out a body of principles applicable to each subdivision, we soon
run into endless combinations and lose all sense of unity in business
as a whole. As soon, however, as we approach business from the
standpoint of accounting, sales management, employment, executive
control, and when we find that lessons in statistics, advertising,
moving materials, or executive management, learned in connection with a
factory, can be carried over with but slight adaptation to the
management of a store, we at once get a manageable body of material on
which to work.

Recognition of the principle of likeness and of its corollary, analysis
by function rather than by trade, marks perhaps the greatest single
step yet taken in the development of scientific business. The
principle, however, has its dangers. Analysis by function implies
functional specialization in research and a similar tendency in
business practice. Without specialization there can be no adequate
analysis of any large and complex body of facts. With too intense
specialization there is always danger that the assembling and digesting
of facts, and especially the conclusions drawn from them, will reflect
some peculiar slant of an individual or of a particular specialty.

The accountant does not always go after the same facts as the sales
manager, and even with the same facts the two are likely to draw quite
different conclusions as to their bearing on a general policy.
Specialization, too, may result in setting an intense analysis of one
group of facts over against a very superficial view of other facts--or
again, an intense analysis of the same facts from one viewpoint with
failure to consider them from another, and perhaps equally important,
viewpoint. Unless these weaknesses are corrected, the business will
lack balance; the work of departments will not harmonize; there will be
no fundamental policy; goods sold on a quality basis will be
manufactured on a price basis--all of which leads to disastrous
results.

Scientific method is the first article in the creed by which business
training must be guided. The growing necessity for critical and
searching analysis of business problems, justifies all the effort we
can put forth to develop plans for training into a structure of which
scientific method shall be the corner-stone. But analysis is not all.
Following analysis must come synthesis. Somewhere all the facts and
conclusions must be assembled and gathered up into a working p