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April 28 - April 29, 2020
I have always remembered his answer: “I cannot expect my railroad to make money until I first put money in the hands of farmers along my right of way. It occurred to me that, during our depression years, we could not correct our national economy until we found better ways of putting money into the hands of our people so they could buy the products of the farm and the factory. “Every dollar we spend,” Hill continued, “helping a farmer along our right of way, puts him in a position to buy needed farm implements and home necessities, which spells income for the railroad.
Seeds of Hormel's stakeholder philosophy, quoting J. J. Hill
Hill belonged to and supported international peace associations. The old Indian fighter had lived long enough to know that it takes twice the energy to fight a man than it takes to work with him toward some constructive end. He once said, “We can have peace whenever we’re willing to work toward making the productions of industry so profitable everywhere that no man can offer his countrymen any gains through war.”
Influence on Jay H approach to conflict w unions
I have been confused about a lot of other issues in life, but rarely about the function of money or what it can or cannot do. It is a good servant but a miserable master.
Just a solid quote. Could sub in “technology “ for “money”
The idea of employees’ shares was an incentive for
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all of our employees to think of ways and means to improve our product and produce it at the lowest minimum cost. Every time an employee submitted a useful idea, he was rewarded with employee share certificates. This incentive kept him alert and his brain active. In a way, these men were made partners in the business. The money paid out in employee share earnings each year paid big dividends and did more to prosper the business than any other one thing.
Personal recognition from his superiors and the fact that we considered him intelligent enough to have profit-producing ideas were as important in quickening his perceptions as the more tangible rewards he earned. In brief, whenever I could convince a man—and this I conceived to be my most important job—that the only limiting factor in life was himself, and that the job he was now doing was both useful and important enough to engage his whole effort since it was the means by which he lived, he proceeded to make greater use of such talents as he possessed. And he often possessed more talents
...more
Psyhchology of human performance and improvement
For the fact that neither in the business nor in the town did this kind of job snobbishness gain a foothold, I take some
of the credit, but most of it belongs to the people of Austin.
I incessantly preached that we were engaged in one of the most important tasks in the world—feeding people. Nothing that contributed to the quality of their food was too much trouble. Consumers might never know whether clean or dirty hands handled their food, whether knives, tubs, floors and utensils were scrubbed and clean-smelling, but we knew.
An assistant foreman didn’t get tough in the way he managed; he couldn’t get tough and keep his job—not even with the newest recruit in his department. We were engaged in processing animals for food and not in killing off our human talent. We couldn’t know, until he’d been given the opportunity to show us, each recruit’s possibilities; it was his foreman’s job to help us find out what they might be.
I saw no advantage in giving a man a place in the business, with perhaps authority over others, who hadn’t gotten some grease, blood, and dirt on his hands and gone home at night with aching muscles, since every “clean” job rested on the man who had a “dirty” one. This rubbed out any illusions a man had about being “better” because he had different capacities or had gone away to school. And it gave the bright, young men we were trying to attract into the business a wholesome respect for the manual labor on which it rested and a speaking acquaintance with the men who make it possible.
Respect for workers
It is the human aspects that have
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interested me primarily—humanity and one’s obligations to it from the industrialist’s standpoint.
I take no credit for “the Hormel Plan.” In fact, I vetoed it when Jay first proposed it for our business.
Back in 1924, when our hog purchases reached a million for the first time, Jay tried to get me to consider a guaranteed yearly payment of fifty-two checks to each regular employee. No involuntary layoffs, no overtime pay, but a guaranteed wage that each worker could depend on.
if we’re going to have any real industrial peace in this business, or in this country, a guaranteed weekly wage plan is one of the answers.
To my son, there was only one answer: keep them on the job—make work, share the work, develop new products to take the place of the old—do everything possible to keep the wheels of industry turning. Expansion, not retrenchment, was the order of the day.
Downturns as a time for investment and innovation rather than austerity
In that operation the genii of the dynamo was doing what the dynamo had been created to do—to harness the genii and make it take the burden off men’s backs. Should it then, I asked myself, be allowed to transfer the burden to their spirits? A thousand times, no.
Poetic thoughts on automation
The new method saved time and labor. It was more sanitary and efficient. But if we had not found a better way to use them, more than a dozen workers would have lost their jobs because of it.
SPAM was destined for strange fame. It had been put on the market in 1937—nearly two years before its earliest twelve-ounce rival—and after two years’ delay for proper testing and for want of the right name. That name was to be taken in vain the world over during the war years as a coverall for the canned meats of a dozen packers, while Hormel—at government request—was turning out two hundred and fifty thousand “K-rations” a day.
During those straining years, my son’s greatest concern was that the company should have work for these men on their return without dismissal of the new men and women who had toiled faithfully in their places. He and others worked tirelessly on a program of postwar make-work projects. A full year before the Japanese surrender, there were ninety-four of these projects in the making on the plant list.
‘Therefore,’ said Mr. Hormel, ‘under our setup, if the stockholder is to get more he first must find the means for the employees to get more. Only as the stockholder through management gets more than enough to pay the base rate
does he begin to share. The greater the earnings above this first requirement, the more the stockholder gets. Likewise, the more the employee gets. ‘This also applies to members of management,’ he continued. ‘Before they can get extra income, they must provide extra income to the employees. In order to increase their own income, they first must increase that of the employees.
A modern industrial enterprise depends for its success on factors which are never contained in any catalogue of its physical assets. The Midas touch is not in them but in the intangibles having to do with the nature and creative capacity of men. This is a spring which flows no higher than its source. The best tools in the hands of the best workmen will neither keep them employed today nor provide them with an adequate return on their effort without a management behind them able to discern genuine opportunities for the use of their skills.
I trust to them the future I shall not live to see. For they alone, in concert with the men of specialized knowledge, are able to explore the infinite possibilities of this wealth-producing earth, in
the terms of their time, toward the end of the greatest good to the greatest number. No nation is ever richer than the numbers of such men it produces.
