In 1536 was born in Japan an undersized, monkey-faced boy of good but poor parentage, who, at the age of thirteen, resolved to make himself the chief power in the distracted kingdom. For 200 years the militant barons had warred against each other, each trying to grab, annex, and hold what he could. The boy, Hideyoshi, deliberately visited the different courts, picked out the baron he thought most endowed with suitable character, succeeded with great difficulty in entering his service in the humblest position, and then steadily and inevitably rose, firstly because he could read human character and always knew almost as soon as they did themselves what his and his lord's enemies were plotting, and secondly, because he was always prepared in advance for any undertaking and skilled in carrying out. Thus, when scarcely more than a child, he reduced the cost of firewood used in the palace to less than one-half; a little later he rebuilt the castle walls in three days, a task estimated as requiring sixty days; again, single-handed, he secured provinces that armies had failed to conquer. By gifts of tact, of insight, of diligence, of readiness, that each one of us thinks he possesses, that any one of Nippon's 30,000,000 inhabitants might have possessed and exercised, Hideyoshi rose, step by step, until he directed and guided the whole country, his general, Iyeyasu, becoming the first of the Tokugawa dynasty, which lasted from 1603 to 1867, with headquarters at Yeddo (Tokyo). Temuchin, Jenghis Khan, born in a tent in 1162, son of a petty Mongolian chieftain, succeeded his father when only thirteen years old. Many of the tribes immediately rebelled, but Temuchin held his own in battle and in counsel against open enemies and insidious traitors, until his empire extended from the China Sea to the frontier of Poland--an empire larger than modern Russia, the largest the world has ever seen. The man of supreme ability is the one who has supernal ideals, who recognizes and uses those underlying principles without which human effort is futile, its results ephemeral. The man of supreme ability is the one who can create and control an organization founded on and using principles to attain and maintain ideals, who then is able to assemble for the use of his organization the incidentals of land, of men and money (Labor and Capital), of buildings and equipment, of methods and devices. All these incidentals make for volume, for quantity, for man's work instead of woman's work, but they do not make for the spirit, nor for the quality, nor for the excellence of work. THE ELEMENTS OF EXECUTIVE ABILITY