In 1898, a manufacturer whose raw material was steel had his attention called to some facts which set him thinking—that the price of steel was lower than it had been for many years; that prices in general had been falling for over twenty-five years; that business had been prostrate since the panic of 1893; that the increasing output of gold must soon have an effect upon the level of prices; that there were many reasons to expect a revival of business in the near future. That was in June of 1898. The manufacturer was so impressed that he immediately ordered a quantity of steel sufficient to last him for three years if the de mand for his product did not increase. In September, business in general began to pick up, and by the end of the year this manufacturer was in the market again buying steel. The lively demand for his product had used up all that he had bought in June.
In June his partners said he was crazy: in Decem ber they doubtless thought he had made a lucky stroke. He was neither crazy nor lucky. He made money simply because Ile had good judgment and relied upon it.
5. importance of self-reliance needs little more than the mere mention. If a man is afraid to trust his own conclusions, all his thinking is of no avail. He is doomed to be a timid business man.
If the manufacturer referred to in the foregoing section had doubted his judgment, or had let himself be influenced by the mere opinions of his partners, their arguments not having convinced his judgment, the return of prosperity would have found him un prepared to take advantage of it.
A man who wants advice before he does anything important can never be a great business man.
6. Patience and is a game in which victory often comes when defeat seems inevitable. That is why patience and grit are essential qualities. The man who loses bis nerve and gets discouraged when things go against him, who is in despair because his employes are making unreasonable demands and threatening to strike, who cannot patiently wait for a favorable turn of the market, who does not pluckily strive in' hard times to increase the aemand for his goods, is like a prize-fighter who wants his seconds to throw up the sponge after the first knockdown. He lacks grit, a quality absolutely essential to success in business.
It took patience and grit for 111Iarshall Field to save his first thousand dollars, for Bell to make his tele phone a business necessity, for Stephenson to prove the value of the locomotive and the railroad, for James J. Hill to demonstrate that the despised Northwest was preg,nant with myriads of gardens, orchards-and wheat-fields, for the Wright Brothers to keep at their costly experiments in the face of all the scorn about "Darius Green and his flying machine." If patience and grit had been lacking there could have been no Wanamaker stores, no Transcontinental railroads, no Standard Oil Company, no United States Steel Cor poration, no great milling developments, no great en terprise of any kind which did not promise immediate and certain returns.
Everybody knows the type of man who wants to "get rich quick" and who complains bitterly if things do not go at once to his liking. He lacks patience and grit, and the chances are against him.
7. is well Imown that all in ventors possess in high degree the power of concen tration. They are striving to convert an idea into reality, to create a new machine, to find a new and better way of doing something, and they need the help of all their mental powers, especially judgment, memory and imagination. A man unable to concen trate will never invent anything worth while.
In business there is constant need of invention. If an up-to-date business man of twenty years ago had left the United States in search of health or pleasure and had lived in the wilds of South Africa or South America, where he saw no newspapers, magazines or new books, he would be amazed, if he came back today, by the great changes which have taken place in our ways of doing business. The changes are so gradual that they attract little attention, and are not noticed at all by many people. Some of the changes are due to important physical inventions, such as the tele phone or the automobile ; but many are due to the en terprising inventive genius of the American business man.
Business is in many respects comparable to the factory. In a factory, the work is done by machinery under the control of men ; the work is not called busi ness, but labor, and in order to increase the efficiency of the labor every effort is made by a wide-awake su perintendent, not only to improve the machinery, but also to organize and correlate the men and the ma chines so that there shall be no lost time and no wasted energy.
Back of the factory is the business which directs its activities and markets its products. In the business, machines are of relatively small importance. The manager need give little thought to the merits of competing typewriters, adding mathines and filing de vices. Yet his whole business, in a sense, is a compli cated machine made up of the various departments and their subdivisions, and it is most important that Ile be continually at work making improvements. He must reduce costs and increase efficiency in the con duct of the business as well as in the operations of the factory. The great business man is never content with what has been done by others or by himself. He is always surprising his competitors by doing some thing which they had not deemed possible, and of which they had never dreamed. This no man can do unless he exercises great power of concentration.