A PRACTICAL SYSTEM.
Some business men do a vast amount of work without any apparent effort; they are rarely, if ever, rushed, and are seldom compelled to seclude themselves from their friends on account of the pressing demands of their business. Other people, who really accomplish very little, are always in a hurry; they seem to have a dozen things to do at once, and the result is, they are in a state of almost perpetual confusion, and the little they accomplish is only done by the greatest difficulty. In a very small country store perhaps a merchant can get along without any system or method in conducting his business. He knows where everything is in his stock, and can lay his hands on it at a moment’s notice, and if a customer calls for it he can serve him without any very great amount of trouble; but, on the other hand, if he is at the head of a vast business, some great establishment, perhaps, in which there are a hundred departments, it would be utterly impossible for him to keep track of things without the most methodical arrangement throughout the concern with which he is connected. Our great merchant leaves the details of his business to subordinates, who are accountable to him that everything goes right in the departments over which they are placed. Some of the great establishments in our city employ thousands of men, yet so perfect is the system that every man can be located at a moment’s notice, and the closest watch can be kept upon the work which he is doing. There is a system for receiving and shipping goods, a system for keeping track of stock while in the hands of the producer or dealer; there is a cash system, a system of bookkeeping by which a mistake of a penny can be detected at the close of every day’s business. It is only by these wise and sensible precautions that a great business can be carried on successfully. Thousands of losses, little and great, are averted that would certainly occur did not this watchfulness prevail in every department.
A writer in the Detroit Free Press said not long ago that “there are some occupations which compel those who follow them to be orderly and methodical. There are none in which these qualities, where they have been neglected, can not be cultivated to good advantage. Deficiency in them is far from being a token of genius. It signifies something of indolence and much that is slipshod. Every man knows whether or not he is as orderly and methodical as he should be. If he is not, unless he is too old to attempt the task, he should endeavour to improve in these respects. There is no danger of his carrying it to that excess which marks persons who have a passionate love of order, but there is a likelihood that he will materially lighten his work, or find that he can do much more than he has been in the habit of doing.”
It seems to the Criterion that this is the keynote of a business man’s success. No man who conducts his business in a slipshod manner can expect to achieve desirable results. He should determine to be orderly and methodical at the very commencement of his career. Order soon becomes a habit with a business man, and by its observance he is enabled to do a hundred things that it would be impossible to accomplish if he did not go at them in the handiest and most effective manner.—[Grocers’ Criterion.
BRAINS IN BUSINESS.
One secret of success in business—the secret, in fact, of success on a large scale—is to conceive of it as a matter of principles, not merely as a series of transactions. There are great merchants as there are great statesmen, and there are small merchants as there are small politicians, and the difference is very much the same in both professions. The small politician works by the day, and sees only the one small opportunity before him, the small merchant does the same thing—he is looking for the next dollar. The statesman, on the other hand, is master of the situation, because he understands the general principles which control events; this knowledge enables him to deal with large questions and to shape the future. The great merchant does the same thing, his business is not a mere money-getting affair, not a mere matter of barter, but a science and an art; he studies the general laws of trade, watches the general condition of the country, investigates present needs, foresees future wants, and adapts his business to the broad conditions of time and place. He puts as much brains into his work as does the statesman, and he ends by being not a money getter, but a large minded and capable man. An eminently successful business man, of statesmanlike quality, said the other day that the more he understood of life the more clearly he saw that it was all done on business principles. By which he meant, not only that the universe stands for the dollar, but that the universe is governed by unvarying laws, that promptness, exactness, thoroughness and honesty are wrought into its very fibre. On these business principles all life is conducted, if not by men, at least by that power which is behind man. It ought to be the ambition of every young man to treat his business from the point of the statesman, and not from that of the politician.
DRUG MARKET REVIEW.
August 10, 1889.