Rotary's Four Way Test

 
 

In 1932 Chicago Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor was approached by creditors, owed more than $400,000 by the Club Aluminum Company, who asked him to take over the failing company.  Taylor realized that Club had a good product and needed a way to distinguish itself from it's financially stronger competitors.  He decided to capitalize on the "character, dependability, and service mindedness" of the company's employees.  He was inspired to write the 24 now-famous words of the Four-Way Test. 

The code was designed to give employees a shorthand formula to determine if a decision was right or wrong.  In the weeks after writing the Test, he found that many of Club's practices didn't measure up.  Advertising claims, in particular, were inflated and unsubstantiated.  When all superlatives - better, best, greatest, and finest - were eliminated, the public gradually came to place more confidence in the company's product.   Twenty years later the company was out of debt, paid $1million in dividends and had gained a net worth of $2 million. 

Impressed, the RI Board adopted it as official policy in 1943.  In 1954-55, Rotary's 50th anniversary, Taylor served as RI's president and made circulating the 4-Way test his highest priority.  Despite criticism from some corners feeling that the code violated the a key principle of Rotary, that it was neither a religion nor a substitute for religion,  the Test has appeared on billboards, in hallways of government buildings and above cash registers at businesses of all kinds.  Astronaut Buzz Aldrin planted a pin inscribed with the text on the moon's surface during his July 1969 moonwalk.  Adapted from the Rotarian Magazine, June 2005)

Of the things we think, say or do

  1. Is it the TRUTH?
  2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
  3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
  4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?