Article October 1, 1921 Issue

Standardization

CLARKE F. HUNN

Standardization is one of the recent fashions in the business world, where new fashions as regularly may be found as in clothing or medicine or national armaments. It supplants individuality in operation, which, being erroneously conceived as a condition of minds many, broke down under the advance of modern industrialism. It is introduced as a twentieth-century product. Like a newly invented medicine or a novel germ theory, it has been eagerly preached, tried, and endorsed until it is now regarded as an essential factor in any well-ordered business. And like all such nostrums it has gained acceptance,—though those who practice it may not recognize the fact,—because of the truth of which it is a perversion.

The truth about standardization is not new but old. Christ Jesus uttered it many years ago when he said: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." That is, as it may easily be interpreted, the Christ uplifted as consciousness is the universal standard. And since the Christ is no less than perfection, this true standardization accepts perfection only. In contrast to this is the dictum of the efficiency expert: "Find the most practicable way of performing an operation, and see to it that the operation is thereafter performed always exactly in the standard practice." While this statement is faintly modeled after the first, there are vitally important differences between the two and these differencess account for many otherwise inexplicable results of modern standardization.

Obviously, the prime factor in standardization is the standard set up. It would seem that with the wisdom usually attributed to those in the business world, the highest conceivable standard would be the one universally chosen; but the fact is that the human mind, in its effort to grasp and apply the truth, proceeds almost exactly in the opposite direction. It chooses not the highest, but merely the "good average." The human mind is willing to admit that some persons posses peculiar aptness and dexterity, but it so firmly believes these to be the private, personal traits or achievements of these persons that it dare not set them as the standard for others at random. Instead, it chooses as the standard the achievements of the less accomplished individual. So, for any mechanical or manual operation it chooses not the best conceivable standard but the good practical average, the standard that is low enough for the average man to follow without undue mental or physical effort. It is, in short, a material standard, not one that is lifted up, but one that is set down. To such a standard men are not drawn, they are driven. In a world of machines, were such conceivable, this form of standardization might be successful. In man's world it can never be, for mankind can never in its direst moments so separate itself from God, even in belief, that it can be content to look down perpetually rather than to look up, to be drive rather than to be drawn.

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