personal finance If the manager is guilty of mismanagement of his own time in the strictly 'scientific' sense there is no reason to suppose he is the vorse manager for that. As this book has repeatedly stressed, qualities of a less tangible, less measurable kind are needed from the manager who is truly worthy of the name. The unanswered question and possibly the most difficult to answer is 'Can, in fact, management make people work better' or 'How can management get the best from people?' This question must be faced. If management is to make the best of its main resource, the human one, it must think hard and long about the resource. Accepting that people work because they have to and usually want to management must try to evolve ways and means of making work something more than mechanized drudgery, uninspired and uninspiring routine, or just sheer boredom. б Three factors need to be tackled at the start of this discussion. The first is to dispose of a myth. A great deal of current management thinking and organization, especially in relation to the tasks given to 'personnel' and 'human relations' departments in large fixms, rests on the assumption that workers need to be sold on the idea of work that work is somehow inimical to the great majority of mankind and that therefore there is a responsibility on these specialists to take over what management itself should be doing. Are these assumptions true ? People surely want to work work satisfies a psychological necessity; people also want to work because they want to eat. And the point is that a man works best at what he can do best. That must be a manager's firm belief if the best is, indeed, to be obtained. It is, after all, a reasonable assumption that managers themselves have reached management level because managing is what they like to do what they feel they can do best. The unwilling manager, the man who has accepted responsibility reluc tantly, is in most cases a pretty useless leader. This point is returned to later in this chapter. The second factor is the question of the relation of work to pay. Pay is a primary necessity because pay ensures the opportunity to live a life outside work which satisfies those desires which are fundamental to most mortals to eat, to sleep, to love, and to cultivate their gardens. But how many managements realize that there is a big difference between the way workers and managements regard the wages a business enterprise can afford to pay? To management the wages bill is a part of the business cost and, as such, must be flexible and capable of expansion and contraction in the light of trading conditions. To the worker his wage is his income, his livelihood, and as such needs to be a stable element. It is the basis upon which rests the whole of his private, intensely personal, destiny. personal finance