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 institution 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.
Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism.
The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants—makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day.
The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad—of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan.