The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world.

Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at least, in the great managers of employers?

You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop.  As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven.  Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each other’s arms.  They dance between their machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work.  You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats with flushed and glowing cheeks.

Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?

The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient it is and the better it works.

“Business is not business.”

One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever else business is, it is not business.  It would be closer to the facts to call business an art or a religion, a kind of homely, inspired, applied piety, based upon gifts in men which are essentially religious gifts; the power of communion in the human heart, the genius for cultivating companionship, of getting people to understand you and understand one another and do team work.  The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success lies in the fundamental, daily conviction—­the personal habit in a man of looking upon business as a hard, accurate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a science of mutual expectation.

I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young women having them, to-morrow morning at eleven o’clock, swing off into each other’s arms and dance for five minutes.  The value of the dance in this particular case was that the Firm thought of the dancing itself and was always doing things like it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in its glass office, felt glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed seeing the girls caught up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a big happy world full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and gentle things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of which they and their lives were a part.

When we admit that business success to-day turns or is beginning to turn on a man’s power of getting work out of people, we admit that a man’s power of getting work out of people, his business efficiency, turns on his power of supplying his people with ideals.

Ideals are news.

You come on a man who thinks he is out of breath and that he cannot possibly run.  You happen to be able to tell him that some dynamite in the quarry across the road is going to blow the side of the hill out in forty-five seconds and he will run like a gazelle.