than to victory by a woman.REBECCA WEST, said just prior to Margaret
Thatcher’s election victory in 1979
Never murder a man who is committing suicide.WOODROW WILSON
This observation is almost always attributed to Wilson, but in a 1916 letter to Bernard Baruch, a personal friend and political adviser, he cited an unnamed friend as the author. A similar observation, attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, may be found in the classic neverisms chapter.
thirteen
Never Coddle a Malcontent
Business & Management
People today usually describe Peter Drucker as “the father of modern management,” but I have come to believe that Erwin H. Schell may be more deserving of the title. Sadly, though, outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is not well known. I first learned of Schell several years ago when I stumbled across an admonition he had offered to managers:
Never be unreceptive to facts,
however discouraging, disappointing, or injurious
to your personal welfare they may appear to be.
I was immediately taken by this wise and beautifully phrased advice from a man I’d never heard of. I immediately went to Wikipedia, where I found only a one-sentence biographical entry: “Erwin Schell was a Dean of the MIT Department of Business and Engineering from 1930 through 1951.” I then checked The Forbes Book of Business Quotations, a massive compilation of 14,173 quotations. Nope, not a single entry from Erwin Schell. I decided to do a bit more digging.
In the early 1900s, an increasing number of graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were enjoying great success in the business world. The American economy was expanding at a rapid rate, and the demand for new products and improved manufacturing methods greatly enhanced the prospects of highly trained engineers. As many MIT graduates became business owners and factory managers, however, they began to vent a common frustration when they got together at alumni gatherings. While their alma mater had provided them with exceptional technical training, it had inadequately prepared them for the issues that now kept them awake at night, particularly the complex management decisions and thorny personnel issues. In 1913, an ad hoc committee of the MIT Alumni Council was formed to study the problem. Later that year, they formally recommended that the university create a new program “specifically designed to train men to be competent managers of businesses that have much to do with engineering problems.”
The next year, in 1914, faculty members from several MIT departments began to lay the groundwork for a new program of study. Following the university’s longstanding tradition of designating programs by numbers instead of names, they began designing Course XV, a planned concentration in what they were calling “Engineering Administration.” After a few initial courses were filled up by eager students, it became apparent that a more substantial effort was going to be required. In 1916, three new faculty members were hired. In 1917, Erwin H. Schell, an MIT alum from the Class of 1912, was hired as the first formal head of Course XV, formally renamed “Business Management.”
Almost immediately, Schell began to prove the truth of Emerson’s famous observation that “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Under his leadership, the program flourished, and he became one of the college’s most popular and respected instructors.
When Schell came out with The Technique of Executive Control in 1924, he almost singlehandedly formulated the concept of the modern manager, a major step up from the factory boss mentality that was common at the time. Schell’s book was revised and updated many, many times over the decades. I have a copy of the 1950 edition, and it contains one of the best management quotations of all time:
Remember that when an employee enters your office he is in a strange land.
He feels the atmosphere of authority; he is constrained and hesitant.
Make him feel at ease.
The book is also filled with many very helpful neverisms, all of them ringing as true today as when they were written so many decades ago:
Never let personal pride stand in the way of getting the right answer.
Never use underhanded methods in retaliation for covert opposition.
Never upbraid an employee in an emotional manner;
under no circumstances should you direct profanity at a workman.
Never make a man obey you against his will,
unless the act you require is to compensate for a wrong
which he knowingly committed.
Never ride roughshod over the feelings of another.
Such acts are not constructive; they arouse harmful resentment.
Never hold a man back on the basis that he otherwise
will outgrow his job and find a better position elsewhere.
Make it a rule never to say anything about any individual
that you would not say to him personally.
Never treat a new employee as a suspicious character
who requires watching until he has proved his honesty and worth.
In 1930, Schell was approached by Alfred P. Sloan, an 1895 graduate of MIT who had recently become president of General Motors. Sloan felt that many of GM’s highly trained engineers were lacking in management skills, and he wondered if Schell could help. Sensing a major opportunity, Schell began designing the world’s first university-based executive education program for mid-career engineers. The next year, “Sloan Fellows” from GM were sitting alongside regular MIT students, and within a few years, business schools around the country were attempting to replicate the model.
In 1952, a year after Schell retired as dean, a grant from The Sloan Foundation formally established the MIT School of Industrial Management. It was later renamed the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, but there are many who think it might have been more fitting to name the school after Erwin Schell.
If the topic of managing people is the most popular topic in business literature, then the subject of investing would probably come in at second place. Many of the best investment quotations have been expressed neveristically, with many cited as examples of “Wall Street Wisdom”:
Never invest on impulse.
Never trade to pay your bills.
Never fall in love with a stock.
Never confuse brains with a bull market.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.
Never invest on the basis of recommendations from friends.
Never invest on the basis of information
from chat rooms or Internet sources.
Some of history’s best-known investors have also weighed in with stern cautionary warnings:
Never invest in a business you cannot understand.WARREN BUFFETT
Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.PETER LYNCH, offering “Peter’s Principle #3” in
his 1993 investment classic Beating the Street
Never invest on sentiment. Never invest solely on a tip.JOHN TEMPLETON