Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

The newest trade territory of McCormick & Co., Inc., largest wholesale spice dealers in the U.S., was beginning to sprout orders. Six ex-G.I.s sent into the rich Chicago area early this month had hired more World War II vets, and the whole crew was hot after new business.

Back in Baltimore, Charles Perry McCormick, tweedy, confident, 50-year-old president of McC & Co., read their reports in the Olde English decor of the firm's head office, and was happy. Reasons : 1) after five years of war, spice shipments were on the move again; 2) the firm's sales of Bee Brand products this year were expected to top $12 million, do better still in '47; 3) the Chicago expansion--and indeed all the company's post-1932 successes--could be laid directly at the door of his own Multiple Management policies.

Multiple Management, as farseeing as it is polysyllabic, is Charlie McCormick's own guarantee that his workers get fair wages, agreeable working conditions, year-round employment, social security, a share in McCormick profits and a share in McCormick management.

"As long as an employe has a justifiable grievance against broad management policy, business is in danger and America is in danger," he says. Five hundred other firms* apparently agreed with him, have adopted plans based on Multiple Management themselves.

Foundations of Multiple Management are three elective employe bodies: a junior board of directors, a factory board, and a sales and advertising board. Their function is to feed ideas to the senior (stockholders') board. In a five-year period, 2,109 such ideas were adopted, among them the Olde English theme for advertising: only six were scrapped. This creative drive, President McCormick soberly believes, pulled his company out of the red, has kept it going ever since.

Bee Brand in His Bonnet. The changeover from one-man control to many-man control began for McCormick & Co. in 1932. That year, autocratic, hard-driving Willoughby M. McCormick, founder of the business, left it to his nephew Charlie. The new boss looked his 43-year-old gift horse squarely in the teeth and found it shaky financially, low in morale, wary of initiative.

Never pleased himself with the way things were run while he was stockboy, salesman and export man, the new president set out to please everybody he could. Result: stockholders now purr happily over dividends increased 150% over 1932's, management turns sedate somersaults at sales figures, and junior board members chomp joyfully on a special slice of the profits (three weeks' pay in 1945). The loudest cheers naturally come from employes: their work-week is stable, well paid, shorter. Union organizers have long since decided that the McCormick lily neither wants nor needs their gilding.

* Among them: Eric Johnston's three Spokane companies (TIME, March 4), Williamson Heater Co., Cincinnati, Ohio; Lance Inc., Charlotte, N.C.

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