Profit Sharing, Its Principles and Practice, a Collaboration
(Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)
Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. This means that we have checked every single page in every title, making it highly unlikely that any material imperfections – such as poor picture quality, blurred or missing text - remain. When our staff observed such imperfections in the original work, these have either been repaired, or the title has been excluded from the Leopold Classic Library catalogue. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, within the book we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. If you would like to learn more about the Leopold Classic Library collection please visit our website at www.leopoldclassiclibrary.com
Henry Sturgis Dennison was an American businessman and social reformer. He was president of Dennison Manufacturing Company.
Background
Henry Sturgis Dennison was born on March 4, 1877, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Henry Beals Dennison and Emma Stanley Dennison. His father was president of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, founded in 1843 by Henry's grandfather and granduncle. By 1897, when the firm moved to a newly purchased plant in Framingham, Massachusetts, the company sold a complete line of stationers' items, including labels, tickets, adhesives, paper decorations, and patented shipping tags with reinforced holes.
Education
Dennison graduated from Harvard College in 1899.
Career
In 1901 Henry Dennison entered the family business. He served a thorough apprenticeship in various departments of the business before he was elected a director in 1909. In 1917 he became president of the firm, a position he held until his death.
A disciple of Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management movement, Dennison endorsed company planning for employee welfare, and he formulated programs for the family firm that made it a showcase of the worker-management cooperation advocated by the Taylor Society in the 1920's. From 1906 to 1920, in addition to reducing hours of work, the Dennison company established a health service and a personnel department, took measures to regularize sudden and seasonal unemployment, instituted an unemployment-insurance fund and an employee committee to work with management, and began a nonmanagerial profit-sharing plan.
In 1917, after the United States entered World War I, Dennison served as a member of the Commercial Economy Board of the National Defense Council. Later he was named to the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, the statistical arm of the War Industries Board. In 1921 Dennison served as a member of President Harding's unemployment conference; in 1922 he was welfare director of the post office department; and he often lectured on labor relations. In 1927 Dennison became interested in the International Management Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, an organization dedicated to publicizing scientific management in Europe, and subsequently acted as the institute's vice-chairman. In 1930 he was associated with the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement when it was investigating the question of prohibition.
Dennison wrote a number of articles and books in the 1920's and 1930's that enhanced his reputation in the field of industrial and labor relations. In addition to adhering to Taylorism, Dennison was also influenced by such progressives as Louis Brandeis and economists as Edwin F. Gay. He collaborated on many of his publications with reform-minded intellectuals, including Gay, or with such businessmen as Lincoln Filene, himself the inspiration for an innovative employee profit-sharing plan.
As one of the limited group of businessmen who supported President Roosevelt's policies, Dennison found many avenues of public service. In 1933 he served on the Business Advisory and Planning Council of the United States Department of Commerce. This led, in 1934, to the chairmanship of the Industrial Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration, which acted as the representative of industry and examined all NRA industry codes before they took effect. Dennison continued to serve the New Deal from 1935 to 1943 as an adviser to the National Resources Planning Board, the agency that Roosevelt envisaged as a long-range planning body. From 1937 to 1945 he was director and then deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Dennison died in Framingham, Massachussets.
Achievements
Henry Dennison is best remembered as an industrial advisor to the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He initiated several reforms, which included an unemployment fund, a reduction in working hours, non-managerial profit-sharing and the establishment of health and personnel services. In 1932 Dennison was awarded the Henry Laurence Gantt Medal by the American Management Association and the ASME, and the Taylor Key Award by the Society for Advancement of Management in 1940.
In his studies Dennison drew on his own practical experience and that of other businessmen in order to differentiate between the strengths and weaknesses of various methods of managerial welfare planning. For example, in a chapter in Stanley B. Mathewson's book Restriction of Output Among Unorganized Workers (1931), Dennison emphasized cooperation between management and workers as the only basis on which time studies and rate setting could be effective. In Profit Sharing: Its Principles and Practice (1918) he insisted that profit-sharing programs should be definite, nondiscretionary, and significant in amount. His aim, in all his business writings and activities, "was to make business management a profession. "
Dennison was naturally attracted to the New Deal emphasis on planning. In many of his published works in the 1930's he endorsed long-range planning on the federal level and emphasized the necessity of cooperation between business and government.
In Toward Full Employment (1938), written with Filene and other industrialists who had implemented Taylorism in their management styles, Dennison advocated a flexible budget as a tool for industrial stability and argued for tax reforms that would constrict the savings stream of the economy while lightening restrictions on corporations.
Teamed with John Kenneth Galbraith in Modern Competition and Business Policy (1938), a preview of Galbraith's later theories of countervailing power, both authors argued for the development of new regulatory mechanisms in situations in which traditional competition was ineffective.
Membership
Dennison was a member of the Taylor Society, the American Management Association.
Connections
In 1901 Dennison married Mary Tyler Thurber; they had four children. Dennison's first wife died in 1936, and in 1944 he married Gertrude Bement Petri, a widow.
