Higher Education and Business StandardsHotchkiss, Willard E. (Willard Eugene)
Philosophy
Higher Education and Business Standards
Hotchkiss, Willard E. (Willard Eugene)
Business education; Business ethics
The accountant does not always go after the same facts as the sales
manager, and even with the same facts the two are likely to draw quite
different conclusions as to their bearing on a general policy.
Specialization, too, may result in setting an intense analysis of one
group of facts over against a very superficial view of other facts--or
again, an intense analysis of the same facts from one viewpoint with
failure to consider them from another, and perhaps equally important,
viewpoint. Unless these weaknesses are corrected, the business will
lack balance; the work of departments will not harmonize; there will be
no fundamental policy; goods sold on a quality basis will be
manufactured on a price basis--all of which leads to disastrous
results.
Scientific method is the first article in the creed by which business
training must be guided. The growing necessity for critical and
searching analysis of business problems, justifies all the effort we
can put forth to develop plans for training into a structure of which
scientific method shall be the corner-stone. But analysis is not all.
Following analysis must come synthesis. Somewhere all the facts and
conclusions must be assembled and gathered up into a working plan. It
is this task of leveling up rough places in the combined work of
department specialists, that puts the training and insight of both the
executive and the director of research to the most severe test. It is a
mark of a well-trained executive that in performing his task he
instinctively follows principles instead of trusting alone to momentary
intuitions, however valuable and necessary these may be.
And here it is that the second article in the creed of business
training appears. The executive's task is primarily to adjust human
relations, and the nature of the principles by which these adjustments
are made, determines the relations of a concern to its laborers, to
competitors, to customers, and to the public. If the executive comes to
his task without a mind and spirit trained to an appreciation of human
relations, he is not likely so to synthesize the work of his
subordinates as to make for either maximum efficiency within the
business or its maximum contribution to the life of the State.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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