Elegant Solutions

Using A 5¢ Pencil!

Speaking of interesting facts, I use a hardback
copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of
the English Language which has over 300,000 entries plus 2,000 maps,
illustrations and specialized supplements. It takes up an enormous amount of
space on a bookshelf and is so heavy, it could be used as an emergency anchor if
I had it with me whenever I am using one of my boats. (I don't care who you are;
I bet my dictionary is bigger than yours.) In any case, this monstrosity of a
book has six different definitions of the word "elegant". The one I
think best describes an "Elegant Solution" is... a solution which is
gracefully concise and simple and admirably succinct.

Another example of an "Elegant
Solution": Years ago, in another lifetime, I worked in the credit
department of Standard Oil of Ohio. It's cold in Ohio in the wintertime and
Standard Oil sells a lot of heating oil. The way you would get it from them was,
to first fill out a credit application and, if the application was approved,
your heating oil would be delivered to you every week or every month as needed.

Standard Oil soon discovered they were spending
more money for the credit reports than they were losing to deadbeats who didn't
pay their heating oil bills. The solution? They continued to require people to
fill out credit applications but, credit reports were never ordered. It's true
Standard Oil had to eat a little money from deadbeats who didn't pay for their
bills but, it was only a tiny percentage of the money they would have had to pay
to get credit reports for all the applicants.

A different Standard Oil story: They also had many
large commercial accounts and, the credit worthiness of those accounts were
checked out before credit was extended to them. This was done by getting a
D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet) report on each of the companies. There were all
kinds of formulas anyone could use with a D&B report. They could analyze
total receivables to total debt, net worth versus liabilities, yearly income
versus yearly payables, to name only a few. Matter of fact, Dunn &
Bradstreet even had a school for the employees of Standard Oil to teach them how
to read the D&B reports.

Anyway, Standard Oil kept track of all the
employees in their credit department to see how accurate their judgements were
in approving or denying credit to these large commercial accounts. You know who
the most precise person of all was? Me. Why? Because I never went to Dunn &
Bradstreet's school and I never learned to use any of their formulas.