In the Business World

The following article is the first of a series to be written for the Crimson by W. W. Daly '14, Secretary for Student Employment, on the various fields of endeavor in business open to college graduates.

In considering business I want you to think just a moment of the field of human endeavor as a Graph with X and Y coordinates. The Y coordinates vertical represent different types of businesses with their various sub-divisions. The steel business, for example, is divided into smelting, mining, and refining, down to machine tool work, making structural shapes, and small metal parts. There are other businesses, smaller perhaps, with various types of products, but which are, nevertheless, separate as businesses.

For the X coordinates we can divide the jobs in most businesses into four or five different categories. There are those in the Production Field, which includes labor, foremanship, superintendency, and managership. Those in the Distribution Field, include selling, sales executive work, advertising in all of its phases, and marketing research. Those in the General Office and Accounting Field, include the keeping of records and handling of finance from book-keeper and office boy to treasurer or vice president in charge of finance. The Service Field, which we find in many organizations--which functions as a method of rendering assistance to other departments--makes no profit but does provide the oil in which the wheels of business rotate.

Now if you will imagine with me this Graph as covering the various occupations in which men labor, you can look along either line--vertical or horizontal--and find a given position at any given point. We shall find, for example, the sales manager for the manufacturing company which makes household furniture. We can find the accountant for the rubber factory.

In considering these various fields of human endeavor, and methods of progress, we can consider, first of all, either the industries or the types of jobs in which a man may work, and we can consider for the moment the man as interested in some particular, field along either line, and that in any event a "castle's move" may, be possible as an outlook to future progress.

First of all however, we must picture the graph and get it firmly fixed in our minds.

Now in discussing the various aspects of opportunities that are open I am planning to describe them from both viewpoints; first, the general fields of production, distribution, and office work; second, from the point of view of specific businesses--particularly those which have been in the habit of coming to Cambridge for seniors, with the thought that they will take them into their organization, and after a period of training, use them in whatever capacity they seem to be best adapted.