Whence the Supply Will Come
In this day of large and permanent undertakings, industry can not afford the risk of administrators who, being ignorant of principles, must govern by extempore decrees. Nor can it endure to educate those who will become wise only through disasters. Society is no longer satisfied to prepare its physicians or lawyers or engineers by an unregulated process of learning through experience. If administration is an intellectual pursuit, it is not sufficient to trust to such processes for administrators.
Furthermore, business experiences now less than formerly offer themselves as an educational ladder apt for the upward climbing of the growing mind. It is only in the world of small independent business that responsibility increases gradually and pari passu with ability. The typical captain of industry advanced step by step. As his experience and powers of mind grew, his business increased and enlarged his responsibilities by almost imperceptible increments. In the end he emerged, as a scholar might graduate from a carefully graded school, having passed through a finely graduated scale of functions, extending from the simplest to the most difficult things. Business experience less and less offers this encouraging educational aspect. Superior minds are as much wanted as ever, but they are wanted already trained in those general principles of administration which the last generation only grasped as the result of prolonged experience. Young men must now expect to enter some department of an organization which is already large, and to remain for long periods engaged in highly specialized functions, making such upward advance as is made by sudden leaps.
Already the dearth of administrators, who are grounded in general principles, is keenly felt in industrial affairs. The late Mr. Dill once said that he could secure a million dollars ten times while he was finding a man with the capacity to administer the affairs representing a million dollars at work. One of the reasons for the excessive concentration of administrative control in American business is the lack of an adequate supply of executives. And this is also one of the reasons why we overload good men and wear them out so rapidly.
What natural processes fail to do for us we must accomplish by educational agencies. To make education effective, however, we must establish the principles and policies which are to be mastered, so that training may form the mind of the executive more certainly, more rapidly, and more thoroughly than unregulated experience can do.
- ↑ "Discourses," Bk. II., Ch. XXIV.
