Fable
The two clerks at Chen's trading house
By the port of Quanzhou there was a Chen trading firm. Boss Chen had an extremely meticulous clerk surnamed Zhou, named Shuisheng. Zhou Shuisheng had one special skill: no matter which year's accounts, which ship's cargo manifest, or which country's customs document you wanted to check, he could pull it out within half an incense stick and read it to you word for word. Boss Chen used him for three years and never once had a mishap.
Zhou Shuisheng also had one thing no one could figure out—he never wrote a single character. He did not put pen to paper, did not alter orders, did not leave a trace on any document. The new apprentice thought he was lazy, and the old bookkeeper thought he was putting on airs. Shopkeeper Chen saw it clearly: his role was to look and check, not to touch writing. He was eyes and mouth; the hand was not his.
After the business grew, things changed. Shopkeeper Chen began handling goods on three routes at the same time—Quanzhou, Guangzhou, and Fuzhou—and each required a set of tax forms. The entries on the tax forms had to be checked, summarized, and filled in one by one from more than twenty goods ledgers. Zhou Shuisheng could find each piece of data quickly and accurately. But filling out the forms was something he could not touch, and had not been able to touch from the first day.
Manager Chen asked the newly arrived accountant to help fill them out. The accountant wrote down the numbers as Zhou Shuisheng reported them. After three days, Guangzhou Customs returned seven forms—five with numbers copied onto the wrong lines, two with missing entries. The problem was not with the person finding the data, nor with the person writing the data. The problem was the extra verbal relay in between: Zhou Shuisheng read, the accountant listened, the accountant wrote. One mishearing, and everything after went off.
Shopkeeper Chen later tried a different approach. He found a different helper, surnamed Wu. Clerk Wu could not only check the ledgers and shipping orders clearly, but also directly write, verify, and correct on the tax return. After reading a page of shipping orders, he could fill in the numbers in the corresponding fields and then check them himself. The first time Shopkeeper Chen used Clerk Wu to handle the Quanzhou customs tax filing, it was done in half a day, whereas it used to take three days.
But Clerk Wu also had Clerk Wu's risks. Once, while handling customs clearance for a batch of spices, he saw a faded annotation next to "frankincense" on the manifest that read "discount by 30%." Clerk Wu glanced at it and filled in the customs declaration at the discounted price. Only later did he discover that the annotation was from two years earlier, and that frankincense had risen in price this year and should not have been discounted. Manager Chen overpaid forty taels in customs duty, which could not be recovered. Clerk Wu wasn't being lazy—he was too fast. There was no pause between what his eyes saw and what his mind judged; it turned straight into action.
Manager Chen later set a rule: Zhou Shuisheng would first go through the key entries to confirm the data was correct, and then Clerk Wu would execute the form filling. Zhou Shuisheng did not write, only checked right and wrong. Clerk Wu did not check, only acted. After the two clerks were paired together, Chen's trading firm never again had a customs declaration error. Outsiders did not understand why they kept two people who seemed to do the same thing, and Manager Chen only said one sentence: "The one who looks at things and the one who does things were never the same thing to begin with."