4. Weight of personality.—When ignorance incurs few penalties, managers are prone to arrogate to themselves great wisdom. Too often the assumption of superior knowledge has stood in the way of prog ress in the study of business problems. Self-made men delight to discourse on personality, but seldom do they give the world the constructive ideas upon which real improvement of business administration depends. Ulm the mere glorification of success, much of our business philosophy is made up of pernicious dogmatism. With it is sometimes found abstract speculation on practical business problems, since' it is much easier to imagine an ideal business situation than to know the tendencies of actual con ditions.
5. Weight of economic forces.—In the science of business administration the tendencie's which have been noted have led to a confusion of issues, for in a science phrases and platitudes cannot be substituted for patient investigation and the analysis of facts. Civil and military necessities have compelled the state and army authorities to study and classify their activi ties and experiences, and now economic pressure is forcing business executives to assume a similar atti tude toward the administration of industry.
The whole tendency of economic development is to destroy the isolation of former periods. Men in the conduct of business are compassed about by general economic forces which they must dominate or to which they must adapt themselves. Whatever takes place in any part of the world has its echo, faint or pene trating, as the case may be, in the economic life of our nation. In the world-wide competition of modern times, mere money and dumb luck cannot be relied .
upon to give a man a place and keep him in it. Suci cessful enterprise requires careful planning. Med may prepare for a business venture consciously or unconsciously, but there must be adequate prepara tion. More and more are men becoming aware of this need; more and more are they planning their busi ness operations as an engineer plans his work.
6. Opportunities of the present.—The nineteenth century was the golden age of machinery and this age has not yet seen its close. Innumerable inven tions found a field open for widespread utilization, and called for vast financial combinations. Thomas Edison's life work displays the possibilities in regard to the invention of new industrial equipment ; the accomplishments. of J. J. Hill and Andrew Carnegie show the possibilities of creation in commercial or ganization, and J. Pierpont Morgan's work epitomizes constructive labor in the field of financial organization —all symbols of successful inventive effort.
Invention—the capacity to see new tombinations— lies behind all human progress. In the past century invention was chiefly concerned with the advancement of the arts connected with machines, materials and money, but there is prospect of further industrial progress if inventive power is applied at a new point.
In the industrial trinity of machines, money and men, men seem to have been neglected. The machine age with division of labor, has prepared the way for an administrative age where men and their cooperation will count most in advancing civilization. It is not unlikely that the men with inventive power, who will be rewarded most highly by society in the future, will be the business executives—the men who devote their creative and constructive,energies to the problems of business and industrial organization and administra tion.
7. Importance of knowing the social trend.— The economic development of the last bundred years can be considered as the necessary preparation for a future in which administrative principles will play a larger part. This trend must be reckoned with. The young man who today prepares himself to become an expert watchmaker would find himself out of place in a land of dollar timepieces ; and an of fice apprentice would be foolish to devote his life to rapid mental calculations in the day of the adding machine. Dazzled by the successes of men who led in the industrial development of their day, many pres ent-day youths, notwithstanding seek to emulate them by following the same course.
Past progress has been rightly attributed to "divi sion of labor," but this principle, which solved so many problems in the past, seems to have lost some of its power under present conditions. It has not in fact lost force, but men have taken too narrow a view of specialization. The possibilities of the division of la bor are far from exhausted. Specialization has en tered the reahn. of administration, and tbe chances of success for men who see opportunities and possess the power of invention, i. e., the power of inventing ad ministrative methods instead of devising new ma chines, have not become less numerous, tho they are found in a different and perhaps a higher field of busi ness effort. ' 8. S pecialization develops organizing ability.—The most recent development in the division of labor is the setting free of the organizing ability of man kind. When the workingman devoted his entire energy to making a living, he had little time for plan ning better ways of doing his work. A century of specialized labor, however, has given great numbers of men an opportunity to perfect new machines and combinations of processes which have greatly enriched society. To these men society has been willing to pay the price which all constructive ability can de mand. Men who found better ways than their fathers ever dreamed of for producing, exchanging and distributing commodities, have been richly re warded. To this class belong the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Krupps and others like them.