Willard E. Hotchkiss

“ Along with our technical and business enterprise, with the courage and imagination of which we are justly proud, a too easy success has given us a tendency to drop into a comfortable and optimistic frame of mind. Imagination, intuition, power to picture the future interplay of forces, courage and capacity for quick action—all these qualities are as essential to-day as they ever were to business success. The pioneer environment reacting on our native temperament has given us these qualities in full measure, but it has also given us a habit of doing things in a hit-or-miss fashion. ”

“ Like our employer, whom a strike impelled to adopt an advanced policy toward labor, we find after the event that we should not know how to do business under the standards in force before the law compelled a change. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In addition to the reputation of keeping bad company, efficiency has to bear the odium of many foolish and inefficient deeds performed by its self-appointed prophets. The quest for efficiency has called forth in business a new functionary known as the "efficiency expert." Many of these men have done a vast amount of valuable work, but many others have not. While the real expert has been raising the level of business organization, the others have been piling up a large wastage of poor work and lost confidence. ”

“ As soon as we recognize that business is primarily a matter of human relations, that it has to do with groups and organizations of human beings, we see that scientific analysis of it cannot proceed in exactly the same way as with units of inanimate matter. The reaction of human relations to changed influences, frequently cannot be predicted until the changes occur. Business, in other words, is a social science and, like all social sciences, must deal primarily with contingent rather than exact data ”

“ It is, therefore, of great importance that in our ideals and our policies for educating future business men we should try to anticipate the social environment in which these men will do their work.
We are in the habit of speaking of the present as a time of transition—the end of the old and the beginning of the new. In a very real sense every period is a period of transition. Society is always in motion, but that motion at times is accelerated and at other times retarded. ”

“ As we come to distinguish more clearly between reward for service and mere one-sided gain, there occurs a parallel change in men's motives; they become more sensitive to social disfavor and to social esteem and less and less willing to devote their lives to activity by which no one but themselves is benefited. In this reaction of altruism with enlightened selfishness there emerges in men's minds a new concept of their own interest and a better understanding of the kind of business policy that in the long-run brings them the greatest reward. ”

“ In our study of business we are always emphasizing the "long-time point of view," and we fall back upon this convenient phrase to harmonize many discrepancies between our so-called scientific principles and present facts. On the whole, we are well justified in assuming these long-time harmonies, but it will not do to overlook the fact that many important and legitimate enterprises have to justify themselves from a short-time viewpoint. ”

“ If we start our study of business by separating manufacturing, railroading, merchandising, banking, and the rest, with a large number of more or less logical subdivisions in each field, and then try to work out a body of principles applicable to each subdivision, we soon run into endless combinations and lose all sense of unity in business as a whole. ”

“ The public is also recognizing that the purpose of goods and services is to promote individual and community welfare, and as fast as public policy to that end can be worked out, it is carrying emphasis even beyond specific products and services to the social ends for which these products and services exist. In these ways society too is trying, clumsily perhaps, to take a long-time view of its business and to conserve the human values that make for progress. ”

“ More frequently advance in moral standards has been forced on unwilling victims through legislation, public opinion, or class struggle, and then men have discovered, as a happy surprise after the event, that "good ethics" was profitable. But science has done something, and might have done still more, if our efforts at scientific analysis had not been so often underweighted on the human side. These very discoveries of harmony between wholesome practice and good business constitute a part of the body of fact of which a truly scientific method must take account. ”

“ The application of scientific method to business has created an entirely new relationship between business and education. Scientific analysis and social policy are establishing a new connection between the material and the human facts of business. In the new atmosphere the business executive requires those fine qualities of mind and spirit, and the ability to command these qualities for a given task, which peculiarly it is the work of the university to cultivate. ”

“ Our inheritance from the pioneer is not only material but psychological. The pioneer attitude of mind has made a real contribution to our business standards. The very magnitude of our enterprises, the fact that we have had to develop our methods as we went, our success in approaching problems that way, have given us a confidence in ourselves and a readiness to undertake big things without counting the cost. ”

“ What the public really wants from business, then, is a contribution to national welfare, and it has become convinced that, by taking thought, it can make the contribution more certain and more uniform than it has been in the past. ”

“ A second force making for a scientific approach to business is found in the beginnings of a social policy to which I have referred. This policy is showing itself in limitations upon the way in which materials and men may be utilized and in a sharper definition of the business man's obligations to employees, to competitors and consumers. As long as resources are to be had for the asking, while cheap labor can be imported and utilized without restraint, and where no questions are asked in marketing the product, there is not the right incentive to do things in a scientific way. ”

“ Finally, what bearing will this social effectiveness or lack of effectiveness have on standards of business efficiency for the generation about to begin its work?
Even though we cannot answer these questions to-day, we have, to-day, the task of educating the generation that must answer them. More than this, the education we provide for the generation about to begin its work will determine, in no small measure, the kind of answers the future will give. ”

“ We have been steadily adding to the burdens on industrial and commercial equipment; even more have we increased the stresses and the strains on human life. A devastating war is now suddenly taking up the slack, and the slow and painful task of making the world efficient must be hastened in order that society may bear the load. In these circumstances we need not apologize for making efficiency the main support of business standards. Nor need we assume, as does the author just cited, that the efficiency ideal in any way conflicts with the ideal of moral responsibility and service. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Resources were limitless; without enterprise, without labor and capital, without transportation they had no value, they were free goods. The great public task of the nineteenth century was to settle the continent and make these resources available for mankind. ”

“ More serious than the antagonism has been the spirit in which some of the scientific management enthusiasts—not all—have met it. They seem to assume that their science is absolute and inexorable, that it eliminates disturbing factors and hence needs no adjustment to adapt it to the difficulties met in its application. This air of omniscient dogmatism, together with the disasters of false prophets, has somewhat compromised the movement and has diminished its direct influence. However, business men have been stirred up. ”

“ But men who approach business from the standpoint of university research are not free from the same danger. In their effort to orient themselves with the business facts, they get the business point of view and run the risk of centering attention too much on materials and material forces. Even psychological reactions of men and women may be analyzed from the standpoint of their mechanics, without ever going back to those impelling motives which have their roots in the human instincts and complex social reactions of which the men and women are a part. ”

“ The term "executive" in large and highly organized concerns is likely to mean the head of a department. A large proportion of the department heads now in business are men of purely empirical training. Their horizon is likely to be limited and to center too much in the departmental viewpoint. They may perhaps be able to see the whole business, but if they do, they will probably see it exclusively from the inside. There is frequently nothing in their business experience that has made them think of the great forces at work in society at large. ”

“ There can be no doubt that many of our old assumptions about the relative dignity and social distinction attaching to different kinds of study, as well as the assumption of a purely mercenary motive in business, have impeded a wholesome reaction between higher education and business standards. These assumptions have created an atmosphere—an objective and subjective attitude of mind, a set of motives and desires, of appreciations and valuations, all of which stand in the way of the most far-reaching educational results. ”

“ In so far as particular business enterprises have rested on engineering, chemistry, biology, and other sciences, a scientific method of approach has long had large use in business; but the scientist in business has usually been a salaried expert—a man apart from the management—and it has been his results, and not necessarily his methods, that have influenced business practice. We are now coming to understand that scientific method is the only sure approach to all problems ”

“ Business is a form of coöperation through which men exercise control over natural forces and thereby produce things with which to satisfy human wants. Any subject well taught, which gives an insight into human relations or into nature and man's control over it, will help prepare a person to deal with the intricate problem of human relations in business—that is, if the student has studied the subject in an attitude of mind to see its bearing on what he is preparing to do. ”

“ The first great element of training which the university can give to future business men is a mastery of scientific method as a means of analyzing problems and synthesizing results. Quite as fundamental as this is the development of an intelligent and sympathetic approach to questions of human relationship. Only the beginning steps in the direction of business efficiency can be taken while attention is confined to the material and mechanistic side of business organization. ”