thoroughly competent. He'd simply got off on the wrong foot. In the kitchen and the storeroom, he was a good operator. But the new owner's place was "out front."

His job was to "get more customers, get them to spend more—and to give them such good food and service that they would come back and bring their friends."

He began by spending money. Took out the gas pipe at the entrance. Replaced it with a brass rail. Provided a small lounging room where customers could wait for their friends. Put in upholstered chairs so they could be comfortable while waiting. Put attractive uniforms on attractive serving girls.

There was an air of good taste about the place when he got through.

Then he changed the arrangement of the counters. But you know all about that—how the desserts came first so they would catch your eye before your tray was too heavily loaded with the heavier part of the meal. Staples which offered a small margin of profit were relegated to places in the rear. Dishes that made the best profit got the positions up front. Each day he offered a low-priced "special." Thus he planned to increase customers' purchases.

And the business began to grow.

That's all there is. There isn't any more. Today he doesn't own a chain of cafeterias extending into many cities and feeding many thousands of people every day at a good profit.

He's still a very successful ceramic manufacturer—and a cafeteria proprietor.

"I flew in the face of tradition," he says. "'First watch your kitchen' is the cry of the restaurant man. But I started with what I wanted—net profits—and WORKED BACKWARD to make conditions that would provide net profits.

"VOLUME OF BUSINESS had to come first. I had to get it before I could get a margin of profit.

"No doubt I could go out in the kitchen today and save some money. If I went to market myself, maybe I could save a cent a pound on my meats. But I can't give up my attention to the 'front' in order to watch the 'back.' As soon as I do that I'm going to be right back where I started."

It would sound like heresy, wouldn't it, if we hadn't sat in and watched him begin with his final objective and work back through the means which make the objective possible. Only by careful analysis would he have had courage enough to FOLLOW HIS PLAN THROUGH to its successful conclusion.

And here's the amusing sequel. Today, as he still dabbles at feeding people, he will admit that he's a better ceramic manufacturer as a result of his cafeteria experience. His pottery had always yielded a nice profit. When he sat down with his sheet of coordinate paper and analyzed it, he found his job of management differed not at all in its fundamentals.

His first job he found was "out front" getting more customers in. A better knowledge of markets, a better job of selling, a better product—those were the ways to get the customers in and make them come back for more.

And his need for a better product led him out into the plant where he found that tunnel kilns with exact temperature control would more than treble the production of the old periodic kilns—and would produce better ware.

But that's another story. The important thing, anyway, is not what he found had to be done in the cafeteria and in the pottery, but HOW he found it.

He took his business to pieces—BACKWARDS.

He began with the objective he wanted to get—MONEY. It was a simple matter to find that to get money from the business he had to get customers to come in and spend money; that to get customers to come in he must make his place look like a good place to come to; that to make his place look attractive he must spend money on equipment and thought on the arrangement and display of food.

And there he had his big job cut out for him, with the other jobs following along in natural sequence. It altered the whole METHOD OF MANAGEMENT.

How this METHOD OF MANAGEMENT is applied to your job is shown in the chart which follows. It's a skeleton of what the cafeteria man did.

Indeed, it's more than that. For it shows what every manager—whether he manages a steel mill, a punch-press department or a time-study job—must do if he is to get an honest-to-goodness PERSPECTIVE OF HIS WORK.

It can be done very simply. Just a sheet of paper ruled in small squares—you can buy it at any stationer's—on which to fill in the steps you must take in between what you have to do and what you seek to accomplish by it—and some careful thought as to just what your job is and why it is to be done, will develop a true ANALYSIS of your problems which will beat reams and reams of typewritten words.

Remember the words of the Chinese philosopher: "A picture is worth ten thousand words"—and reflect how clever these Chinese are!

The MEANS FOR ACCOMPLISHING the final objective may be many or few. You have seen the cafeteria-manager's problems on the chart on page 24. Now turn to page 35 and see what a file clerk does beside powder her nose from nine to five.

A bright young lady fresh out of high school went to work in an editorial office. There wasn't enough filing to do to keep her happy from nine to five, so she filled in with a bit of typing here and a trifle of routine clerical work there. Thursdays she hopped over to the neighboring bookstore and collected Saturday Posts for the editors—now she'll have to do that on Tuesday. And Fridays she distributed The New Yorkers to avid readers.

Filing, though, was her main job. When she first came, the managing editor said "Here it is" or words to that effect, and she went to work.

Those files had always been more or less of a sore point. An editor's mail is nothing if not voluminous. And every day Flossie the fascinating file clerk got a mass of data which she had to stick away. Her great trouble was finding it again after she'd stuck it away.

Often she couldn't find it. And pretty soon she discovered that she got the blame no matter what was missing—whether an important inquiry from Peter B. Stilb or the editor's pipe cleaners.

She couldn't do a thing about the pipe cleaners, but she made up her mind that since she was held responsible when a letter got lost, she would also have the responsibility of changing the filing system. The system, she felt sure, was to blame.

One day when she was "on her lunch" and the editors didn't need cigarettes from the corner drugstore, she sat down and made an ANALYSIS of her problem. Curiously enough, she started at the end and WORKED BACKWARDS.

She WORKED BACKWARDS, not because someone told her that was the right way to analyze her job, but probably because she was only a file clerk and no one ever told her anything.

"Why," she asked herself, "do I file these old papers anyway?"

"So I can find them again, quickly and surely, when they're wanted," seemed to be the only answer to that.

"What's the right way to file these letters and papers and data so I can find them quickly?" was her next question.

"Arrange them like words in the dictionary—ONE PLACE, and ONLY ONE