ALL TALK AND NO ACTION?

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 18, 10 November 1950, Page 2

ALL TALK AND NO ACTION?

Parliament, and a lot of modern business too, is just “bla, bla, bla and nothing done,” according to business efficiency expert Herbert Casson, who has arrived in Wellington on a visit to friends and subscribers.

Mr Casson has for 40 years been telling people through his books how to succeed in life, how to get on in business, how to pass examinations, and how to be a salesman. Recently at afternoon tea with some of his subscribers to his 36-year-old “Efficiency Magazine,” he was able to see how well some of them were making out on the Casson formula. At the same time Mr Casson added another to his “How to . . series. He told his audience how to put a little efficiency into the New Zealand Parliament. “In your talk house—for that is what the word Parliament means,” he said, “you have 80 members. That’s one for every 25,000 people, and it’s far too many. What you want to do to get a little efficiency and get the job done is to put just two men into Parliament and let one of them take his wife. Then the work of Parliament would get done.”

As an expert on efficiency he said that a government could never run a business on an efficient basis. Things the Government took over were put in the hands of clerks—• “yes, just little clerks”—who knew nothing whatever about the job in hand, and because nobody cared about things that were everybody’s business, it was impossible to get things done or to take care of the money.

To run a business profitably it must be privately controlled; only then did people take an interest in running it efficiently and making it pay.

“Profit is a creative thing and running a business at a profit is the finest thing you can do,” he said. “It gives people a livelihood and gives them confidence. I believe you can’t do a finer thing than take a business making a profit of £lO,000 a year and make it into one worth £20,000 a year. “But the problem today is,” he said, “how to run our businesses free of outside interference by people in government offices who don’t know anything about it. We’ve got to put an end, to that.”

Mr Casson told his audience not to talk too much in business. Talking was terrible waste of time in commercial life nowadays. He himself hadn’t gcft a telephone hn<d didn’t want one. “Bla, bla, bla on the telephone” was costing the world millions of pounds •of waste time. Why not cut out the talk and get on with the job in hand?

At 81 Mr Casson is still writing books. One of his latest is “How to Have 80 Years of Youth.”