Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
Railroads, high-roads, by-roads, bridle-paths, footpaths, mountain climbs!
The unlettered mountaineer of all countries is the best man for the last,
and it takes the best kind of trained climbing expert to emulate him; but
as the road is improved shoes are exchanged for horses, horses for
bicycles, a change from one kind of muscular effort to another; bicycles
for automobiles, automobiles for railroad trains, both these latter using
incarnate energy instead of muscular or incarnate energy. The all-round
skill of the mountaineer becomes the subdivided, specialized skill of many
different men, who are supplemented with increasingly complex equipment.
The philosophy of efficiency is to be used to build roads along which any
organization can travel with the least friction and the greatest
advantage, and the more ramified and involved the business, the more is
the philosophy needed.
However, no highly complex automobile, even with the best network of
roads, can make any great progress unless in the hands of a skilled
directing intelligence; no highly complex human enterprise, though it uses
all the principles of efficiency, can make any great progress unless
guided by a skilled intelligence.
On personality, on the wisdom of the individual, whether locomotive
engineer or von Moltke, whether the manager of a plant employing ten men
or Judge Gary, chairman of the board of the gigantic Steel Corporation,
will depend the ultimate value of all that creative physical or
philosophical ability has brought together.
Recently there was submitted to me in the office of one of Chicago's
greatest businesses the draft of its organization. No man can pass on the
merits of the details of a complicated organization without long and
intimate acquaintance with its workings. Seeing the plan of the Chicago
plant, pressed for a suggestion, I said: 'Your chart is upside down; the
president belongs at the bottom, sustaining and carrying, through his
organization, all the operations of the plant. Because he is in supreme
authority he has the responsibility of making available for everyone, down
to the tool, all the wisdom in the universe in order that each may fulfil
perfectly its special duty and task.'
Whether on the grounds of Long Branch, on the desert trail, in a section,
department, division, or plant of a great manufacturing concern or
railroad; whether on the deck of a battleship or on a battlefield, what is
wanted is a leader who can swing and manage what has been entrusted to
him.
It has become the fashion in history to decry the strong-man theory, to
turn for understanding to evolution, to explain the strong man as the
inevitable accident of the moment. There is evolution; there comes, at
last, opportunity, but only rarely does the strong man arise; hence we
have England, not Norway or Sweden or Holland; hence we have Prussia, not
Saxony; Germany, not Russia; Italy, not Portugal; France, not Spain;
Japan, not Siam or Korea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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