The Green Bag

We suspect the members of the Council for Profit Sharing Industries who are meeting in New York City today and Friday will be surprised, and we are sure they will be pleased, at the talk which our own Harrold Johnson of the Will-Burt Company will give them at their session tomorrow morning on the subject, "The Employee Looks at Profit Sharing."

Harrold permitted us to read the manuscript of his address earlier this week, and while it would not normally be released for the press until after it is given, we are a long ways from New York, and we can see no harm in quoting two of the passages from it which struck us forcibly. They read:

"It now becomes the job of this Council to show those industrial leaders who have lead the march of industry to the physical achievements which are so magnificent that by applying the same dynamic leadership toward the incorporeal parts of men - their hearts, their minds, and their souls, we can surpass our material achievements by leaps and bounds.

"You (the leaders of industry) must accept the challenge of spiritual leadership. The employees throughout American industry are ready to follow those who will lead us again in the old traditional spirit of freedom and individual integrity. Management and labor , who are so utterly dependant on each other, will no longer be separated by the rifts of ignorance and misunderstanding. Instead they will be banded together in a powerful, undeniable force dedicated to the propisition that we are a free people, that our freedom must be maintained at all costs, that all we do must be for the common good. Only then will we find true happiness."

A great many people, perhaps almost everyone, thinks of sharing of money when they hear the words "profit sharing." In fact, a great many profit sharing plans have been set up (and many have failed) on the theory that by giving men more money, they are thereby made more content and better partners in the labor-management team.

Now, money is virtually important. All of us know that. Most of us do little more than make ends meet, and extra payment is a good thing in itself. But the fact is that, however much we may scoff at it, men do not live by bread alone, and that the great need of all men is for just what Mr. Johnson is talking about - spiritual leadership. On a very practical plane that men can feel at their work benches as well as from religious leadership.

The one thing which impressed us most when we were privileged to attend the founding conference of the Council in Cleveland was that many of the business leaders present had already learned the lesson, or had know it before they tried proift-sharing, that the sharing of profits means a great deal more than the sharing of money and that unless it does, it has little permanent value.

This, of course, is the high idealism which H. C. Nicholas took to the founding conference and which has run as the spark of invigorating life through the Council during its span of existence to date. We would think that it would be a most difficult conception to get across to a large segment of business, for it is idealism even though very practical idealism, which does not always find ready acceptance in the market place.

It is to be deeply regretted that Mr. Nicholas is prevented by illness from being at the conference in New York this week, but the message of spiritual re- evaluation which Mr. Johnson will give the members tomorrow is one that he must find highly pleasing. He can be sure too, that his conception of the importance of the individual, the validity of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount as a guide for industry, will be expressed by other speakers who share his vision and who have been inspired by his leadership.

(Sheri's note - excerpt from an article following the convention)

Members of the Orrville group report that Mr. Johnson's talk was one of the best at the conference, and that it was inturrupted repeatedly with applause.