CHAPTER NINETEEN

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Is Personnel Management Bankrupt?

A FEW YEARS AGO I received the following letter from the president of a company: I employ 2,300 people mostly women doing unskilled assembly work. Please send me at your earliest convenience a suitable personnel policy and enclose a statement of your fee. For a long time I thought this letter a good, though unintentional, joke. But lately it has dawned on me that the laugh was really on me. My correspondent, I have come to suspect, is much like the child in Andersen’s story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who had the innocence to say out loud that the emperor was naked when everybody else was trying ...

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