willingness and a great desire to exercise it. There isn’t a single man in anybody else’s organization, I don’t care how successful he may be there, that I would trade for any one of you. There isn’t a single man, I don’t care what he could bring to us, that I would take if it meant the elimination of any of you. In other words, you start off with our having real confidence in you, real respect for you, an honest conviction that you are the best lot of fellows that exist anywhere, a thorough patience in waiting for your development. In return, we ask exactly the same of you. We say to you men in the field, who are removed from | New York, believe in us in exactly the same ratio that we believe in you, extend to us that confidence that we necessarily repose in you, have the same respect for us that we have for you, have the same patience with us that we have with you. By patience, I mean things of this character. We had to get this business organized so that we might intelligently prepare budgets, so that we might intelligently know the aggregate amount of money that we are going to spend for maintenance this year. Each month we couldn’t finance, we couldn’t conduct our business; we wouldn’t know how to conduct our business, if it were not for these figures. Necessarily, in planning our business that way we couldn’t ‘| give every fellow exactly what he wanted the minute he snapped his ‘fingers, for this repair, this job, or this improvement. Possibly ¥ 1500 other theatres were asking for the same thing at the same time. Your District Managers did not ‘lose patience when you didn’t get exactly what you wanted the moment you wanted it. Your District Managers are not ‘Yes’ men. | They invariably write what they think. They have been brought up that way. That’s the type of patience you must have with us. Don’t go down in the dumps. Remember that we have several hundreds of places that we must account for in which capital investment has been made and for which I am, at least, called to account. Besides other obligations we have to ourselves, we have an obligation to return dividends to those people who have invested in our securities and have given us money. This is not a privately owned company. It is a company that belongs to the public. Each stockholder in your company is entitled to a feeling of security in his. purchase and also the | hope of a fair return when he makes his investment with you. Your own Paramount stock is an investment. Everytime a person buys your stock they make a bet, first, in their confidence in you, second, a belief that they’ll get a return on that investment, third, a hope that they will profit on that investment, Cautious Spending Necessary We have that kind of obligations constantly before us. The day that we just in a careless, quick manner disburse all the cash that comes in and don’t set up methods of budgeting and carrying on our business — you |. know the result. That can’t be laughed off lightly. We have invested in the last sixty days an enormous amount of money. With that investment goés serious trusteeship. That’s why I try to picture to you the reciprocal patience and confidence in us that we necessarily have to have in you when we toss you a town, or a building. The money that we have received, we must return. There have been fine examples of fortitude among the boys. It has been a perfect delight performing my duties, only because of the really fine, honest, upright cooperation that I have had from all of theboys. I can’t wait until I get to my desk in the morning. I know I am going to be happier there than anywhere else and everytime my door opens I don’t wish that they hadn’t come, even though, invariably, it’s bad news. It’s been just that ,kind of a thing. A fine, wholesome something, something nice, something clean. There has been no ‘We told you,’ etc. It has been devoid of the cheap, petty things. There has been no. other boss in the place but our own consciences. There have been fine examples of character among the fellows, a willingness to help each other with the success of our company first in mind. You boys in this room can make a great contribution along this line. Your assistant managers, where you may have them, they have your trusteeship and are your special and single joy. You should help them come on up, see them pop through, feel that you have been the reason for that man’s development and realize the joy we, in the home office, get when one of your division boys gives us a list he is willing to stand behind as being able to take a bigger load. Everybody is tickled to death for we feel that another one of our boys is popping through, coming up. That’s the kind of a job you. want to be tremendously interested in. Single out, if only one usher, go to work on him, make up your mind that you are going to hand him to Publix some day and that he’s going to take a big load, or a big slice of this load. You will find you will get a real pleasure and joy out of doing this. ee Seniors Real Fellows ~The men who are charged with being your Seniors are a real lot of fellows who are capable of stepping aside from what is probably the biggest thing in most people’s lives, the perpetuation of their names in the company they have built, for the sake of bettering their own organization. You might understand it more readily in some other industry, but when you get a man in the show business to do that sort of thing you have met a real human being. We are carrying three-fourths of a million dollars a year of extra manpower in training. We are combing every technical school in building, construction, maintenance, for more men. That is just exactly what the studio is doing. Paramount is the only company that’s placing an investment. Every player that shows up in New York and looks like he, or she, may develop, has a chance. I do know that no other company is making quite the concentrated effort that your own is in this thing. In conclusion, I want to re peat a little of what I said to you .a while ago. Please go back remembering that the grass looks greenest to us right under our noses. You are the best lot of fellows we know of existing anywhere. Go home knowing that we are comfortable and contented in the confidence and respect and friendship that we have for you. In return I repeat again, all I ask of you is this: when you wonder who your friends are in any walk of life, I don’t care > where you look, try to think of us as the best friends you’ve got. Try to think of us as vitally, anxiously, honestly, interested in your well being. Have for us the same confidence and the same respect that we have for you, and if we jointly do that, and I assure you that we will do our part, | then I have no apprehension about saying to Mr. Zukor, or the directors of this company, that this gang of fellows will . justify not only these present -hundreds, or millions, of dollars invested but anything the company endeavors to undertake. Omaha Highlights May 24, 1930 Our experience taught us the first thing we should prepare for in operation was man power and plenty of it, so that no matter what might happen at least we would be fortified with a sufficient number of willing and energetic men who would respond favorably under adverse conditions. For your information, during that first year, we spent about one million and a half dollars in excess of our profits, most of which went into the development of an organization. I personally was almost totally disinterested in whether we showed a profit or loss so long as I felt certain: that proper men were being groomed. I have this further vanity. Sometime ago in our scramble for young men who might come to our school, we put a blind ad in the trade papers requesting young men for managers. There were but two or three men in the office who knew about that ad at the time it wasrun. We received some seven hundred: replies from managers from every circuit, and, fantastic as the statement will sound to you, not one single Publix man replied to that blind ad for a job. I often feel that there should have been some man who was dissatisfied with his job. we had plowed through those letters, I looked at the ad to see if I know that after| \ the boys did not guess it was a Publix ad, but this was impossible. .| You can well appreciate how high ly pleased we were that not one cf our boys were among those seeking a new position. Those records peint to something I had hoped for and of course did not expect to experience so soon... That is that even though we were moving rapidly and in the rapid movement necessarily making many mistakes, yet apparently we had succeeded in maintaining and developing a human kind of outfit, and that, apparently, we had not lost sight of the necessity of developing a human organization simultaneously with the necessity for a hard-hitting and hard-driving organization.. .In that connection I will make a few observations just as I said to you a little while ago, that the same boys that began with us are doing the job now and will always do it. No Favoritism Shown I do want you to know a few facts first. Nobody was given any of those jobs because of any personal relationship, or because I may have liked them after six o’clock in the evening. The list — was wide open and I want.to tell you another thing, that in all of the choices that were made, I never made one alone. In every single choice, all of the boys participated in it. The only boss in Publix is your own conscience. I have honestly believed that it is possible to gather together a group of men and let them have their conscience as their own boss and up to this time I have not had one single regret. : Naturally, locked in an office in New York so much of the time, I miss the feel of the field and must and do rely on the boys that get into the field, but if their conduct and contacts around the office are any criterion, then I think I caniassure you that you have men who ably represent you. But as you boys know we must all be guided and driven. I remember thinking long ago that I never wanted to be the supreme critic of my own actions. But when it comes to the moral, spiritual makeup of this business, the only boss I want is every boy’s individual conscience. Nearly every one of these men that I have met who have been eminently successful. has been that way primarily because of orderly thinking, orderly procedure, so they were able to exclude everything else and give that subject everything they had. When a man does this, he has time to spare and as soon as he gets time, considering he job, he becomes an _ executive. Then taking on an additional load — becomes less a matter of, getting“ mentally confused and is easily handled. Obligation To Public As I look at_you I think of you as being theatre managers, but you are charged with the responsibility of the most important thing, because this picture depends entirely on your contribution as man power. It depends on the example you set, so that we may have the right to take on these investments to which I re-= ferred. If you all do that. job properly, if we all honestly appraise ourselves, than I haven’t any worry about saying to the men L meet in the field: ‘‘All right, go | right ahead and get more of this. kind of men in and our business. will measure up to our obliga-. tions.’’ We have a tremendous ob ligation for all of these mil lions coming from the public. They come from people who. (Continued on Page Nine) as done a given ~