Good Working Habit No. 3. When You Face a Problem, Solve It Then and There if You
Have the Facts Necessary to Make a Decision. Don't Keep Putting off Decisions.
One of my former students, the late H.P. Howell, told me that when he was a member of
the board of directors of U.S. Steel, the meetings of the board were often long-drawn-
out affairs-many problems were discussed, few decisions were made. The result: each
member of the board had to carry home bundles of reports to study.
Finally, Mr. Howell persuaded the board of directors to take up one problem at a time
and come to a decision. No procrastination-no putting off. The decision might be to ask
for additional facts; it might be to do something or do nothing. But a decision was
reached on each problem before passing on to the next. Mr. Howell told me that the
results were striking and salutary: the docket was cleared. The calendar was clean. No
longer was it necessary for each member to carry home a bundle of reports. No longer
was there a worried sense of unresolved problems.
A good rule, not only for the board of directors of U.S. Steel, but for you and me.
Good Working Habit No. 4: Learn to Organise, Deputise, and Supervise.
Many a business man is driving himself to a premature grave because he has never
learned to delegate responsibility to others, insists on doing everything himself. Result:
details and confusion overwhelm him. He is driven by a sense of hurry, worry, anxiety,
and tension. It is hard to learn to delegate responsibilities. I know. It was hard for me,
awfully hard. I also know from experience the disasters that can be caused by
delegating authority to the wrong people. But difficult as it is to delegate authority, the
executive must do it if he is to avoid worry, tension, and fatigue.
The man who builds up a big business, and doesn't learn to organise, deputise, and
supervise, usually pops off with heart trouble in his fifties or early sixties-heart trouble
caused by tension and worries. Want a specific instance? Look at the death notices in
your local paper.
Chapter 27: How To Banish The Boredom That Produces Fatigue, Worry, And
Resentment
One of the chief causes of fatigue is boredom. To illustrate, let's take the case of Alice, a
stenographer who lives on your street. Alice came home one night utterly exhausted.
She acted fatigued. She was fatigued. She had a headache. She had a backache. She
was so exhausted she wanted to go to bed without waiting for dinner. Her mother
pleaded .... She sat down at the table. The telephone rang. The boy friend! An invitation
to a dance! Her eyes sparkled. Her spirits soared. She rushed upstairs, put on her Alice-
blue gown, and danced until three o'clock in the morning; and when she finally did get
home, she was not the slightest bit exhausted. She was, in fact, so exhilarated she
couldn't fall asleep.
Was Alice really and honestly tired eight hours earlier, when she looked and acted
exhausted? Sure she was. She was exhausted because she was bored with her work,
perhaps bored with life. There are millions of Alices. You may be one of them.
It is a well-known fact that your emotional attitude usually has far more to do with
producing fatigue than has physical exertion. A few years ago, Joseph E. Barmack,
Ph.D., published in the Archives of Psychology a report of some of his experiments