Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the pa.s.sions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together.
People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want.
It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist--if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of G.o.d and the love of one"s kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone.
This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship.
I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.
The way for America to meet the German militaristic and compet.i.tive idea of business and of the business executive--the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a subst.i.tute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a subst.i.tute for it.
The American engineers of business or great executives--the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pa.s.s, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this subst.i.tute.
-- 2. _The Engineer At Work._
The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.
I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching--who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn.
The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money--the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded--and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization.
If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end.
But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work.
The difference between the business world that is pa.s.sing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry.
The man who orders can no longer order. People will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope.
The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors.
The reason that the I. W. W. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work.
Only inventors--executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others--men who invent ways of making men see values--men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything--either money or work, from now on, out of anybody.
-- 3. _The Engineer and the Game._
The time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength.
Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own pa.s.sion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work.
It is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. A man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money--the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man--the man who can touch men"s imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it.
The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon inst.i.tutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman.
A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day.
-- 4. _The American Business Sport._
If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is--what I would call a fine all-round religious sport.
Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both.
To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find.
The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in G.o.d, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that G.o.d has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist.
It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for G.o.d to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works.
There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.
People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people--to make them peaceful....
The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages.
Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production.
The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in compet.i.tion with Gobblers and Plodders.
The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point.
The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport--the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it.
The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by.
What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders--the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anaemic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pa.s.s.
A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, _i.e._, he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to--by paying higher wages than they can earn.
In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world.
The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business--who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of Christ.
The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental.
Having imagination about one"s employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry--the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now.
The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams--and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there--the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped--the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human inst.i.tution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods.
From now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance.
People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did.