Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE
MILflC TIRADE
VOL.
LI. N o . 5.
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman Bill at 1 Madison Ave., New York, July 30,1910
SING
$ 2E OO°P P ER S YE O AR ENTS
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IENCE ! !!
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OME of the best theorists whom I have ever met have amounted to practically nothing in the hard
grind for business success.
It is mighty easy to sit down and spin out an elaborate argument in support of a theory,
but the next thing is to work out a business problem" successfully according to this theory. There's
the rub.
The theorist, to my mind, in a large degree is a man who is always planning—rarely ever acting;
and, while I think the colleges are doing good in establishing post graduate schools for the study of busi-
ness, yet I think the best school in the world for business is active employment.
Some years ago a New England college had just established a post graduate school for the study
of business.
A number of well-known'^manufacturers, bankers, railroad and insurance men were invited to
make addresses.
. . Among them was a practical Yankee, who had fought his way up from a farm boy to some of the
highest offices in prominent Eastern banks.
A prospective student of business asked him which was the best of the business courses then offered.
"What do you want to be?" asked the
financier.
V
"I-want to be a banker," replied the student, with enthusiasm.
"Then the best school for you, young man," was the advice, "is an office in a bank. Get a job as an
office boy, and do the work for nothing if the bank won't pay you. One way to learn banking is to bank."
A decade, has passed since these schools have been established, and, aside from the fact that the
man who left college to "bank" is generally employing the man who stayed behind to study about it, they
have been reasonably successful. .
,.
.
Of course, the colleges are training young men to think business, but that's only one part.
Practice is quite another, and the best business school is experience.
But the great trouble with the young men of to-day is they expect to mount to the top rungs of
the ladder of Fortune without even touching the lower rungs.
In othe'r words, they are afraid to enter business as office boys, when really they are only fitted to
perform duties which belong to that position.
•
.
, .,
They think they are too far above that point, and because they do not begin in a systematic, thor-
ough way is one of the reasons why there are so many useless hulks and wreckages scattered all along
t he bvwavs of life.
.
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