What's interesting about this piece in particular, and writing from this period in general, is the absence of psychological language.
The author praises what we refer to today as the personality trait conscientiousness, although his description is grounded in theological, rather than psychological, terms:
> God Almighty, in fashioning his most useful men, often works slowly with quite common stuff. Now and then He turns out a quick job of superfine materials -- a genius who really delivers the goods. But most of His better grade line is ordinary in everything except the extra effort, and dogged determination, which have given it a finer texture and finish.
What bugs me is the framing of the salesman as a “petulant child”, and then telling him,
> You never sold yourself to the people with whom and through whom you had to work.
The one problem being that old aphorism of “you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink”.
My point being that the author presents his company as something like a family-run business, being small and tightly-knit. Under those conditions, the company culture adopts certain processes and becomes very insular and resistent to change. Especially from outsiders with new and strange ideas.
Under those conditions, there could easily be those few influential employees who can completely kill any attempt to introduce new methods and processes, regardless of how good they may be, or how well these ideas have been presented. It ceases to be “how well these ideas have been sold”, as these “roadblock employees” could easily reject any new change from outside the core people, regardless of what it is.
After all, most of us have known people at companies who are both influential yet also hidebound, in a “that’s never been done here, and so it never will be” manner. They may not in any real official position of power, they just have other attributes - flow of information, control over access or documentation or processes, etc. - that makes their obstinance an insurmountable barrier to anything different and new. Think of that one head of data entry who refused to move on from Windows XP. Or that old CFO who refused to give up paper ledgers because computers were a horrible data risk. These people are found everywhere.
At that point, it also becomes the CEOs job to step in and provide additional leadership. An idea to change the company must have clear and visible buy-in from all levels of the company… including senior leadership. And I would say, especially senior leadership.
This apparent failure to back up that sales manager makes the failure of the sales manager just as much his own failure. He shares in that failure not by hiring that man, but by failing to support him.
It seems the answer is more or less "because I've redefined brilliance to exclude the type of people I want to hire, even to the extent that many people who are widely considered renowned geniuses are not brilliant".
>The five-dollar shoe has a lot more wear in it because there was a lot more work in it.
Wasn't the reason in the first place that he thought his salesman was the five dollar shoe?
If it's based on the price it says nothing about the quality.
In the end his mediocre shoes were better in the long run.
Sounds like justifying bad decisions by retconning his father's lesson.
He made a bad hire by following dad's advice, thinking he is overpaying, but that he's getting a return on it.
The problem is that in employment, it's not the market that sets anyone's individual value (like for a shoe), but a bunch of intangibles in how well one sells themselves.
Past writing is so easy to read, so flowing, so effortless to understand. Our writing today is stilted, low information content, and hard to parse.