Excerpt from Works Management
In a former book (Linseed Oil: An Industrial Manual), the present writer has undertaken to discuss some of the conditions of efficiency in a special industry. It seems to be the current belief now that there exists an art of management without regard to special application; that there are underlying principles of efficiency germane to any business. Participation in this belief has suggested the present volume.
Every American is concerned that the United States may attain and maintain industrial supremacy. We no longer hold with Carlyle and Ruskin that machinery is bad. Machinery is a blessing to man. It has permitted him to substitute head work for hand work and has made him free.
We can have no industrial supremacy as we go on now. We are the most wasteful nation on earth. We burn up money in human lives, wasted by preventable disease. We recklessly consume our natural resources of land, forest and mine. Nowhere do we waste more thoroughly or more rapidly than in our factories; nowhere are we more childish than in some of our "business methods."
The remedy is not this or that widely heralded "system." Industrial incapacity is not a specific disease needing an antidote: it is a characteristic of our frame, which we must survive and outgrow. No one of us is individually greatly to blame; we are all greatly to blame as a people, because we do not do the best we can. Profits are no index to efficiency. A man may be rich, yet a spendthrift.
The growth of a philosophy of works management has been an American growth. This philosophy is one that comes home to every individual, no matter how far he be removed (as he may think) from industrial affairs. Every man should know something of the new ideals of industrial management. Superficial knowledge may have little available value, but there are things so important that we must all know something about them, even if that something have only the force of a suggestion.
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