Will often lamented that he never received any “glory” for making the San work so gloriously every day. His days (and nights) were spent accounting for a huge hospital, kitchen, dining room, and hotel, filled with demanding guests. In the Sanitarium, there were countless sheets, towels, and dining linens to buy and launder. Hundreds of bedrooms needed to be made up just so, lest the guests complain. Bathrooms, showers, and changing rooms required constant attending and cleaning as did the gymnasia, swimming pools, lobby, parlor, and the other public rooms and outdoor sporting areas. The dining room was a four-star specialty restaurant serving thousands of meals per day. There was always a raft of bills that needed to be paid, supplies to be purchased and inspected, and a line of new guests to register and please.
Will had his fingers in each and every pot and knew exactly what he was doing at all times. He also had the manager’s skill in “manipulating people for maximum advantage,” a talent his grandson Norman Williamson Jr. later lamented “was carried over into his relations with his family.27 Will realized early in his career that supervising these complex enterprises required more than a keen mind, it demanded a routinized and efficient system of management. Will met the embodiment of such a system in 1897. His name was Arch Shaw and their meeting was the result of a cuff link that mysteriously went missing.
Arch Shaw, Will Kellogg’s best business consultant and close friend, 1917 Credit 70
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ARCH SHAW WAS A YOUNG, handsome, and enterprising man with a vision. Born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1876, Arch was educated at Olivet College but left before receiving a degree. While tutoring a student bound for West Point, he became disenchanted with teaching and, instead, returned to his own education, on his own time, and in his own way. After spending months studying in the reading room of the Jackson Public Library, Arch concluded that because all businesses shared a routine set of practices, executives would benefit from a paper-driven search engine of sorts allowing for easy access to facts, figures, and information related to their firms’ operations. The model for information retrieval he developed was based loosely upon the Jackson Public Library’s card catalog. Shaw’s system facilitated the accurate analysis needed to apply modern standards of work performance for thoughtful planning, ordering, and purchasing, as opposed to the then common practice of merely reacting to each day or crisis as it came along.
In 1899, Shaw founded an office supply and file cabinet business with Lewis Walker in Muskegon, Michigan, and in 1903 he established A. W. Shaw and Company of Chicago, where he helped businesses organize and furnish their offices. His company also published two highly regarded magazines of commerce, System: The Magazine of Business, and Factory, as well as a long list of books on marketing, sales, and management. Even more lasting a contribution to the business world, Shaw helped create the field of management studies at the Harvard Business School and initiated the concepts of using historical data to plan future ventures, the importance of understanding the culture and practices of businesses, and the central coordination of a firm’s activities. Shaw’s acumen was so celebrated that Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover as well as Thomas Edison, Bernard Baruch, and Robert Taft sought his counsel.28
Back in 1897, Shaw was traveling across Michigan in search of clients to purchase his first product, a record-keeping and indexing system. The fourth city he wandered into was Battle Creek. After entering and leaving several stores without a sale, he discovered he had lost one of his cuff links. Shaw found a local jewelry store where he could purchase a new pair. While there, he tried to interest the proprietor in his system but the jeweler declined, explaining that his business was too small for such measures. The jeweler did, however, point Shaw in the direction of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Arch Shaw had never heard of the San until the jeweler told him it was the biggest business in town. “You go up there and ask for a man named Will Kellogg,” the jeweler said. “Maybe he can use your system.”29
Within a few hours, Shaw sold Will “a buyer’s outfit” for keeping quotations from his many suppliers and vendors and a set of ledger systems to keep closer track of the doctor’s publishing and food businesses. As good as Will’s mind was for figures, business deals, and human resources, he quickly grasped the need for a means of recording all of the San’s transactions beyond merely relying on his brainpower or scratch pads. Arch Shaw provided that methodology. Soon after Will founded his cereal company in 1906, Shaw became a crucially important advisor on advertising, sales, and marketing techniques as well as a member of the Kellogg Company’s board of directors. Decades later, the always captivating Arch Shaw observed, “Fate makes the wisest decisions.”30 What an understatement. That lost piece of jewelry, a mere hunk of metal used for keeping a single shirt cuff closed, might have been the most valuable cuff link in American business history.
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PERHAPS THE BEST WAY to illustrate how central Will was to the daily operations of the Sanitarium is to see how badly it ran after he left. Astonishingly for a man who did not want to be bothered with the dull tasks of running the San’s daily operations, John refused to replace Will. Instead, the doctor promoted Will’s ineffectual underlings to take over his myriad tasks with the understanding that the lackeys were to report directly to him. Even on their best days, these men performed their jobs in an ineffective manner. There was no one at the San quite like Will who had such a tight grip on every detail, cog, and activity that needed attending to on a daily basis. There was no one who walked up and down the halls looking for problems to fix; no one who came close to caring as deeply about every bed being properly made in each bedroom, every bathroom rendered spotlessly clean, and every meal served as hot and tasty as possible. The inevitable result was that the quality of the Sanitarium experience plummeted. Guests complained about the decline in service and many refused to return; correspondingly, the San’s bank ledgers displayed less and less black ink and, in some months, much more of the red variety.
In the summer of 1907, the First National Bank of Chicago requested an audit. John had already borrowed a great deal of money from the bank for his Sanitarium rebuilding efforts and wanted to borrow more. The rumblings of things proceeding poorly at the Battle Creek Sanitarium were so loud, however, that the bankers were less than enthusiastic. To investigate their investment, the bank hired Stephen T. Williams and Staff, Inc., a New York firm renowned for assessing the efficiency of more than four hundred large companies and businesses until 1914 when Mr. Williams committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.31 The agent assigned to the San was Frederick A. Kerry, a confident man who specialized in advising hoteliers and hospital administrators. After an initial tour of the San, Kerry met with both the Kellogg brothers at John’s home on September 26, 1907. Although Will had by now left his brother’s employ, John invited him to the meeting as a trusted and knowledgeable advisor.
The news was not good. Kerry collected a huge list of problems after inspecting each department. His first suggestion was to buy better help with better wages. The staff at the San was primarily Seventh-day Adventists from Battle Creek. More than half of the one thousand employees at the San, including nurses, masseuses, orderlies, and patient assistants, worked for room, board, and nominal wages. This was a losing proposition, Kerry argued, because too many of the employees ate too much food, while giving short shrift to their assigned duties. Based upon a complex means of calculation, which Will asked the expert to explain to him and quickly grasped, Kerry estimated it cost 10 to 12 cents a meal (about $2.60 to $3.12 in 2016) to feed the San’s staff, representing a substantial loss of income.32
Many of the maids and housekeepers were impoverished widows and pensioners who worked for 7 cents an hour (about $1.82 in 2016). Kerry observed that these employees were “tired when they start work in the morning and do not do any work though they put in their time.” Instead, the institution would get more work by hiring one young woman at 12 cents an hour (or $3.12 in 2016)
doing the work of three elderly maids.33 “It costs just as much work to do it wrong as it does to do it right,” he explained.34
Worse, some of the workers interviewed during the audit were surly and rude, representing a huge problem for an institution selling itself as helpful, healthful, and worth shelling out significant amounts of money to visit. Kerry reported that the front desk clerk was “not educated enough to talk decently and politely and diplomatically.” Nor was the clerk diligent at collecting initial deposits or final payments from guests, leading many dishonest patients to leave without paying their bill!35 Kerry identified similar problems in the accounting office, the pharmacy, the stockrooms, and the operating rooms where nurses left work “before they are through for the day.” All over the facility, there was furniture in various states of disrepair and too few carpenters were inspecting these pieces, let alone repairing them if loose or broken. The San’s carpenters, Kerry wanly observed, spent more time (and money) dodging their work responsibilities than performing them.36
At a minimum, Kerry advised, John or his designated manager needed to enforce employee work hours by installing “as many time clocks as necessary” and requiring all employees to “report their time when they come in, when they go to lunch, and when they come back.”37 Another solution Kerry offered was to discharge the least productive employees, even if they had worked there for decades. Both suggestions were unacceptable to the doctor, who saw himself as a benevolent and caring employer. Kerry countered the doctor’s hesitance: “You want cheap pay and you give cheap board. That is not good business.” To drive his point home, Kerry cautioned, “Don’t mix in [with an employee’s] private affairs. Ask him what he is worth, and get him as cheap as possible.”38
By neglecting to document all of the therapeutic and diagnostic services they provided, the medical staff unwittingly created an even greater loss of income. No one was badgering these physicians to complete the paperwork necessary for accurate billing. One modern way of solving this problem, Kerry explained, was to install “teleautograph devices” in every treatment or medical department, which were connected by an electrical wire that went directly to the cashier’s office. This novel machine used the principles of a telegraph but featured an electric pen whereby signatures and written orders or messages could be quickly transmitted from one part of the San to another, without ever having to leave one’s office. The devices were especially popular in banks. For the San, the machines would provide an up-to-date record of all the treatments a patient underwent, including duration and frequency, and insure that each patient was appropriately charged for every service the San rendered. An electrical engineer named Elisha Gray, the cofounder of the Western Electric Company, invented the device and his company manufactured and leased them out for $50 per month plus a $5 installation fee.39 Kerry recommended that John lease at least twelve to fifteen teleautographs and place them all around the institution. Dr. Kellogg was noncommittal about installing this modern convenience but it is a safe bet that if Will was still running operations at the San, both the time clocks and the teleautograph machines would have been installed the very next day.
Kerry uncovered several other issues that, in his estimation, required immediate attention. For example, while inspecting the ladies’ bathroom and linen room at 7:00 a.m., he found it to be “not very orderly. There were piles of buckets that had been used in washing the feet of the patients, and all kinds of things that had not been scrubbed off as they ought to be, not clean and nice, but with salt left in them, and in some cases, even water that had been used in treatments.”40 The men’s bathroom was in a more slovenly condition; the stalls were not cleaned immediately after patients left them and there was, at least, one occasion where Kerry caught some of the help “lying on the couches” in the midst of messy rooms that needed cleaning.41 While inspecting the laundry plant, he determined that it was run by an abusive supervisor whose employees hated him. In retaliation, many of the laundry staff used the facility for the free washing of all their personal clothes and linens.42
In the dining room and kitchen, Kerry noted too much breakage of china and cookware. Kerry acknowledged that broken dishes were part and parcel of any restaurant but he calculated that the San’s breakage rate was, at least, 20 percent higher than what should be expected for a large dining facility and, hence, a huge added expense. Kerry suggested a reward system for all the kitchen and table service workers. The employee who broke the least number of dishes each week would receive a 25 cent reward. Dr. Kellogg argued that both the breakage estimate and the reward system were “absurd.” As an alternative, Kerry suggested an investment in Carlsbad Chinaware, which was prized by many large restaurants for being “unbreakable.”43 Another potential saving would be to convert the energy source of the kitchen’s massive ovens and ranges in the kitchen from gas to coal. Dr. Kellogg remained unenthusiastic about either plan.
The biggest problem was not exactly the clichéd “elephant standing in the room,” per se, but, instead, the younger brother seated at the meeting. There was no boss with clear authority running the San. There existed no “walking delegate” to inspect the facility every day, checking every department, making notes of all the problems he encountered, and assigning employees to correct them by a specific time. The doctor, Kerry said, may have been a brilliant inventor, food creator, and physician but he was no manager. Will’s only query at this point in the conference was “how much would such a man cost?”44 Kerry replied $20 a week (about $520 in 2016, and a good deal more than Will’s final salary running the San) but Kerry said it had to be the right man:
You need a mixer, but the right kind of mixer who is diplomatic, who jollies them a little, pats them on the back and gets the work done, and nevertheless who is so close to you that he likes the institution for the institution’s sake, and he has to have a time clock everywhere, and he has to have time passes, and has to have records, and he has to have the authority to be the boss. And what he says goes; and he is to have appointments with you, and you are the pope, the king and the emperor who always does not mix with those questions; and this is the way, Doctor, that those fellows—the king, emperor and pope—conduct their affairs. They reserve their great dignity. They do not mix with any mortal being in a usual way. And that is the way you ought to do it.45
In other words, Dr. Kellogg needed Will, even if he could not find a way to admit or acknowledge the superb management qualities his younger brother unfailingly brought to the table. All of the problems Kerry discovered at the Sanitarium were directly related to Will’s absence. None of them, Will Kellogg must have quietly beamed from within, would have been allowed to occur on his watch.
In typical consultant fashion, Kerry told John that if he accepted all of his suggestions and hired him to get the process rolling, the Sanitarium would save $60,000 a year (about $1.56 million in 2016). John doubted that the savings would amount to more than $25,000 or $30,000 (a respectable $650,000 to $780,000 in 2016) and he chastised the efficiency expert for being so rough and disrespectful of his devoted staff. Nevertheless, Kerry insisted that the intensive work was necessary and it would be well worth his hefty consultant fees. He promised an even more in-depth inspection of all forty-five departments at the San, within a twelve- to fourteen-day period. More enticing, Kerry pledged, “I guarantee that in six months from now you will thank me ten thousand times that I came down here and fixed you up, because I know what a rotten condition it [the San] is in.”46
In the years to come, John would hire, and just as often fire, several men who administered the complexities of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He cruelly dominated these employees just as he dominated Will. And yet none of them ever matched the resourcefulness of his brother. In fact, Mr. Kerry’s conclusions of how badly the San ran without Will’s supervision encapsulated the brothers’ lifelong rivalry over which form of operations, the medical type or the managerial kind, was more important. Both enterprises, clearly, needed to be appreciat
ed by each sibling if a successful partnership was to be sustained. Sadly, the brothers were incapable of working together in such a manner. As one former San doctor described their corrosive and competitive relationship, “John Harvey Kellogg and W. K. Kellogg were like two fellows trying to climb up the same ladder at the same time.”47
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A “University of Health”
FIRST AND FOREMOST, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was a “university of health” and Dr. Kellogg was its mesmerizing dean and professor-in-chief. His student body encompassed the medically curious, the worried well, and the seriously ill. Their coursework centered on biologic living, learning how to preserve, restore, and regain healthy bodies and minds.
The highlight of every week was the Monday night “Question Box Hour,” hosted by Dr. Kellogg. In the six days preceding this event, guests were encouraged to write down their most vexing—and potentially embarrassing—health questions on specially printed slips of paper. They then submitted them anonymously into the “Doctor’s Question Box,” which stood at the head of the dining room. Come Monday at 7:00 p.m., the Sanitarium’s sumptuous parlor was overtaken by rows of “Kellogg chairs” filled with enthusiastic and eager patients. Each chair was specially designed by the doctor to promote good posture and the proper care of one’s inner organs and spine while seated for long spells of time. Alternatively known as “Perfected Posture chairs,” they featured a “chair back” curved in a convex manner to provide lumbar support. Long before the term was coined, Dr. Kellogg taught his patients the importance of ergonomics and the health risks of sitting in a chair too long. “You know sitting is a bad habit that civilization has put upon us,” he liked to say, “We are not born attached to chairs. There are no chairs growing on trees.”1
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