"They couldn't hit an elephant from this dist ."

Last words of General John Sedgwick, Battle of Spotsylvania, 1864

Not including its chairman and president, Daedalus now counted among its fifty employees twenty-five vice-presidents and twenty-four individuals with the rank of supervisor. You just can't hire people into new and risky businesses without offering incentives. As the owners quickly discovered, titles are cheap. To most of Daedalus's management, which by now had become accustomed to the good life, "roughing it" had come to mean a slow bell-hop. Daedalus was falling into the pattern of newly growing businesses with surprising ease. But why then were they having to struggle so mightily to control costs when, as everyone knows, as a business grows, overhead cost, as a fraction of total cost, goes down? It was concluded that to tackle so contentious a topic an independent and detached group of examiners would be needed. Thus, the Headquarters Staff established itself. Early in the overhead cost investigation which followed, this staff actually found two of its own members who, when asked what they did, both pronounced out of utter frustration, "Nothing absolutely nothing." To demonstrate the corporate staff's remarkable diligence and toughness the overhead committee recommended that one of the two...