A Word Of Sympathy For Business Owners Dealing With Slipshod Assistance, Foolish Inattention, Dowdy Indifference, And Half-Hearted Work.
By Rich Harshaw
Like all business owners, I find it challenging to find employees with the right combination of skillset, attitude, initiative, and passion.
And since Monopolize Your Marketplace is a “virtual company”—meaning we have no physical office and everyone works alone, from home—finding people with real initiative is EXTRA critical.
That’s why I developed a little test several years ago designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I created a little questionnaire that I have people fill out instead of looking at resumes. The questionnaire has twenty questions that ask the kind of stuff you’d expect—tell me about a time you worked well in a deadline situation, what other positions are you considering, how do you feel about working from home—like that.
But question twenty-first question is the real doozy.
It says: Google A Message To Garcia and find the essay by Elbert Hubbard. Read the essay and answer the following three questions:
- What are you overall impressions of the essay?
- Name three times in your life where you’ve performed like Rowan in the essay.
- How do you think this essay might apply to your potential job with us?
And that essay, A Message To Garcia, is what I’d like to talk to you about today.
By way of historical background: the essay was written in for a magazine by Elbert Hubbard in 1899 as an afterthought to fill some extra space. It recounts a story from a period of tension between the United States and Spain (which ruled Cuba at the time); President William McKinley needed to communicate with the leader of the Cuban rebels, Calixto Garcia. A man named Rowan was chosen to deliver this “message to Garcia,” and he did so without elaborate instructions, time to plan, or resources to accomplish it. He simply went and delivered the message using his own initiative as his greatest tool.
The story was a sensation and was immediately reprinted into a pamphlet and book, and ultimately went on to sell more than forty million copies in thirty-seven languages. It was well-known and often quoted by soldiers and businesspeople alike until the middle of the 20th century.
Fast Forward to 2015: I have found this tool to be tremendously helpful in finding great people with great attitudes and plenty of initiative. Those who won’t even bother to read and respond clearly aren’t my kind of people. People who read the essay and complain about “forced compliance” don’t get it and I don’t want them.
I’ve also found solace as a business owner in the message of this essay. It’s easy to criticize the boss; to tear down the one in charge; to minimize the accomplishments of the doer. Elbert Hubbard’s essay offers a little glimmer of empathy and understanding to the one who (sometimes seemingly) foolishly dares to hang his shingle. It’s a welcome thought.
I’d like to invite you to read the essay—printed below—and consider it on many levels. Perhaps as a tool for hiring… or a philosophy of work… or as something that’s simply an encouragement to you as a business owner.
If you have any thoughts about it, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Enjoy!
Note: Just for fun, I’ve added a few idiotic responses to this essay from comments from Amazon.com… just to prove that some people just don’t get it. These are similar to some replies I’ve received over the years from potential employees who never made the first cut.
A Message To Garcia
By Elbert Hubbard
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba – no one knew where. No mail or telegraph could reach him. The President must secure his co-operation, and quickly.
What to do!
Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”
Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and having delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.
The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing – “carry a message to Garcia!”
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.
No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man – the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant. You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office – six clerks are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Corregio.”
Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?
On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye, and ask one or more of the following questions:
Who was he?
Which encyclopedia?
Where is the encyclopedia?
Was I hired for that?
Don’t you mean Bismarck?
What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?
Is he dead?
Is there any hurry?
Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?
What do you want to know for?
And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him find Garcia – and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.
Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Corregio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.
And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night holds many a worker in his place.
Advertise for a stenographer, and nine times out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate – and do not think it necessary to.
Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?
“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.
“Yes, what about him?”
“Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him to town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and, on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.”
Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.
Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, this sorting is done finer – but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best-those who can carry a message to Garcia.
I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to anyone else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress, him. He cannot give orders, and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself.”
Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular firebrand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.
Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in your pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold the line in dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless.
Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds – the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and, having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes.
I have carried a dinner-pail and worked for a day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous.
My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village – in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly – the man who can carry a message to Garcia.
Idiotic responses to A Message To Garcia—people who clearly don’t get it. From Amazon.com reviews:
Idiotic Response #1:
To anyone really considering buying this really, really short, really, really over-priced book: you can find it online for really, really free.
The message of Hubbard’s commentary on Col. Rowan’s mission is not to do what you are told without question, but to think for yourself. What Col. Rowan did was amazing. He was asked to carry a message from President McKinley to an insurgent leader in Cuba named Garcia. This was leading up to the Spanish-American War and Cuba was hostile territory. If captured, Rowan would be shot by the Spanish. What you now know about Rowan’s mission is what he knew at the time he took it up. And he succeeded! Hubbard’s lament is that all employees are not more like Col. Rowan
Idiotic Response #2:
This is an interesting story, but times have changed since it was written. My manager at work gave this to all his employees a few years ago. As soon as I finished reading it, I decided to start looking for another job. When that manager gave us that book, whether he realized it or not, he was sending the message that he wanted us to just do what we were told and to stop thinking about what we were doing. That’s not why I went to school.
Any reputable company should hire people who think for themselves, who ask questions and try to find ways to do more than what is expected of them. There are too many mindless automatons in this world already. Doing only what you’re told without thinking about what you’re doing is not the way to achieve success in life.
Little Tidbit #1: Read Rowan’s own account of how he actually delivered the message to Garcia.
Little Tidbit #2: Check out this 1936 movie adaptation of the essay.
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