Officers & Departments

A concern of 1,247 people is supposed to have a chart with boxes on it, and the boxes are supposed to be joined by lines, and the lines are supposed to mean something. Ours has one box at the top. Everything printed below that box is filing, and I want the men from Washington who keep writing in for this sheet to understand that I am not being coy with them. That is the chart. There is no second page.

I own one hundred per cent of Aperture Science Innovators. There is no board, there are no outside directors, there is nobody in this building who can tell me no and keep his desk, and I have arranged it that way deliberately and at some expense. A committee has never once put a hole in a wall. I have the minutes to prove it.

On The Absence Of Vice-Presidents

We do not appoint Vice-Presidents. A Vice-President is a man paid a great deal of money to be nearly in charge, and nearly in charge is the most expensive commodity in American industry, because the man will not decide anything and he will not let anybody else decide it either. I have department heads. A department head decides, and if he decides wrong he tells me on the same day, and we find out together what it cost. Usually it is nine thousand dollars and a Tuesday. Twice it has been a floor.

Nor do we have a Personnel Director in the sense the trade journals mean. We have Mr. Pike, who is eight men including himself, who knows the name and the shoe size of every soul on the payroll, and who has been asking me since 1954 to hold something he calls an exit interview. Mr. Pike and I have a difference of opinion about the word exit.

How A Department Comes To Exist Here

Not one department of this company was founded at a meeting. Materials exists because in 1948 a man named Vane wanted a room with a drain in it and would not stop asking me for the room. Computation exists because I asked whether a person could be written down and Mr. Kesler said probably not and I said try anyway. The outfit in New Mexico founds a department by forming a committee to consider the founding of a department. We found one by giving a man a key and a floor and finding out on the Monday whether he still wanted it.

The Marine Division exists because of 1956, and the Marine Division will continue to exist for precisely as long as the United States Navy continues to buy its shower curtains from somebody else. It has one employee. It has one filing cabinet. Its annual budget would not cover a Christmas party for four, and it is the finest money this company spends.

Legal is three men in the basement, rear, behind the boiler, and I put them there. Not out of malice. Out of arithmetic. Every foot a memorandum has to travel before it reaches me is a foot in which somebody might improve it, and the Legal Department improves things by removing them. They are good men. They are wrong about almost everything, in writing, promptly, and in triplicate, and I have kept every one of the letters.

On My Secretary

Caroline has been at the desk outside my office since 1946. Thirteen years. Her title is Personal Secretary to the President and it is the smallest title in this building, and it is the only one I have never had cause to review, and every man in the table further down this sheet reports to me through a doorway that she sits in.

She signs nothing. Officially. I want that on the sheet because Accounting wants it on the sheet. Fourteen requisitions in 1954 carry an authorisation that is not in my hand and not in anybody else’s either, and every one of them was the right call. She is the best damn thing that ever happened to this company and she will strike that sentence out of this paragraph before it goes to the printer, and I have instructed the printer to put it back.