Household It is just as important for the shopkeeper mentioned at the start of this chapter to plan what he wants his new assistant to do and why and to explain his wants in clear unmistakable terms as it is for the foreman and supervisor to think out in detail the organization for the 'special effort' his superior management has asked him and his colleagues to make. The Board must be the main policy maker because, in fact, policy has to come from the top policy, objectives, and leadership. It is necessary here to inject a truism. Top management must bear the responsibility for working out objectives, but the building of the organization to achieve those objectives is not an end in itself. It is simply the means to an end. It is the successful pursuit of the objectives that is truly the end. The finest organization brains and money can devise will never produce the desired result if the end is obscure. Preoccupation with organizational problems has tended to bedevil many enterprises in which, had the objectives, the ends, been crystal clear, the means of achieving them would have fallen quickly and logically into place. The case studies in failure at the end of this book will vividly demonstrate this point. But what is meant by objectives? It is becoming increasingly clear to business management that subordinates cannot be expected to take particularly seriously objectives that are put forward to them in broad, windy phrases. The objective must be easy to assimilate, reasonable of achievement; it must carry with it the ring of conviction, but if it is evangelical it will be highly suspect. FieldMarshal Earl Wavelrin his Soldiers and Soldiering says of Cromwell's Ironsides that 'they knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew'. Many, possibly cynical, managers today would say that this is highly irrelevant in modern conditions when causes and objectives are oversPiadowed by purely material considerations. It is one thing to know what the objectives are : to hope that they will be universally approved is quite another matter. And so the leadership 54 The Business of Management element in management again appears, for to make the objective intelligible and worthwhile is, in the last resort, a leader's task. One more quotation used by Lord Wavell and which comes from a book about the Second World War, will suffice : A man does not flee because he is fighting in an unrighteous cause. He does not attack because his cause is just. He flees because he is the weaker; he conquers because he is the stronger or because his leader has made him feel the stronger. ... It has been said earlier in this chapter that there must be caution in the matter of laying down organizational rules. Size, function, and location are but three of many determining factors in this matter. Some rules are better than none at all, and it may be a useful guide at this point to take an averagesized industrial operation employing, say, several thousand people. personal finance