CHAPTER XXVIII INTELLECTUAL PREPAREDNESS For I dipt into the future, far Saw the vision of the world, and The Future Business Leader In the doing of today's work a man should train his powers with an eye upon tomorrow. This means nothing more than foresight applied to personal management; a preparing now for future business leadership. This executive to come, this leader who will swing the enterprises which are to be, will necessarily possess a superior capacity. No petty trader, no putterer over details, no mere hoarder can handle the complex relations of such an enterprise nor deal efficiently with the broad-gauge problems which characterize its development. These are matters for whose solution an executive must dig deep into economics, sociology, the relations of capital and labor, and the complex problems of government and social well-being. He will have to work with lawyers, engineers, chemists, statesmen and economists. He must of necessity be as well educated, as well trained, as well disciplined as they. Broadness of perception and sympathy will be required. This business leader of the future will sense the inner desires of subordinates, employees, and customers, and plan almost intuitively their gratification. He will know the public— the common people, the citizens of his country. Policies and methods of doing business he will shape with due considera tion for the rights and sentiments of all those whom he sees fit to regard broadly as his co-workers. The leader in a free country necessarily has to be an abler man than the autocrat who rules a race of slaves with an iron hand. The executive who dominates a factory, a commercial house or a financial institution in a society of intelligent and civilized people, jealous of their own rights, quick to note fraud, injustice or oppression, must be a different type from the profiteers, the audacious business barons, the commercial freebooters who upon occasion dominated in the past. Constructive business team-work is something higher and more difficult in its leadership than bossing a section gang; the commanding of intelligent and capable subordinates calls for more skill than being mate over a crew of rough sailors; to guide a business enterprise in a civilized and enlightened community when the rules of the game protect stockholder, employee and consumer is a more complex undertaking than was the pioneer's rough and ready task. Business, simply because it mounts constantly toward a higher plane, demands of its leaders an increased capacity. Self-Culture in Business The man who purposes in all seriousness to develop within himself the increased capacity demanded of the future executive will wring valuable knowledge from every experience. Conferences, conventions, technical experts, friends and chance acquaintances, books, trade journals, mishaps, successes, and problems faced, alike serve him as stepping stones toward a broader knowledge and a firmer grasp of business. This is quite as it should be; the seeker of positive impulses will get ahead. Opportunity is here and the time is now; seek those positive impulses. If satisfactory progress is not being attained, it requires only an examination of some notable career, such as that of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Marshall Field, Carnegie, or Schwab, to realize how puerile are the excuses for nonadvancement with which a man is accustomed to solace himself! "I never had a chance to go to college." "I have no time.” "I cannot afford it." "I am too tired to study." Humiliation should overcome the person who in these days of abundant opportunities for self-culture thus deludes himself. Being fundamentally untrue, these excuses prove only that his intentions are not serious. The college diploma of itself does not guarantee success; it does signify training, and the trained mind must then carve its own future. But this training which the colleges offer, a great many master achievers have seen fit to work out for themselves in the midst of practical affairs. By persistent self-direction they broadened their knowledge, disciplined their powers, and developed fertility and resource in solving problems. This persistance it was, and neither the possession of a college diploma nor the lack of it, which made them great. Making the Most of Opportunity Twenty-four hours a day is granted each man: no one has more. While the possibilities of spare moments are truly astonishing as can be proved by whoever will assiduously utilize them, they are far surpassed by the possibilities of studying as we work. Since each task, no matter how humble it be, is connected up with all other activities of the organization and through those with business in general, it remains for a man to determine whether, a passive toiler, he shall degenerate into a cog, or alert and positive, eager to inquire and insatiable for knowledge, he makes of business a real profession. The man who refuses to develop himself in the belief he cannot afford the time and money closes his eyes to the wastes disclosed by Bradstreet's. Incompetence in 1915 wrecked 5,689 businesses, inexperience cost an additional 1,057 failures, lack of capital 5,229 more. Who loses money when the proprietor refuses to study finance and business management, or to profit by the experience of successful men? Yet these actual losses are much less and scarcely more deplorable than the failure to secure those profits which the trained man does secure. The efficient man does more than avoid losses; he discovers profits otherwise hidden and makes them real. To him the cost of self-development is truly not expense but in vestment. The condition of being too tired commonly indicates nothing more than faulty habits of diet, posture and breath control, insufficient sleep and exercise, needless strains and unproductive expenditures, and particularly a flabby will unable to transform sluggishness into force and vital power. Selfdevelopment can alter these below-par conditions since its program deals with both the production of force and its proper conservation, a program of personal dynamics which the tired man most of all needs. These and sundry other excuses which would make us victims of our "worser" selves can all be routed in one way or another by whomsoever desires to grow. This expresses in one sentence the message which the nation's most revered hero illuminated by his entire life. The Making of a Great Character The rude life of the backwoods in the midst of which he was born and where his early years were spent might well have appeared fated to yield Abraham Lincoln an equally commonplace and secluded career. No doubt this would have occurred had he not laid hold of every opportunity for selfimprovement, of which the following instance is typical. "One day a man who was migrating to the West," said Mr. Lincoln in relating the incident several years later, "drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value. I did not want it, but to oblige him I bought it, and paid him, I think, half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the store, and forgot all about it. Sometime after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel, and emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. I began to read this famous work, and I had plenty of time; for during the long summer days, when the farmers were busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them." This instance, one of many of like nature, reveals a great character in the process of being forged. In the log cabins of the pioneers poring over the only copy of Kirkham's Grammar the community afforded, in the country debating societies developing his ability as a public speaker, in the stuffy hotel bedroom with a candle by his side studying the demonstrations in the first six books of Euclid while his brother lawyers slept, in court-room, halls of Congress or White House, Lincoln was always exhibiting the one trait which more than any other accounts for his marvelous advance-power to grow. The man who determines that he, too, shall grow must not stop at that. He must supply his mind with the materials with which growth can take place. The reading of good business books, supplementing as it does the preceding chapters and exercises, aids most decidedly in charting the way toward broader conceptions. A good book has compressed into its pages the author's life experience, and the reading of it affords an entirely feasible method of increasing the mental stature. |