Never Trust Paper, Only Personal Inspection

““I never trust papers. Statistics, curves, reports reveal whatever you want, except reality. Trust them, and you’ll be wrong two times out of three. Go there. If you can’t go, send someone whose eyes are yours.””

“It goes without saying that the young “wolf” eager to have a beautiful industrial tool takes advantage of the dogmas coming from the United States with the American army: rationalization and productivity. Circumstances have offered him exceptional opportunities. He seized them. Here he is taking the lead in the movement from which modern industry will be born, a movement with a double impact: on the workforce, better employed and therefore more productive; on machines whose improvement must be incessant. In these two directions, Boussac outpaces his competitors, at the cost of an “on-the-job” action whose meticulousness borders on obsessiveness.”