Gaining Credibility – Man in the Middle

Working Towards GYAT Towards Trust

Initialization

The website opening page presented the site theme – we are our choices.

Making choices is an intellectual activity of an individual brain, an effort philosophers call thinking (2) responding to a “call” (1) also originating in the subconscious mind. Our target is confined to the significant sociotechnical system problems we label Category three.

“Thinking” underwrites choice making by comparing the knowledge about candidate fixes to a prioritized value system also held within the individual’s brain (3). Choices made that turn out to be good attest that high-stakes thinking took place. 1 2 3

The theme is so central to our life’s trajectory it is expressly connected to this page:

Scope of page subject matter
The logical couplings between theme, the sociotechnical system, and this page
Choices to be made

Scope: This page covers the qualifications that seem to fit the subconscious mind recognition program for GYAT attending the invariant human genome everyone has. There traits have come from decades of experience with Cat 3 problems. We make no deliberate effort to be GYAT rated. Our focus stays on getting to Plan B and the rest is interpretation of the consequences of our toil by others. The GYAT phenomenon revolves around high-stakes trust and only performance can engender trust. Words are a waste of time.

Connections: There are many referrals to the FLLP on this page that transpose Plan A MitMs to Plan B rank. The front line leader program builds GYAT for MitMs over many episodes. While each MitM develops at his own pace, the first ones to make it are a powerful incentive for the laggards. They can see the positive change in attitude of others for themselves.

Preparation for Trust Building

In order to reach that mighty but attainable goal of Plan B requires Cooperation, Collaboration, coordination, and unbounded Curiosity expressed in Continual innovation. To orchestrate high-stakes trust, the catalyst of social action that attains significant goals, requires significant cognitive effort. Trust is 100% psychological and the very heart of goal attainment. It can’t be bought. Trust is performance based and always after the performance is recorded history. No trust is involved in trust assessment. Faith and hope have nothing to do with trust. The device that measures trust is the subconscious minds of others, not yours.

While premium-grade trust takes intelligence, effort and time to attain and maintain, the required task before trust can bloom is “Getting Your Act Together” (GYAT). The amazing truth that puts this milestone ahead of trust is the speed of your subconscious mind in classifying GYAT, which goes from scratch to final grade in a centisecond. You perform this computational sprint yourself several times a day and you can’t consciously prevent it. If you don’t pass the GYAT test of the subconscious mind, it doesn’t bother with making trustworthiness determinations.

With GYAT determination, your subconscious mind recognized dozens of variables from its real-time sensory inputs, its storehouse of information, and the algorithm of our Stone Age human nature, to size people up. If the person does not have his act together, as calculated by the subconscious audit, the trust meter of the subconscious points at “no-confidence.” Do you trust people who can’t function on their own hook?

There is nothing a person who fails to pass the GYAT assay can do to attain a high trustworthy grade. Anyone who does not have his act together cannot make good choices for his performance with reality. These are people who make productive collaboration impossible. If they can’t help themselves, how can they be trusted to help get the group’s job done? History contains no exceptions.

There are two species of addressable issues in the operational reality.

Problems to be solved that do not require GYAT. These problems are not disruptive, complex or urgent. Follow the procedural recipe of SCRBF (short cycle run-break-and fix) and you will eventually arrive at a satisfactory solution. SCRBF runs on the intuition of your subconscious mind, a nobrainer. Even though intuition chooses wrongly more often than random chance, a tightly-coupled SCRBF is a GIGO-compensating process that ricochets off of your intuition errors towards the goal line.
Problems that are significant, massive, complex, and urgent, where GYAT is the only vehicle of intelligence that can carry the load.

After a generic indoctrination consisting of a few basic principles, anyone can engage SCRBF as-is. It is the equal-opportunity problem solver. It requires neither special knowledge nor serious cognitive effort. It’s an all-subconscious show. For SCRBF to be prudent:

There must be a goal, what “done” looks like, defined in working terms.
There must be immediate feedback from performance – from results to problem-solver, cheek by jowl. No interpreters in the cycle. Just time-stamped data.
Freedom to choose the next cycle of action and evaluation.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. It is the natural consequence of consistently applying the proven fundamentals of solving complex problems.

GYAT reality

Getting your act together with the operational reality is a royal PITA. We found the most annoying feature of GYAT is that it has no rules of exception for leaving any step out. You may be able to truncate some of the investigations by evidence, but you can’t assume there are no saboteurs where you haven’t looked.

There is no easy way to GYAT. No shortcuts.
It is all about making right, goal-seeking allocations of your efforts. Forget intuition.
It can’t be bought.
You must become astute in hyper-learning.
No one can do it for you.
It is a slow, energy-consuming affair. Go to the trouble to witness Plan B streaming benefits and you won’t mind the slog.
Many disciplines are involved. Expertise in one area does not compensate for ignorance in another. While other disciplines will help you learn, they want no knowledge about your quest.
As you progress towards GYAT, improving in noticeable ways, your social systems will push back. So much for thinking your social system wants what’s best for you. When you fail in a cycle with SCRBF, and everyone does, your social system comforts you. Go figure.

The GYAT indicator set

GYAT comes as a package. Find some positive indicators, you can assume they’re all there.
Personal responsibility for results
Knowing what done looks like. Know what you need to know and how to get it
GYAT skills need broad knowledge and systems-think experience
Knowing how to personalize. Rogerian triad.
Trafficking in truth AQI
Fair, square deal
Humble, respectful, unaggressive
Continually growing
Intensely curious for going forward
Safe, useful, trustworthy, capable, fearless, free energy, low angst, love of learning
Admits mistakes, ignorance
Highly motivated to fix, establishes a constrained choice field
Authentic, respectful to others, an active listener
Calm, comfortable, confident, GYAT posture
GYAT in areas of spiritual, economic, professional, personal, physical, psychological, hyper-learning
Makes Maslow climb every day. Sisyphus

Left to themselves, things go from bad to worse. Mother Nature

The framework and flow of logic that organizes the cause/effect cascade to Plan B is the rack upon which the sociotechnical knowledge we acquire, discover, and develop is hung. By definition, this superstructure is the connected assembly of primary core concepts. Everything that matters to social dynamics has a place on the rack. It is the scheme by which the infinite complexity of social behavior is rendered understandable to the human mind.

The condition to be transmuted, Plan A, is a system. The destination where the transmutation ends up, Plan B, is a system. The effortful process by which Plan A operations are successfully transmuted to Plan B operations is a generic methodology, a sequence of goal-seeking tasks that gets the job done and increases Plan B attainments throughout the arriving future. Plan B is the handiwork of alert, conscious minds.

The consequence for any failure to attain or maintain Plan B is freefall back to Plan A. To form and maintain the Plan A condition is effortless. No conscious-mind thinking is required. The instructions you carry in your genome are automatically processed by your subconscious mind and displayed on your teleprompter. The path of least organizational resistance leads straight to Plan A.

The foundational platform supporting the superstructure of social dynamics is Nature. The rack and everything hung on it is supported by and scrutably connected to Nature (Popper). Nature includes human nature (our invariant genome) and the invariant laws of the universe, Natural Law, mathematical physics.

The associations of human nature with reality are described by their invariance throughout history. These are innate concepts, human universals. They are displayed in the operatic scenes unfolding today. The invariance is striking and incontrovertible, beyond dispute. The ball of falsification is in your court.

The associations of natural law with collective choices of task action, propositional knowledge, are described at great length in the website. There is a handful of universal laws out of the hundreds that play major roles in shaping social behavior. Once validated by logic and evidence, incontrovertible, the role of natural law moved to habit. There are no further obligations on our part. The ball of falsification is in your court.

It is the interaction between the two Natures that channels all social behavior. To understand why Plan B works requires a comfortable understanding of both Natures and how they play out in the operational reality.

It is noteworthy that society tried to get itself to a Plan B (utopia) without understanding the mechanisms of action in play and failed nonstop for twelve thousand years. The many times when a Plan B condition existed in past history were transient. Society had the “what” of Plan B in its face but not the “why” and “how” of its conditions of existence. You could enjoy the fruits of Plan B while you had it, but no one knew how to create it from scratch.

When we finally got to Plan B in 2013, it was on the backs of mathematical physics and knowledge of invariant human nature, not examining junkyard wreckage. The evidence from 12K years of Plan A wreckage provided no clues for navigation to Plan B.

We all know that but for labor we would have very little that is worth fighting for, and when wars do come, they fall upon the many, the producing class, who are the sufferers. They not only have to furnish the means largely, but they have, by their labor and industry, to produce the means for those who are engaging in destroying and not in producing. Ulysses S. Grant speech, Newcastle, England on 22 September, 1877

Encouraged – the instincts of:

Survival (life)
Freedom, independence, self-responsibility (liberty)
Learning (the pursuit of happiness)
Workmanship
Responsibility for outcomes, self-determination
The square deal, fairness
Psychological success (Maslow)
Curiosity
Innovation for improvement
Constructiveness
Husbandry
Reciprocity
Social cohesion and stability
Society betterment

Intentionally downplayed instincts:

Domination, aggression, rivalry
Forming class distinctions
Herd security, bait ball formation
Path of least organizational resistance, cognitive effort

While nothing can account for individual behavior, human nature makes the choices, natural law channels their performance. The application of the two natures to the case at hand is strongly determined during first encounters where the law of optimality takes charge. If things get off to a bad start, the consequences are not reversible. A constructive relationship becomes impossible. Natural law says it is pointless to plan ahead without starting right. Intuition makes more bad choices than random chance.

A factor in the irreversibility of a bad start is the speed at which the subconscious mind makes choices. It goes from launch to conclusion in less than a centisecond. This speed erases any possibility of inquiry, fact gathering, and reasoning taking part.

Trust

In social relations the master controller is trust. If the front-end evaluation concludes distrust, no confidence, the cascade of task actions flows down the gorge of darkness. Low social performance is the signature of mutual distrust. If the assessment concludes trust, complete confidence, the flow of activity goes down a happy route. Collaborative social performance takes high-stakes trust.

Although the subconscious mind runs the trust evaluations, its unknowable process commences after GYAT. It uses a large number of clues it gets from various sensory inputs, checking out his performance record, and observing how he handles himself with the operational reality going forward. If the person is judged to not have his act together, the trust meter pegs at untrustable. If the person passes muster on GYAT, trust building is given the green light. Every time the trust matter comes up, GYAT is input to the determination. All issues of trust, and therefore GYAT, are tracked going forward by performance, not opinions.

On what basis would you trust a person who doesn’t have his act together, which is another way of saying he doesn’t make good choices in allocating his efforts? How do you cooperate with someone who habitually makes bad choices and still attain goals?

Whatever decision the subconscious mind comes to regarding GYAT and trust, it is updated as his performance unfolds. If he is GYAT, he will focus on performance, getting things done. If he is not together, he will spend his efforts debating peripheral issues and building his social status by competing for top opinion, avoiding performance altogether.

Curiosity, fact gathering, study, concept formation, check the dynamics, implement and test. 12 K years of bandaging consequences failed. Continuing this failed strategy is continuing to fail. To not learn from history indicates that your brain has been hijacked. You are not making the choices you implement and you never know the purpose of who controls you.

In order to turn these Natures to your account, they must be comfortably understood to the degree this amoral pair can be played like an organ. Indifference works both ways. Play the right chords and Nature will benefit you with the same enthusiasm it flogs you with when you choose wrong. You choose, Nature acts.

The paradigm of good choice-making is not part of subconscious mind operations. Since it takes time and effort, it is a conscious-mind affair. While the paradigm of good choice making does not guarantee perfect choices, it does assure that you will avoid making really-bad choices.

GYAT determination always comes before trust-building commences. Both GYAT and trust are keystone factors in choice-making. This knowledge is beneficial to anyone on both a personal and a collective basis. You get to see first-hand that personalities are a tangential factor in macro social behavior.

Mistakes made in the evaluation of GYAT and trust in others, cost you in several departments and you can’t refuse to pay their bills. The avoidance learning the truth about choice-making does nothing to stem the increasing flow of consequences.

The final exam for the GYAT diploma

People that have their act together understand and identify with the generic task checklist for choosing prudently and can do a reasonable job in every sub task. They do not hesitate to call for coaching on their tough spots. GYAT for real is like earning your Eagle Scout insignia. It’s a lot of effort and paying attention. Unlike authority, merit badges are not gifted.

This checklist of the subconscious mind works both ways. While it sets a frame of reference, a GPS for navigating your life, it also educates your subconscious mind as to the set of relevant factors to examine and evaluate in others. A reliable determination of GYAT is extremely valuable. Think about what it means to transact with someone who doesn’t know how he makes task-action choices and doesn’t have his act together. He has bought-in to the fear mongers. The herd rulers, like FB, make his choices. Ugh!

Think about what it means to collaborate with someone who does have his act together. You know before you start it will be both a productive and a learning occasion, happy and beautiful. That’s as good as social behavior can get.

Prudent Choice-Making, generic checklist

Action demand signal registers.
1. Pause taking action and follow checklist
2. Prequalification
  1. Credible source of demand?
  2. Examine the stated goal of the choice demand
    1. Navigational aid worthy?
    2. Credible? Possible?
  3. Classify choice
    1. Material, conscious mind
      1. Operations
      2. Project (novel, temporary)
      3. Voluntary collaboration
    2. Opinion, subconscious mind
      1. Intuition
      2. Debates, aggression
      3. No personal qualifications to engage
    3. Material
      1. Evaluate significance of goal and process
        
        Size, value
        
        Complexity, multiplicity, connectance
        
        Consequences exposure
        
        Benefits opportunity
        
        Urgency
        
        Scope
      2. Issue deemed not vital but actionable
        
        Revisit source credibility
        
        Determine goal of chosen efforts
        
        Provide for SCRBF cycle
        
        Use intuition
        
        Commence SCRBF implementation
        
        No personal qualification to engage
        
        Significant Issue– Avatar Proving Ground Design
        
        Qualifications to engage
        
        Goal specification, GPS, success criteria, what “done” looks like
        
        Franceschi Fitting status (FF), from concept to part numbers
        
        Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety status (ARV)
        
        Design Basis Events (DBE)
        
        Configuration and parameterization
        
        Study precedents
        
        Documentation
        
        Examine implementations
        
        AQI actionable quality information determination for Avatar Proving Ground
        
        Goal setting
        
        GIGO
        
        Foreseeable threats beyond DBEs
        
        Tort standard
        
        Risk Assessment
        
        Risk analysis
        
        Pre-establish acceptance criteria
        
        Baseline performance reference benchmark
        
        Natural Law conflicts
        
        Pre-established selection criteria LCRBF cycle (study, judgment, opinion)
        
        Performance
        
        Safety
        
        Quality
        
        Availability
        
        Reliability
        
        Efficiency
        
        Goals for dynamic simulation, ecosystem design modules
        
        Significant variables, configurations
        
        Stability limits
        
        Dynamics of disturbances
        
        Social system context, launchpad status
        
        Plan A, corruption, distrust
        
        Plan B, collaboration, high-stakes trust
        
        Alignment with human nature
        
        Alignment with relevant natural laws
        
        Social status value system in service (A\P)
        
        IA avatar dynamic simulation (DBEs)
        
        Run configurations and events on proving ground
        
        Independent and dependent variables
        
        Covariance
        
        Select by measured criteria vs benchmarks, no judgment, opinions
        
        Context stop rules
        
        Implement selected LCRBF process
        
        Second Law entropy extraction

The items on this checklist are covered throughout the website. The checklist should be used as a safeguard, as a map. It should be familiar but it doesn’t have to be memorized. It likely is viewed as a little much. Its purpose is to preempt making really bad choices, the kind featured in every history book.

To handle the small stuff, set up your SCRBF cycle and use intuition. Done. To handle the big stuff, only conscious-mind processing will do. And, you can’t skip a section. The enormous contrast is just the way it is, you don’t have to like the struggle, but it does go a long way to explain why civilizations fail.

Motivation

H.S. Dennison’s thoughts on motivating the workforce, a century ago, have lost none of their sting for today.

“The real work of managing an organization must be done upon the wants of men, not upon their acts. All methods of influence from inducements to threats of physical harm are alike in operating upon the minds of the members in such a way that they prefer to act as desired.

Men feel compelled when they make any choice the alternative to which seems inescapable and very undesirable. The slave prefers the pain of obedience to the pain of the lash; the saint chooses the satisfactions of eventual self-respect, respect from his fellows, or approval from his God over more immediate physical pleasures and comforts; the martyr chooses torture and death rather than give up his greater satisfactions in serving his fellows or in the hope of eternal bliss.

It is necessary to get free from the wasteful idea that men must be compelled, and on the other hand that they can be induced to prefer a course of action by hearing it emphatically called “duty.” The organization member who acts merely to avoid consequences will do no more than the least which is made necessary by the supervision of the moment.

Only the members whose abilities are of the lowest order can be brought into full action by the exercise of authority alone. The fear of discharge and hunger will get some work out of folk. The positive economic motives will get more work out of more folk. Only the enlisting of all possible motives will get the best work out of all folk.

A slave army was never efficient; mercenaries have their limitations; conscripts, approving the cause, go far; but volunteers in defense of what they consider fundamental causes stand the strongest chance of winning. Since an organization can work upon its members only through their minds, every influence which it brings to bear upon any one of its members must reach him through just that intellectual and emotional structure which is at the moment the result of his heredity and past environment.

Every incentive of any sort, in order to bring about a reaction, must pass through and be affected by whatever agglomeration of opinions and attitudes past living has built up. The most powerful incentive may fail to force a way through an obsession; suspicions or prejudices may offer internal resistances which cut down the effectiveness of an incentive by half. These states of mind of the members, are the elemental data for the organization engineer.

When any group of people have lived and worked together a number of years there grows up gradually among them a body of standards; policies, or traditions which are difficult and slow to change. They are the group habits, prejudices, ideals—the unconsciously accepted standards of behavior which are often so much more powerful than written laws. From them may come the proscription “it isn’t done,” or the affirmation of a cherished “natural right.”

They may resist or greatly assist measures of management and, hard as they sometimes are to discover, must be taken into account as influential in the organization. Where varying organization forms giving similar results, are found or identical forms giving varying results, an examination of the underlying traditions frequently offers the solution.

All of men’s desires, aversions, attitudes, thoughts, and actions are under the powerful influence of these habits of emotional, intellectual, and muscular response they have acquired. Past preferences arising from instinctive response, unconscious choice, thoughtless whims, avoidance of pain or discomfort, complicated calculations of self-interest, narrow or broad, and acknowledgment of duties or other claims to service are crystallized as habits which can only be changed by new preferences. In great part the work of organization engineering may be said to be the development of effective habits.

Dr. Donald G. Paterson, University of Minnesota, writes: “The extent to which firing squads, rules, police, etc., exercise control over men, in my opinion, is generally overestimated, just as the extent to which preaching exercises control over men the breaking of a harmful habit involves essentially, the learning of new responses, that is, the formation of new habits. In this .work time is essential; the change of a habit pattern is not the result of a sheer act of will; there are required a number of impulsions towards the change under favoring emotional tensions fully comparable in value to the number and tension of the previous habit-forming influences. However unreasonable a mental habit may be, it cannot be changed by reasoning. The only thing reasoning, if properly employed, may do is to gain an attitude of mind favorable to the processes of change.

Among the common-habit attitudes which offer resistance or active opposition to a workman’s giving his full energies and abilities to the organization he is in are fear of is over-estimated. The trouble is that the ‘dynamic rule of habit’ is overlooked. For example, fear of punishment may be used to get a boy to study the multiplication tables but mastery and habitual success in manipulating mathematical relationships (mathematical habits) may quickly displace the fear element—the acquisition of skill (the development of a habit) may furnish its own drive.” undeserved loss of the job, dread of a dependent old age, plain fear, a lack of interest, dislike of a foreman or of surroundings, or resentment at crowded homes or at long trips to and from work.

For some time after joining an organization a man feels strange, and because he is afraid of making false steps plays safe. His attitude is chiefly determined by what he has so far in his life experienced or heard or read about the organization or others like it. In the case of a workman joining a business organization this attitude usually is “on guard,” in anticipation of lack of consideration or worse. Bad first impressions may set a bad attitude into habitual bias, or good ones may weaken it so that a better may be developed; early impressions may undermine a good attitude, or strengthen it.”

However widely he may differ from his fellows, each man is, nevertheless, an aggregate of characteristics and tendencies shared in common by all. By considering these tendencies separately and instituting measures suitable to them, closer adjustments by general regulation are possible than would be feasible if men had to be regarded only as wholes. In an organization we may often deal with some psychological state common among a group of men such, for example, as the desire for self-respect, just as in a chemical compound we may deal with some element common to its group of molecules.

Four general groups of tendencies which may actuate a member of any organization are:

Regard for his own and his family’s welfare and standing
Liking for the work itself
Regard for one or more members of the organization and for their good opinion, and pleasure in working with them
Respect and regard for the main purposes of the organization.

Members may be actuated by any one, or by any combination of these groups. When by (1) alone, he “works for a salary” and may or may not (as his nature may dictate and opportunity may offer) “play up to the boss,” “play for a showing,” or “double cross” the organization; when by (2) he is a craftsman; when by (3) he is a team player or a faithful follower, perhaps even blind to his own self-interest and ignorant of what the organization is all about; when by (4) alone, he joins ‘for the cause’ as have so many volunteers in wartime. Only when impelled by the four combined can all man’s powers be brought into steady and permanent play.

From the point of view of the organization engineer it is useless to attempt the arrangement of motives in order of importance, for his ideal must be to make the fullest possible use of each of them. To “substitute the service motive for the profit motive”—to “make for use not for profit” are in rare cases successful and yet prove little. For it is the organization which makes appropriate uses of all groups of motives which will be more effective than any other.

During war it is not uncommon to find the economic motives overruled; to find men to whom money means much nevertheless choosing army service over highly paid civilian service, not because their economic motives are quenched—perhaps they are not diminished at all—but because other motives gain them a power they do not have in time of peace.

And in peace times there are considerable groups of men whose lives the economic motives by no means dominate. Teaching, scientific research, and the medical profession, at their best, furnish many examples of the high productive results to be obtained when a man’s motives, in their full variety, are set to a single task.

Obviously the desire for money is a powerful and pervasive characteristic of men, but it is not the only one through which they are influenced. Many business organizations have relied solely upon the self-serving motives. They are the most obvious and, although not so simple as commonly thought, they are on the whole the most simple. While they do not work in uniform degrees upon all men, they are distinctly more nearly uniform in their effects than the other groups of motives.

Since fear of discharge and the wish to make a good living, as well as the desire for social prestige and glory, must all be included in this first group, there are probably no organizations which do not make some use of them; though we may find examples of their most complete subordination among religious, educational, and other social-service institutions.

Hundreds of attempts have been made to organize Utopias without the help of economic motives. The history of the Shakers and the Moravians shows that under the power of intense religious convictions it may be done. Experiments of a more secular nature such as those of the Owenites, Brook Farm, and the North American Phalanx seem to prove that such organizations cannot survive the natural cooling of the first fires of enthusiasm unless they find a leader of unusual force. Even in the story of their failures many of them strongly suggest that the desire to serve under acceptable leadership comes close to the economic motives in its power.

The strictly economic incentive—the appeal to the desire for money—is the most nearly mechanical. Being a strongly self-regarding motive, it must be expected to act in its own field with little regard for anything but self-service. Direct financial incentives must, therefore, be fitted with nicety to the actions they are intended to stimulate. They have a powerful tendency to result in such lines of action as bring in the most immediate money, whether or not they are the actions foreseen and desired. Salesmen’s commissions, for example, unless carefully devised and administered, have resulted in overselling, high-spot selling, proprietary claims to territories.

Piece work has often led to reductions in quality standards. Schemes which have stimulated the desire for quick profits have had a long catalogue of results, unexpected and undesired. A recent and important set of cases has arisen from the widespread modern custom of getting stock of the company into the hands of the principal executives by sale or bonus distribution, or both.

If this stock has an active market and it appears to the holder that he can make more for himself by trading in that market than by working harder at his job, he must be expected to act accordingly. Large bonuses in cash may result in greater devotion of his time and attention to best ways to invest than to his day’s work. In more than a few cases, schemes intended to incite to more intense devotion to the organization’s purposes have resulted in serious distractions. The economic motive is not of fixed power, but is relative to the financial status of each individual.

Neither a fixed sum of money nor a fixed percentage of increase in income affects to the same extent the man who has recently increased his income, the man who has not, the family head, the young lad, the girl living at home, the person at the margin of subsistence, and the one well above it. If a given financial incentive is offered to a varied group of employees, uniformity of effect is not to be expected.

Fluctuation of income is a decided detriment to a considerable percentage of families. This is true regardless of their economic status or occupational group; only exceptional folk enjoy or prosper under income irregularities. A minor but interesting cause of limitation of output under piece rates has sometimes appeared through objections raised by wives who prefer a steady, even if smaller, income. Even where rate cuts are not feared, there are, therefore, some men who prefer to adopt a standard of accomplishment they can be fairly sure to maintain during every pay period rather than risk violent ups and downs by letting themselves go the limit.

Wage earners will ordinarily prefer an income which can be depended upon regularly each week, even if it yields 10 per cent less per year than one of wide fluctuations. In planning ”payment by results” these factors cannot be overlooked. They are often partly met by base rates or guaranteed minimums. Downward changes in wages and salaries are made only against great and persistent resistance. It is because men are so constituted as to offer such resistance that they have risen from savagery. But because they are so constituted the wage problem presents a special difficulty in the path of management, and a serious interference with the smooth running of any mechanical economics.

In a mechanical system reducing wages ought to reduce costs; with men as they are, to reduce wages may be to increase costs. And because wages and salaries can only be lowered with great caution, they must be raised with equal caution; taking, nevertheless, into account the fact that increases in hour rate or salary have a more powerful effect when they originate with the employer than when they are the result of demands. A sudden increase in pay of any amount over 30 per cent may result in a sudden increase in time taken off rather than as a stimulus to production. During 1917 many workers were criticized for manifesting this common trait. But those who understood men realized that habits of thinking, of living, and even of spending do not change abruptly, and hence that the desires which stimulate effort could not jump as the pay jumped.

In certain coal-mining regions where opportunities for spending are narrowly limited, it has been noticed that personal satisfactions and the desire for social status, elsewhere met by the expenditure of money, seem to be gratified by taking time off.

It has many times been reported that the economic motive soon finds a limit to its effectiveness upon natives of tropical countries. When their primary wants are satisfied, no driving force is left. In some such situations, company stores offering novelties in food and clothing have gradually been able to arouse new desires. Townsend in his “Asia and Europe” suggests that a “little badness might be good” for the natives of India. “Tea is as much pure waste as alcohol; but then, the desire for tea produces the energy necessary to obtain it, and so far as appears, the countervailing consequence of abstemiousness is deficient energy.”

Your subconscious is a choice-making speed demon. A factory for producing bad choices.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us. Jim Rohn

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