PROFESSIONAL SPIRIT IN BUSINESS GROWING

Business is sometimes spoken of as an especially lucrative calling, but its money-making aspect is usually over-emphasized. While business, especially during the past generation of rapid exploitation of the country's resources, has offered some enormous money prizes, the average business man's income is moderate. And though good fortune plays its part and seems occasionally to pour wealth into the lap of its favorites, the average business man gains his modest "competence" by a combination of knowledge, persistence, good judgment in estimating values, and courage in making or seizing opportunity. Everyday business is not an adventurous speculation.

Important as "making money" may be to preserve solvency or even in common estimation to measure success, mere accumulation is not the paramount object in life of the broad-minded business man. The work itself, with its responsibilities and power, its service rendered, is in large degree its own reward. The auditor of a great railway system, with a fine and sincere enthusiasm, once told me that instead of drawing a salary for his services he really ought to pay for the privilege enjoyed, of seeing, as he put it, "all the business of the road come across his desk." He had the spirit of a professional man in his work.

Increasingly American business life is pervades by the professional spirit. It has grown in response to pressure from within and to a quickened social sense from without. It was large-scale business, complex and with many public contacts, that has first felt these forces, and therefore has sought systematically to enlist broadly trained men. The smaller concerns are now falling into line. Business leaders began looking for young men who could use their minds, who could analyze problems and take a fresh point of view. They found that college graduates were likely to have the qualities they sought, activity of intellect, breadth of interests, and some familiarity with scientific method.

But the college graduate, although his general training might be good, was often not immediately serviceable in business. His mind might be active, his vision broad, and his ideals high, but frequently he did not function properly in the initial stages of his business career. He was apt to be impatient with exacting routine and wearisomely repeated detail operations, because he did not realize their significance. He often sought promotion, not merely because the pay was higher but because the work was more interesting, before in his employer's opinion he was fitted for the work of the organization he had entered. Sometimes, when only ignorant that there is a fascinating science of business, he was thought to be supercilious, as if, leaving higher things, he condescended to his work. A great employer recently expressed his preference for college men, but only after they had been four years out of college, and after someone else had "knocked the nonsense out of them." There has been some failure of adaptation and consequent dissatisfaction on both sides. The fault of adjustment has not been all with the college man, but he was in fact not specially trained for his work.

To remedy this fault and to answer the demand from the business community, during the last thirty years the colleges have introduced special courses and have organized Business Schools. The technical schools demonstrated the value of systematic class-room training for the engineer; the college could render a similar service to the growing profession of business. At the University the great professional schools were graduate in character, and the School of Business Administration, established in 1908, was put on the same plane. It was to give a professional training, scientific in method yet practical in application, to young men aiming to be business executives. This purpose the teachers of the School have endeavored to fulfill; and the steady growth of the student body, now representing the graduates of seventy-two colleges from all parts of the country, the hearty co-operation and support of leading business men, and the wide demand for the product of the School seem to indicate a substantial measure of success in working out the comparatively new problems of education for business.

The profession of business calls for as high qualities of mind and character as any of the older recognized professions. The nation needs now, as never before, the scientifically trained and high-minded business man. A man entering his profession should resolve to give it the best he has in him