Creating Capital: Money-making as an aim in businessLipman, Frederick L. (Frederic Lockwood)
Philosophy
Creating Capital: Money-making as an aim in business
Lipman, Frederick L. (Frederic Lockwood)
Business; Saving and investment; Wealth -- Moral and ethical aspects
Let us now consider some of the implications of this concentration on
rendering service. The directed effort of each man to the production of
the utility characteristic of his business, tends to result in his
learning to conduct that specific activity with a high degree of skill,
and with an increasingly valuable fund of experience. So highly
specialized does he become that it will be quite impossible for any one
hitherto a stranger in that sphere to conduct it as well. Therefore in
an age of coördinated effort the more a man has of accumulated
knowledge and facility in handling a certain kind of affair and the
better fitted, therefore, he is to continue and to progress along that
line, the less relatively he is able to undertake the affairs of some
other kind with which he is not familiar. We commonly feel free to
criticize a railroad, a newspaper, a large business house, perhaps a
university, with which we may have casual contact, but the fact is
there are few competent critics outside of the ranks of the enterprise
itself or of those carrying on activities that are directly similar. In
a word, through this focusing of attention, a man will come to be
exhaustively familiar with his own occupation, while possessing a
merely superficial acquaintance with the theories, customs, and
responsibilities of those of others. The wise man therefore argues the
necessity of confining himself to the field in which he has become
expert and will avoid taking chances in some outside direction wherein
he is not familiar. One of the most common and disheartening
experiences in the money-making and money-saving of the thrifty is that
after having both worked hard and practiced self-restraint, the
resultant savings are often put into some enterprise that turns out
badly, and the whole effort is thus thrown away. Generally this happens
because he has violated the rule we have just stated; he has ventured
his savings in unfamiliar fields, ignorantly he has rushed in where the
better informed would have feared to tread. Such so-called investments
are in reality highly speculative. They involve risks which are unknown
and altogether to be avoided. Now no one speculates in his own
legitimate business, for there he is acquainted with the hazards which,
he has learned, require the best of knowledge and the greatest of
prudence. It is the allurement of the unknown that tempts him to seek
unearned profits through speculation in outside regions where, in the
nature of the case, the chances must be against him. Now speculation
has its proper place in business: there are certain inherent hazards
that must be undertaken, mainly to be found in the risk of the seasons
in the production of crops, and the risk of the future in undeveloped
enterprise. These risks must be carried by somebody, but clearly they
constitute an activity for specialists who study conditions, becoming
relatively expert in determining how and when to act. These specialists
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