swift and reliable method for handling enormous masses of details.

The methods here utilized are equally applicable to business; condensed reports provide the information required and graphic methods of presentation render it usable. In consequence, when the details involved in the operation of a large scale enterprise have been condensed into a few graphic charts and laid regularly upon his desk, the manager who before was overburdened will sense the significance of mobilization in his business.

Graphic methods, in fact, provide a new language. Its symbols to the initiated convey quantitative facts with accuracy, ease, and rapidity.

1. They substitute facts for guess-work. The graph calls for verifiable evidence as its material; "I guess so," cannot be plotted.

2. They mean organized thinking. Myriads of details are summarized that the essentials may be set forth. 3. They keep results in sight. They are both a check upon what has been done and an incentive to accomplishment. The plain record of what has been stimulates the mind to seek what is to come and aids it in answering this question wisely.

In fact, graphic methods are short cuts to business knowledge. The essential facts and relationships which it might take months to discover through unaided study are, when properly presented, focused into a half-day's time.

Maps

In securing for himself these benefits of graphic methods, the business man has at his command several different mediums or devices. Among these, maps are available for a variety of

purposes.

A wall map for instance may be shaded to show the consumption capacity, consumer occupations, yield of crops per acre, potential water-power, or similar information of a particular territory. In any case, a scale according to which the shading is done must be decided upon, usually the portion highest in the particular item under consideration being made solid black and the lowest left white. This scale, it may be added, as a rule should be placed for explanation in a lower corner of the map.

Coloring may be used in practically the same way as shading, although shading is better for showing gradations in the same item and for purposes of reproduction. The sales manager of an agricultural implement house, for instance, when indicating sections yielding varying bushels of corn per acre will find a map of blue, red, yellow, etc., less easily intelligible than a shading system with its progressive degrees of darkness. In marking off the territories of his various branch offices, however, color proves convenient.

Dots and circles placed upon the map convey very satisfactorily at times the information desired. An automobile manufacturer, selecting as his scale, let us say, one dot for every five hundred automobiles, pictures to himself and associates the distribution of motor cars in the United States. Or it may be he represents the total number of cars in a state by means of a circle of given size, a second circle representing those of his own manufacture.

Increasing the Map's Usefulness

The map and tack system, in which the various towns. visited by a salesman are connected with a string, has for some time been commonly used by sales managers in routing their

men.

Pins when used with maps increase their usefulness. Each pin may represent a service station, a sales agency, a branch

factory, a prospect, sales of $1,000, or other items appropriate to this method of presentation. The large variety of pins available-plain, colored, numbered, lettered, celluloidcovered, cloth-covered, round, square. star, or flag designenable one to devise almost any system one may desire.

President Simmons of the Simmons Hardware Company has hung in his office at St. Louis a huge map of the United States, on which appear colored disks. Each disk contains as its center the photograph of a salesman, the position of the disk indicating where the salesman is traveling and its color which one of the branch houses he travels for. An arrow back of the disk shows by its color and direction what that salesman is accomplishing in comparison with his previous record. The person familiar with this map reads its whole complicated story at a glance.

The map system with its various adjuncts is a complex and facile instrument, able to set forth data with considerable fairness and accuracy.

"Boards" Which Present Facts Graphically

An office manager, faced with the problem of keeping an accurate record of the employees whom he constantly shifted from one department to another as the work fluctuated in amount, finally hit upon the checker-board idea.

On a small card-table he diagramed the office. Serious congestion in a department he indicates by a small red flag, a surplus of workers by a small white flag. The employees he represents by celluloid discs, upon which their respective names are written. In addition to this he has worked out a color scheme: a white disc indicates an employee of ordinary ability; red, a division head; gold, a worker to whom special responsibility can be delegated; and half-red and half-white an employee in line for promotion. Tardiness is indicated by a small green thumb tack inserted into the disc.

Boards frequently prove serviceable for the display of various data. Sales per week of the sales force, with the respective contributions of each member, are placed upon a board in the salesmen's room for purposes of record and incentive. Interviews, luncheon appointments, meetings, and other engagements, particularly when the persons concerned have an active part in these affairs for which preparation must be made, may be noted upon small cards and either hung upon hooks or slipped into recesses upon a board arranged left to right according to the days of the week and top to bottom according to hours of the day. The various positions of officers and employees in an organization, with their duties, responsibilities, and connecting lines of authority, are sometimes charted by enterprising companies, for the information of their employees.

Control-Boards

The board as a check upon the progress of work is one of its most common uses. The architect whose desk sheet was shown on page 54 has what in essence may be termed a control-board. Contractors, printers, publishers, manufacturers -almost anyone in fact who wishes to keep a check upon himself in carrying through a job-separate a piece of work into certain essential processes and prepare the board to record under these headings the progress to date. Various elaborations of the control-board have been devised, most of them receiving the approval of the scientific managers.

Geometric Figures as Aids in Presentation

Charts expressing data by means of straight lines are often easily made and effective. A chart prepared for a busy manufacturer by his accountant was useful not only in picturing to the executive's own mind the work of a twelvemonth, but proved to be valuable "ammunition" when he appeared at the

various conferences held by the company's work managers during the year. The quota for each plant had been set at a conference held at the close of the previous fiscal year, the production expected for each month being indicated by a tick on a dotted line which represented said quota. A solid line which represented what was actually being attained was extended from month to month.

Figure 27. A Railroad's Operating Ratio

The Vertical Bars are here used with excellent result. A considerable body of data is set forth clearly, in such a way that comparisons can also be made without difficulty. (Reproduced by permission from The Magazine of Wall Street.)

Horizontal or vertical bars are in certain cases more satisfactory than lines. Length of line proportioned to volume of the items under consideration is, of course, the essential principle in Figure 27, but while the ordinary line might show this it would be indistinct as compared with the vertical bar used in this instance. Production records, volumes of sales, cost of an article, stock quotations, expenses, and savings are typical of items which lend themselves to presentation in this

way.

The bar also is an excellent device for showing component Two operators, let us say, are found under the stop

parts.