mmediate and
obvious circumstance--there has been so little necessity for sparing
materials or men and so little penalty for waste--that we have
developed a national impatience with the slow and tedious process of
finding out.

Along with our technical and business enterprise, with the courage and
imagination of which we are justly proud, a too easy success has given
us a tendency to drop into a comfortable and optimistic frame of mind.
Imagination, intuition, power to picture the future interplay of
forces, courage and capacity for quick action--all these qualities are
as essential to-day as they ever were to business success. The pioneer
environment reacting on our native temperament has given us these
qualities in full measure, but it has also given us a habit of doing
things in a hit-or-miss fashion. Our very imagination and courage
applied to wrong circumstances and in perverted form have often borne
the fruit of national defects.

There is a strong inclination to assume that the old approach to
problems will bring the same results that it did in the past, and to
forget that we are living in a new world. The problems confronting the
pioneer were not the problems we face to-day. It requires great ability
to draft a prospectus; in many of our greatest enterprises drafting the
prospectus has been the crucial task. But a prospectus is not a going
concern. There is a vast difference between promotion and administration.
In the promotional stage of our business life we were solving problems
made up of unknown quantities, problems for which the only angle of
approach was found in the formula _x_+_y_=_z_. We still have and shall
always have problems of the _x_+_y_=_z_ type, but if we apply that
formula to a problem in which 2+2=4 we are not likely to get the best
results.

Business may not yet be a science, but it is rapidly becoming
scientific. Scientific inquiry is all the while carrying new factors
from the category of the unknown to that of the known, and by so doing
it is setting a new standard of business efficiency. The more brilliant
qualities, like courage and imagination, must be coupled with capacity
for investigation and analysis, with endless patience in seeking out
the twos and the fours and eliminating them from the equation. When it
is possible by scientific research to distinguish a right way and a
wrong way to do a task, it is not an evidence of courage or imagination
but of folly to act on a faulty a