Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/272

266 of authority and responsibility, and to formulate the rules of their distribution. He will study the coordination of mutually functioning agencies, and the means of their supervision. He will find need to more precisely determine the basis upon which rests the division of labor between administration and operation, and between principal matters and details. He will concern himself with the meaning and use of standards and sequences and schedules, and will attack the great problem of framing a theory of rewards and punishments adequately adjusted to the moral sense of the time.

What the military leader was in the ancient days of constant war, and the statesman in the period of the formation of great empires, the industrial executive may be considered to be in this commercial age. He is the leading exponent of organized action in the world. He should dignify his task, boldly conceiving it on the highest plane of which he is capable. He is the intellectual heir of all the executives of the past, and has resting upon him the mandate not to disgrace the succession. It is open to him to maintain a stimulating communion with his predecessors—with all the great military leaders and statesmen and diplomats whose history is preserved for us—and from their experience to gather basic principles of action. Why should not the business executive practise Cæsar's leniency, and his art of making common cause with his men, or endeavor whether Napoleon's celerity may not be used in the bloodless battles of economic service? Why should he not be stimulated by Richelieu's example to strive for coolness in analysis, or be moved by Sir Philip Sidney's charm to practise the art of winning friends?

Brought into contact with the thoughts and deeds of great minds, the business executive need not feel alone in the smallest village or the most distant engineering camp. He will find that before him the great company of the world's executives has had to deal with the same weaknesses of human nature as those against which he combats, and has relied upon such virtues and employed such methods of organization and administration, in bringing men to effective joint action, as are open equally to him. The fields of leadership may, indeed, have been different, but the fundamental principles have been largely the same.

Viewed thus, work again becomes a challenge. The function of the business executive is seen to lose its isolated and empirical character, and acquire a history, and an intimate relation with all other branches of society's organized effort. It is lifted onto the plane of an intellectual achievement, and so offers a foundation upon which to erect ideals of a professional character.