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among which we may now select the choicest yet unrealized. What we wish to select are certain possibilities in which a given amount of time and effort is able to effect a maximum improvement. Use Test Chart II for recording your choices. These choices finally we proceed to realize in practice, employing for this purpose the rules of habit formation discussed in the present chapter. The check marks in the last column record our advance.

TEN THINGS TO DO IN THE PROPER WAY TO
ATTAINING EFFICIENCY DO EACH IS AS
FOLLOWS

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Test Chart II. Capitalizing Attainments as Habits

PART IV

THE THINKER IN BUSINESS

He who hopes for success must organize, prepare, enlist method and science, if he would live upon the high plane which business has now reached.-A. C. BARTLETT, President of Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett and Co.

Keeping a little ahead of conditions is one of the secrets of successful business; the trailer seldom goes very far.CHARLES M. SCHWAB, Chairman, Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

CHAPTER XI

INITIATIVE AND VISION

Some men seem to have a golden touch. Everything to which they turn their hand yields miraculously.-FRANK W. TAUSSIG, Harvard University.

Routine and Constructive Thought

The aim of the preceding chapters has been so to aid in systematizing the day's work that its necessary routine may be cleared away with ease and dispatch. While this act in itself is an attainment much to be desired, its most important result is the freeing of the executive's mind for constructive effort. The real leader in business is the man who thinks, investigates, weaves new plans, and looks ahead.

The succeeding chapters deal with the principles and methods through which this constructive effort is brought into most effective operation. The problems treated are difficult because they concern highly complex elements in human nature and are vital because they concern the continued life and growth of the business or department of business over which the executive presides.

The Perception of Opportunity

The first question which the man who intends to do really big things in business puts to himself is, "Where are my best opportunities for profits?" He raises this question in no narrow, sordid sense, because the ambition to do things worth while, to achieve distinction, to acquire knowledge and exercise skill, to play in a masterful way the two great games of business and life, constitute his persistent motive force. Granted, however, that these things, and not a sordid love of

money for itself alone, are what he would have, the way to attain them requires that first of all he locate the most profitladen opportunities. He is not merely to "dig in" and look no further when the first prospects show.

In the search for possibilities of superior service or, in other words, for opportunities for profits there are at best five broad lines which deserve consideration:

I. Exploitation of natural resources

2. Development of inventions

3. Improvements in production and distribution
4. Fluctuations in values

5. Supplying known wants

1. Exploitation of Natural Resources

"The world puts its richest prizes at the feet of great organizing ability, enterprise, and foresight," says John D. Rockefeller, Jr., "because such qualities are rare and yet indispensable to the development of the vast natural resources which otherwise would lie useless on the earth's surface or in its hidden depths."

In her oil fields, timber tracts, coal beds, mineral deposits, waterfalls and virgin land, nature has abundantly provided for the American. While these rich opportunities cannot last forever, they are not yet exhausted. Those which remain, however, require wiser and more economical management than has characterized much of their treatment in the past, which was well termed "exploitation," in the worst sense of the term. Those who controlled them usually considered that they were privileged to grind labor in production and at the other end extort the largest amounts possible from the con

sumer.

The resources, such as forests, coal, and water-power which yet remain in the hands of the government will be guardedly leased to parties who desire to use them, and the

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