Business sense

“ THE principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employé.
The words "maximum prosperity" are used, in their broad sense, to mean not only large dividends for the company or owner, but the development of every branch of the business to its highest state of excellence, so that the prosperity may be permanent. ”

“ To this end he should equip himself by spending four or five years acquainting himself thoroughly with all the phases and departments of the business and learning the facts about the manufacture of the goods he expects to sell eventually. ”

“ Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) 349 the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. ”

“ True enterprise is constantly on the alert to discover some new want of society, some fertile source of profit or honor, some unexplored field of business, and is ready to supply the one or to take advantage of the other. ”

“ First and principally, it requires that the directing mind should be incessantly occupied with the subject; should be continually laying schemes by which greater profit may be obtained, or expense saved. This intensity of interest in the subject it is seldom to be expected that any one should feel, who is conducting a business as the hired servant and for the profit of another. There are experiments in human affairs which are conclusive on the point. ”

“ My friend the business man tells me that for success in business one requires four things: a large capital, industry, insight, and caution—and then it's a toss-up. I am fain to believe this whole system of modern commerce was devised to please the amateurs of the aleatory. ”

“ The common run of business concerns are occupied with industrial enterprise of some kind, and with transactions in credit, -- with a running sequence of bargains from which the gains of the concern are to accrue, -- and it is upon these gains that attention and effort centers, and to which the management of the concern constantly looks. ”

“ Honest Business, inclusive of all serviceable activities—service for service, to adopt a phrase in definition of Business—would be identical with Economics. Either, like the other, may be described superficially as the process of the science of making money.
Quite consistently with the foregoing survey, Economics has been described as the science of “mankind making a living.” This definition, too, excludes the solitary life by limiting Economic science to cooperative mankind—in other words, to Economic association. ”

“ But in the final analysis it is the knowledgeable consumer and the responsible business person whose decisions will determine the success or failure of products and services in the competitive marketplace. ”

“ Our business succeeded beyond our expectations; and in order to supply the increasing demands for our products, we found it necessary to employ additional force and capital, build new forges, and otherwise enlarge the sphere of our operations. ”

“ These are only some of the many influences which might become operative, but they serve to show the necessity for careful consideration of all the factors at work if a true conception of the condition and tendencies of business is to be formed. ”

“ And even in the earlier days of the doctrines, when the aim was to dispose of the undertaker's work under the theoretical head of Production, the business side of his work persistently obtruded itself for discussion in the books and chapters given to Distribution and Exchange. The course taken by the later theoretical discussion of the entrepreneur, leaves no question but that the characteristic fact about his work is that he is a business man, occupied with pecuniary affairs. ”

“ What is business? Professor James Mark Baldwin, in his volume “The Individual and Society,” says that “business has to do with the production and distribution of valuable things; money, utensils, anything for which there is a demand in society, or on which society or some individuals of it set value”; and again, “to produce such things in response to the demand and to distribute them to those from whom the demand comes, is the undertaking of business.” Here is set forth very clearly the idea that the distribution of things is business just as much as is the production of them. ”

“ In current economic theory the business man is spoken of under the name of "entrepreneur" or "undertaker," and his function is held to be the coordinating of industrial processes with a view to economics of production and heightened serviceability. ”

“ This good-will is chiefly a capitalization of the differential advantages possessed by the several concerns as competitors in business, and is for the most part of no use for other than competitive business ends. ”

“ I find that at the foundation, the machinery of business is simple, but whether it is plain or complicated, all who would succeed must make every effort to comprehend it thoroughly. All I care to emphasize at present is the great truth that knowledge, established and classified, is the basis of all business success. ”

“ What I purpose doing is to carry out my business schemes by such methods as will enable those who work with me and for me to earn their own betterments in life, and then to enlighten and guide them in the spending and investment of their earnings. ”

“ We have, from a thorough study of economics, decided to enter upon this business. It has many merits, chief among which may be noted that we can indulge in large and lucrative operations without capital. ”

“ Moreover, the facts which economic theory seeks to describe are primarily economic facts, facts, that is to say, which emerge in, and are concerned with, the ordinary business world; and it is, therefore, mainly upon such facts that the theory must be based. ”

“ Let us consider, briefly, the evolution of our present-day economic or business life, and then take note of the necessary place that particular classes of business men must hold in the structure of our society. ”

“ Therefore we should, as we go along, constantly endeavor to correct errors, shortcomings, and abuses, and prune away rotten and unsound timbers in our public and business life, and make the whole machinery of business and activities of all kinds—trade, banking, insurance, manufacturing, legislative, and the various professions and mechanical industries, work as legitimately, honestly, smoothly, and harmoniously as possible. ”

“ Nothing but a cold, emotionless, methodical, business-like precision, a well-considered series of commercial transactions, conducted by men specially acquainted with the articles required and regularly trained to office routine. ”

“ The management, for instance, of a bank, a wholesale export business, a large retail establishment, or of a large putting-out enterprise dealing with goods produced in homes, is certainly only possible in the form of a capitalistic enterprise. ”

“ The focusing of attention on one's own function also implies and explains the custom of placing upon participants in a business transaction the responsibility each for his own side, a custom which is economically justified but which must be kept within proper limits, as is fully recognized by the business men who are successful and who therefore become models or examples for the guidance of other men, influencing the latter towards high ideals. ”

“ The reason that the masters of combination have sought to shut out competition is that the basis of control under competition is brains and efficiency. I admit that any large corporation built up by the legitimate processes of business, by economy, by efficiency, is natural ”

“ In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. ”

“ In so far, however, as that definition may be appropriate, it applies only to business abuses, not to Business as a possible synonym for Economics. It defines Business only as theft might define morality.
To be a closer synonym for Economics, Business must deserve a definition relating its customs to natural Economic law (a subject to be considered in a later Lesson) and extending its functions more completely to universal mutual service. ”

“ At all events, we mailed a few letters to customers explaining the matter, and a business on this basis was commenced and quickly grew to large proportions.
This fact made it dangerous, for the larger the business the greater the risk. We had to continually have an interest in the market either on one side or the other, and if the business was large our interest must be in proportion.
For some time the business was most satisfactory. My judgment of the market was correct, our customers were well pleased, and we made good profits. ”

“ Concomitantly, of course, the rest, who may, for lack of means or of pecuniary aptitude, have been less well fitted for pecuniary pursuits, have been relieved of the cares of business and have with increasing specialization given their attention to the mechanical processes involved in this production for a market. ”

“ But it is not enough that the business man should see a chance to effect economies of production and to heighten the efficiency of. industry by a new combination. Conditions favorable to consolidation on these grounds must be visible to him before he can make the decisive business arrangements; but these conditions, taken by themselves, do not move him. The motives of the business man are pecuniary motives, inducements in the way of pecuniary gain to him or to the business enterprise with which he is identified. ”

“ The independent conduct of industry is the salient characteristic of the business man's work. He assumes the risks of the outcome of industrial operations. * * * This position as residual claimant explains one striking characteristic of business profits—the irregularity of the income. ”

“ As regards the mass of civilized mankind, the idiosyncrasies of the individual consumers are required to conform to the uniform gradations imposed upon consumable goods by the comprehensive mechanical processes of industry. ”

“ Though such varied experience is perhaps impossible, much of the best recent economic thinking undoubtedly has come from men who have served in business or official capacities that have brought them into close contact with detailed realities of economic life. ”

“ In the first place let me say that what we have done in our business any firm can do in theirs. It is not that we have any extraordinary talents along organization lines. We simply have taken the lessons learned in everyday trading, have tabulated and filed them in triplicate. ”

“ It is my business and my compeer's business and every other man's business who buys and sells, to pick that action out in its motive and result from the great mass of dubious actions, and to set it up in its own light, to rejoice in it as the clearest thing in social action, to claim it as God's own plan so far forth for our comfort and progress, and then to see to it that no preposterous hand mixes it up with perplexities or theologies or other abominations—muddying with a tentative pole the stream of our clear brook! ”

“ There are many eloquent passages in the economic manuals which may be called in witness of this truism, where much pains is taken to show that human wants are, in the nature of the case, indefinitely extensible. ”

“ Taken by and large, the standardization of conduct, knowledge, and ideals Current in the eighteenth century, and consonant with the eighteenth-century economic situation, is in the last analysis reducible to terms of workmanlike efficiency rather than terms of material cause and effect. ”

“ The business men of to-day—who are, indeed, of to-day and not a relic of yesterday and the day before yesterday—have an exact and detailed knowledge of their costs, determine prices scientifically, know definitely where are the best markets and what are the best locations for their factories, forecast with a reasonable degree of accuracy their need for materials, determine in a laboratory just which materials will best supply their needs, and in many other ways walk upon solid highways of exact information rather than upon the quaking bog of guesswork. ”

“ In dealing, therefore, with many of the men who have used the methods condemned by the statute for the purpose of maintaining a profitable business, we may well facilitate a change by them in the method of doing business. ”

“ If there are qualities in literature which are above price, these are also to be found in the world of manufacture and finance in that huge pyramid of loyalty which is modern industry, and that vast network of fidelity which is modern commerce. ”

“ Of these strictly economic activities that are lucrative without necessarily being serviceable to the community, the greater part are to be classed as "business." Perhaps the largest and most obvious illustration of these legitimate business employments is afforded by the speculators in securities. ”

“ What is legitimate Business but human service? And what else in Economic classification fundamentally can human service be but Labor? Business is in the Man class of Economics in contradistinction to the Natural Resource class and the Artificial Objects class. ”

“ The "productive-goods industries" show the modern industrial and business traits in an accentuated form and force, and they are, by consequence, in a strategically primary position in the business situation. ”

“ The number of individuals who are in a position to envisage a business opportunity, and to assess with some confidence the chances of success and failure is very limited. Not only must they possess special knowledge, ability, imagination, confidence in their own judgment, and the capacity to act on it; they must also have at their disposal considerable financial resources. ”