The Executive's Service Ideals

What of the man at the top? As a fountain head of an organization throbbing with business idealism, the old narrow, greedy type assuredly cannot serve. Changing conditions

evolve new standards of selection and due to these a different sort of business executive has now risen into prominence, emphasizing the co-operative virtues with service as his key

note.

"Ultimately," so runs the creed of Judge Gary, head today of the world's greatest corporation, "efficiency is based upon a policy of life which considers first the claims, needs and deserts of the other fellow. Generous motives, fair principles, and honest dealings are vastly more important as efficiency measures than the technical phases of skilled management and economical production."

This creed announced by Judge Gary, which he and hundreds of other leaders in finance and industry practice today, would have impressed the magnates of the old school as too ethical for practical purposes. Yet men of the new school are not finding it so.

"Most men who have really lived," declared the railroad king, James J. Hill, whose death was widely mourned as a national loss, "have had in some shape their great adventure. This railroad is mine." Note the words. The Great Northern was to Hill a great adventure although he accepted no salaries serving as its President, Chairman of the Board, or Director; refused at all times to use his inside information in manipulating the stock market; and, as an instance among numerous acts of like nature though less in the amounts involved, turned over to its stockholders at cost the Missabe ore lands whose purchase price, paid by his own money, was $4,000,000 but whose real value, it has been estimated, is $750,000,000.

Great adventures, in truth, are open to the business man

now as heretofore. But society, wedded to the principle of democracy and insistent upon such an equalization of opportunity and reward as will in general evoke the full powers of all, demands that these great adventures be confined to projects socially expedient and that their promoters accept not a lesser but a somewhat different type of reward.

"The dividend which the business man seeks and receives today is not alone in dollars," explains Andrew Carnegie, an enterpriser of the old school who is remarkably adaptive to the new order, nay, more than that, its active promoter. "He receives with the dollar something better-a dividend in the shape of satisfaction in being instrumental in carrying forward to higher stages of development the business which he makes his life work."

Development of Social Consciousness

The development of a more vivid social consciousness constitutes for most men perhaps as difficult a task as any. In reality, however, it calls only for the inclusion of more persons and more territory within the scope of the relations which men usually exercise so well in narrow circles, such as the family, the club, or the neighborhood. This means that a man is to recognize his wider obligations and perform them with something of the flesh-and-blood interest which closer obligations always have received:

"Every man who by eminent success in commerce or finance raises himself beyond his peers," says Otto Kahn, the well-known financier, "is in the nature of things more or less of an 'irritant' (I use the word in its technical meaning) to the community.

"It behooves him, therefore, to make his position as little jarring as possible upon that immense majority of men whose existence is spent in the lowlands of life so far as material circumstances are concerned.

"It behooves him to remember that many other men are working, and have worked all their lives, with probably as much effort and assiduous application, as much self-abnegation as he, but have not succeeded in raising themselves above mediocre stations in life, because to them has not been granted the possession of those peculiar gifts which beget conspicuous success, and to which, because they are very rare and because they are needed for the world's work, is given the incentive of liberal reward."

The Enduring Satisfaction of Business

The broad tolerance and consideration for others, of which Mr. Kahn speaks, prevailed in an inspiring way during the Great War. Men of affairs, engineers, executives, and financiers, in the finest of spirit disregarding every opportunity for personal profit, served their country whole-heartedly because it was their country and the ideals for which they as Americans stood were at stake. They endured and conquered with a morale which was irresistible.

The ideals maintained steadfastly and so high, it may be, cannot continue unchanged now that the threat of Teuton domination is withdrawn; but the lofty unselfishness, the wholehearted service of which we justly are proud, shall in part at least remain as a permanent gain. The idea of business as merely the satisfaction of sordid desires, the exploitation of opportunity for personal ends solely, the willingness to wreck quite as readily as to upbuild provided only it were profitable, have in the love of higher things and the imperious call for sacrifice of self lost in large measure their old-time appeal.

The war thus has hastened a process which inevitably, like a ferment, has been for years working itself out in busiIts ideal is service, its purpose the common good, its slogan democracy, its achieving instruments all forwardlooking men. Executives enlisted in this movement not only

ness.

make America the magnificent but secure for themselves the enduring satisfactions of business.

EXERCISES

In this, the final exercise, let us ponder over certain questions which reach down to fundamentals and lay bare our philosophy of life.

1. Whom do you admire as ideal business men? What qualities render them to you ideal?

2. Whom do you regard as high-placed misfits? in them does it appear desirable to avoid?

What qualities

3. Do you or do you not consider service the foundation of suc cess in business?

4. Through what concrete ways can you keep your business ideals high?

5. What to you are the ends most to be desired in the business career?

The answering of these questions sincerely and fully calls for a searching of the heart such as a man permits himself only when in silence alone he thinks over the deeper problems of destiny.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE GOAL WHICH MOVES FORWARD

The first concern of every man is to know that he is achieving something, advancing in material wealth, industrial, power, intellectual strength and moral purpose.

Yourself That is To Be

-JAMES J. HILL.

In the foregoing chapters various principles and details have been considered which, put into practice, increase executive ability. Considered separately some of these principles may have seemed trifling. Even though they be trifles, however, they all go to build up the able executive, and the man who aspires will utilize them to his advantage. In order that principle and detail may be fitted into that consistent program which moves a man forward, the young executive needs a vision of the self that is to be.

The executive's development and management of himself is the most vital problem in business, because none other lies so near the heart of his concern's prosperity or failure. Up at the top of every business-at the apex of its pyramid of functions-sits someone to whom all lines, wires and paths of communication lead, the focus of countless records, problems, and plans; from whom radiate the policies, the initiative, and the spirit which write the future of the enterprise. No other position is so hard to fill, because no other man must be so well rounded and evenly poised.

Men are not well rounded and evenly poised by chance, but become so only after more or less arduous and long continued effort. They must grow into the self that is to be.