Developing Executive
Ability

By

ENOCH BURTON GOWIN

Assistant Professor of Commerce, New York University School of
Commerce, Accounts and Finance; Secretary, The Executives' Club
of New York; Chairman, Committee on Executive Training, National
Association of Corporation Schools; Author, "The Executive and His
Control of Men," "The Selection and Training of the Business
Executive," etc.

Copyright, 1919, by

THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY

PREFACE

"There are more jobs for forceful men than there are forceful men to fill them," says the Chairman of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Charles M. Schwab. "Whenever the question comes up of buying new works we never consider whether we can make the works pay. That is a foregone conclusion if we can get the right man to manage them."

"The average man is ambitious and wants to get ahead," says the General Manager of the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company, G. H. Willcockson, "but he does not know how."

The opportunity with which men in business are faced and the reason why it remains in large measure unutilized are here set forth. Though the need for their most skilled service continues very real, men possessed of the latent executive capacity too often are left to plod through the day's work as best they may, without vision and the definite methods which might so readily advance them.

This vision and these definite methods, valuable because based on sound principles and concrete enough to apply to the day's work, are necessary if men in business are to forge ahead; and they ought to be so interwoven with the general qualities of mind and body that a coherent program of personal management results. The individual then utilizes to the full his resources because he wants to and knows how. That such full utilization shall take place in the reader's personality and career constitutes the purpose of this book.

The form of presentation adopted is non-technical and informal to a degree perhaps unusual in a work of such serious purpose. The author admittedly has a preference for the