Sources and editorial notes

The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by the group, is always a part of the group.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett places the leader within the group rather than outside it. The office contributes direction while remaining answerable to the experience of people doing the work.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams asks a social ethic to encounter other people’s burdens. Executive decisions need that encounter because their inconvenience is often carried by people absent from the decision.

The vices, when they have leave from power and authority, go greater lengths than the virtues;

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt considers what authority permits others to do. This excerpt stops before his embedded Shakespeare phrase; its question is how leadership can make an excess seem authorized.

Embrace and invite helps and advices touching the execution of thy place; and do not drive away such as bring thee information, as meddlers, but accept of them in good part.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon asks officeholders to receive information without treating its bearers as meddlers. The director’s legitimate authority to decide does not supply an answer to the engineer’s observation.

To the open mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey describes a disposition toward inquiry, not an exemption earned by expertise. An experienced organization can still allow an unfamiliar observation to change its account.

The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they sacrifice every thing, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things.

William Hazlitt · Table Talk, in Collected Works, volume VI · Read the source

Hazlitt is criticizing an intellectual style that prizes outside show over underlying worth. The contrast questions whether an impressive assurance has examined what it approves.

The weak, the vain, and the frivolous, indeed, may be mortified by the most groundless censure, or elated by the most absurd applause.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith contrasts deserved assessment with the power of groundless applause or censure. The distinction matters when the audience’s reaction begins to govern the service being announced.

Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, Second Series · Read the source

Emerson offers an ideal of thought that reaches beyond praise. Read it as a challenge to dependence on applause, not a guarantee that thoughtful people cannot become vain.

To praise a man’s self cannot be decent, except it be in rare cases;

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon distinguishes self-praise from a defensible account of an office or profession. The omitted continuation allows the latter; representation need not become a performance of personal importance.

Preserve likewise the rights of inferior places; and think it more honor to direct in chief than to be busy in all.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Directing a whole is distinguished here from being personally busy in every part. The executive’s proper oversight need not consume the decisions others require to discharge responsibility.

But the chairman of the Commission must have another and higher power—the power of uniting these conclusions with the conclusions of others, the power of using this material to evolve with others plans for action.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

In Follett’s account of collective inquiry, the chair’s additional contribution is to join conclusions into plans with others. Authority does useful work beyond collecting every permission.

The State, while it respects the liberty of each in what specially regards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him to possess over others.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill is discussing public limits on power over others. The passage supplies a question about accountability for entrusted power, rather than a statement of current employment law.

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon describes the continuing occupation created by studying revenge. The challenge addresses the powerful person seeking payback; it does not demand forgiveness or unsafe confrontation from the reporter.

Love is an agreeable, resentment a disagreeable passion; and accordingly we are not half so anxious that our friends should adopt our friendships, as that they should enter into our resentments.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith observes how strongly people seek companions for resentment. A leader’s private grievance can consequently acquire a coalition without acquiring a defensible reason for punishment.

If our friend has been injured, we readily sympathize with his resentment, and grow angry with the very person with whom he is angry.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Fellow-feeling can spread anger before its grounds have been examined. This historical account invites scrutiny of a leader’s alliances; it does not establish that every expression of solidarity is vindictive.

The greatest proof of pride is its being able to extinguish envy and jealousy.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt’s paradox separates pride from envy rather than recommending pride as a cure. The ability to welcome another person’s achievement deserves examination beyond an attractive label.

No mean jealousy ever influenced his conduct to his brother artists; he could afford not only to acknowledge the merits, but to forgive the malice, of his rivals.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin presents an artist as able to acknowledge rivals’ merits. The passage is his evaluative portrait, not independent proof of the artist’s conduct or a universal law of success.

Those that have joined with their honor great travels, cares, or perils, are less subject to envy; for men think that they earn their honors hardly, and pity them sometimes, and pity ever healeth envy.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon considers how perceived effort affects envy of honor. His historical generalization is a prompt to examine a comparison, not a reliable way to diagnose another person’s motives.

Employers and employed cannot be exhorted to feel sympathy one for the other; true sympathy will come only by creating a community or group of employers and employed.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett locates sympathy in relationships and common activity, rather than exhortation alone. An executive cannot substitute a declaration of care for arrangements through which people’s experience becomes known.

Sympathy, though its meaning was, perhaps, originally the same, may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith uses sympathy more broadly than pity for suffering. The relevant question is whether another person’s experience enters the judgment, including hopes and concerns as well as distress.

It is easy to confuse the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the response to the social claim.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams distinguishes a response to numerous individual requests from a social response. A leader can be busy dispensing exceptions while leaving the arrangement producing the burden unexamined.

Memory may provide an antiseptic refrigerator in which to store a stock of meanings for future use, but judgment selects and adopts the one used in a given emergency—and without an emergency (some crisis, slight or great) there is no call for judgment.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey distinguishes a stored stock of meanings from judgment in a particular situation. Familiarity can supply an initial category without settling whether that category fits the candidate.

I am not very patriotic in my notions, nor prejudiced in favour of my own countrymen; and one reason is, I wish to have as good an opinion as I can of human nature in general.

William Hazlitt · Characteristics and other writings, Collected Works volume XII · Read the source

Hazlitt resists confining favorable expectations to his own countrymen. The point here is openness to people outside a familiar circle, not a claim that personal affinity always determines judgment.

Surely, there is in some sort a right in every suit; either a right of equity, if it be a suit of controversy, or a right of desert, if it be a suit of petition.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon asks what is due within a petition or dispute. That historical framing makes the applicant’s legitimate claim visible before the officeholder’s personal liking; it is not current legal advice.

We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

For Addams, truth needs an interest in life that can receive different people’s experience. A reporting arrangement designed around reassurance can exclude precisely the contribution that would correct it.

The common statement that "language is the expression of thought" conveys only a half-truth, and a half-truth that is likely to result in positive error.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey is discussing language and thought, not corporate reporting. His half-truth distinction helps ask whether an accurate expression supplies the adequate understanding the audience reasonably takes from it.

Duty is closely allied to truthfulness of character; and the dutiful man is, above all things, truthful in his words as in his actions.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles connects truthfulness with action as well as speech. The warning display illustrates why an account can mislead through its arrangement without requiring an explicitly false sentence.

For corruption, do not only bind thine own hands or thy servant’s hands from taking, but bind the hands of suitors also from offering; for integrity used doth the one, but integrity professed, and with a manifest detestation of bribery, doth the other; and avoid not only the fault, but the suspicion.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

The historical advice addresses both accepting and offering a private inducement. It asks how an office can resist purchase; declarations of integrity do not themselves prove that the judgment remained independent.

He is corrupt, of course, but he is not elected because he is corrupt, but rather in spite of it.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams distinguishes a politician’s corruption from the relationships through which voters support him. Her paternalistic period language is not adopted here; explaining the attraction does not justify selling entrusted power.

Many ill matters and projects are undertaken; and private suits do putrefy the public good.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon contrasts private petitions with public good. The Executive question is whether a private benefit has displaced the reason the office exists, rather than whether the beneficiary feels grateful.

It is the love of money—not money itself—which is “the root of evil,”—a love which narrows and contracts the soul, and closes it against generous life and action.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles distinguishes resources from excessive attachment to them, incorporating a biblical phrase in his argument. The passage challenges the appetite, not the legitimacy of earning or holding resources.

The acquisition of knowledge may, it is true, protect a man against the meaner felonies of life; but not in any degree against its selfish vices, unless fortified by sound principles and habits.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Self-Help refuses to treat intellectual accomplishment as protection against selfish conduct. The executive’s technical ability does not settle whether the private claim gives other interests their due.

It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith links the display of wealth with a desire to be noticed. This excerpt concerns that incentive; his surrounding generalizations about workers’ material sufficiency are not adopted as contemporary facts.

A man ought warily to begin charges, which once begun will continue; but in matters that return not, he may be more magnificent.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon distinguishes continuing charges from a single expenditure. The useful question concerns what the commitment will continue to require, not a general presumption against expensive work.

Not, of course, without some trouble and some expense; you can do nothing much worth doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth having without expense.

John Ruskin · The Two Paths · Read the source

Ruskin insists that worthwhile work can require expense. This is a counterweight to equating economy with the cheapest option; its value does not excuse expenditure detached from a purpose.

Thus too the virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self interest.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith is presenting Aristotle’s account of a mean between avarice and profusion. The historical distinction invites judgment about attention to resources; it supplies no universal budgeting formula.

Riches are for spending, and spending for honor and good actions;

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon places use before accumulation. His language of honor and good actions opens a question about the resource’s purpose, rather than making every request for expenditure justified.

Although money ought by no means to be regarded as a chief end of man’s life, neither is it a trifling matter, to be held in philosophic contempt, representing as it does to so large an extent, the means of physical comfort and social well-being.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles rejects treating money either as life’s chief end or as a triviality. Entrusted resources matter because they support real purposes, including appropriate comfort and provision.

England has of late been too much busied with the counting-house and not enough with the workshop: with the result that the counting-house at the present moment is rather barren of orders.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris contrasts the counting-house with the workshop in a historical critique of cheapness. The passage asks whether the account remains connected to useful making, not whether its economic diagnosis holds universally.

Some forbear it, not upon negligence alone, but doubting to bring themselves into melancholy, in respect they shall find it broken; but wounds cannot be cured without searching.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon names reluctance to examine an estate because its condition may be distressing. The medical metaphor is historical; the Executive issue is deliberate avoidance of relevant organizational knowledge.

Any attempt to decide the matter by thinking will involve inquiry into other facts, whether brought out by memory or by further observation, or by both.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey’s traveler needs inquiry to turn uncertainty into grounds for a direction. In an organization, an available route to relevant information matters more than the comfort of an unopened question.

Too much that is easy gives no ground for inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry hopeless.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

The educational context distinguishes a productive challenge from an impossible one. Necessary inquiry must be made feasible; demanding an answer without access or capacity does not remove the obstruction.

It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith identifies the wish to protect one’s view of one’s character. The selected sentence does not diagnose every optimistic account; it asks which unfavorable circumstances the explanation keeps avoiding.

If this meaning is at once accepted, there is no reflective thinking, no genuine judging.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey describes a suggestion accepted before examination. The mirror’s pleasing account remains a suggestion, even when the person accepting it feels completely sincere about what it shows.

It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined, and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon convictions which we no longer hold.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams describes a gap between professed convictions and established habits. The contrast invites an executive to examine an actual arrangement rather than rely on its reassuring description.

All this is true, if time stood still, which, contrariwise, moveth so round, that a froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation; and they that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

For Bacon, keeping the old form while circumstances change can itself be disruptive. Continuity therefore requires judgment about purpose, not simply refusal to use the new key.

It is scarcely a digression to note his way of dealing with flowers, which, moreover, gives us an apt illustration of that change without thought of beauty, change for the sake of change, which has played such a great part in the degradation of art in all times.

William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art · Read the source

Morris is criticizing changes made to cultivated flowers without regard for their beauty. His example supplies a counterweight: novelty alone does not establish that a revision improves its object.

Bad custom, consolidated into habit, is such a tyrant that men sometimes cling to vices even while they curse them.

Samuel Smiles · Character · Read the source

Smiles describes the grip a harmful custom can acquire. This concerns attachment to a recognized problem; an established method can still deserve retention when its reasons remain sound.

In the discharge of thy place, set before thee the best examples; for imitation is a globe of precepts, and after a time set before thee thine own example; and examine thyself strictly whether thou didst not best at first.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon asks an officeholder to compare present conduct with the earlier example. The photograph cannot supply that comparison on its own; the present arrangement must be examined.

Some are so taken up with routine as to be inaccessible to new facts and problems.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey identifies a routine that closes attention to new facts. An established practice is useful only while the organization can still receive observations it did not anticipate.

I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin’s autobiographical observation concerns the difference between self-image and examination. It does not introduce vice tracking here or establish completion or performance conclusions from a Workbook grid.

Attention, application, accuracy, method, punctuality, and despatch, are the principal qualities required for the efficient conduct of business of any sort.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles offers a standard of attention and method for business. These qualities concern the actual conduct of a task; a neatly completed inspection tag is not evidence that each was exercised.

The only way to achieve traits of carefulness, thoroughness, and continuity (traits that are, as we have seen, the elements of the "logical") is by exercising these traits from the beginning, and by seeing to it that conditions call for their exercise.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey connects habits of carefulness with conditions that allow them to be exercised. A leader’s demand for care needs an arrangement capable of supplying it, not merely a stronger assurance.

Conformity of acts to precepts and rules is the easiest, because most mechanical, standard to employ.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

The ease of judging conformity can displace inquiry into what the act accomplished. Dewey’s moral-training example illuminates how completion of a form can be confused with due care.

With the union the purpose comes into being, and with its every step forward, the purpose changes.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett treats a common purpose as capable of development through shared activity. Constancy need not freeze the original plan after a genuine reason to revise it has emerged.

It is not accident, then, that helps a man in the world so much as purpose and persistent industry.

Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source

Smiles emphasizes purposeful, sustained effort. Read as a claim about application, the sentence challenges serial beginnings; it does not explain every unequal outcome or guarantee worldly success.

It is good, also, not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent, or the utility evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation;

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon distinguishes a reform that requires change from a desire for change dressed as reform. His caution concerns political experiments; here it prompts examination of the new priority’s reasons.

Therefore, measure not dispatch by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business; and as in races, it is not the large stride, or high lift, that makes the speed, so in business, the keeping close to the matter, and not taking of it too much at once, procureth dispatch.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

The essay measures speed by actual advancement rather than the appearance of rapid activity. Pressuring a process to look finished can leave the important part of the work undone.

The individual may return upon, revise, restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which suggestion springs.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

Dewey makes reflection active: revisit and analyze the material from which a suggestion arose. A useful interval can improve an account rather than merely postpone its delivery.

Trifling alterations may, however, be made in it from time to time; and thus mathematical tables may, by the gradual extirpation of error, at last become perfect.

Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source

Babbage describes progressive correction of printed mathematical tables. The concrete example values accumulated improvement; it does not promise that an organization can eliminate every error or delay.

There is surely no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and onsets of things.

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon’s essay weighs the timing of beginnings rather than praising either speed or waiting in isolation. A further delay needs a reason fitted to the occasion.

He wants something in the nature of a signboard or a map, and his reflection is aimed at the discovery of facts that will serve this purpose.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

The traveler’s reflection has a purpose: find facts that can guide a choice. Continuing to request information becomes less useful when the inquiry no longer identifies what could change the direction.

The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

Benjamin Franklin · Autobiography · Read the source

Franklin describes how a qualified manner changed the reception of his opinions. Modesty can permit a judged contribution without pretending to certainty; it need not prevent the person from giving an answer.

Thus the virtue of fortitude or courage lies in the middle between the opposite vices of cowardice and of presumptuous rashness, of which the one offends from being too much, and the other from being too little affected by the objects of fear.

Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Read the source

Smith’s account of Aristotle places courage between excessive fear and rashness. This passage is deliberately retained from Business because proportionate risk remains essential; the Executive case concerns owning an available exercise of power.

He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.

John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source

Mill emphasizes the faculties involved in a person’s own considered choice. The connection is responsibility for judgment, not an instruction to disregard dependency, coercion or serious danger.

No one can truly lead except from within.

Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source

Follett’s leader belongs within the group, rather than performing isolated heroism. An accountable answer can be supported and informed by others while remaining an answer the officeholder is willing to own.

Dangers are no more light, if they once seem light; and more dangers have deceived men than forced them;

Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source

Bacon distinguishes a danger’s appearance from its weight. The historical maxim supplies a question about reassurance, not a method for assessing modern financial, legal or physical risk.

This rival hypothesis (or conditional principle of explanation) prevents him from dogmatically accepting the first suggestion.

John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source

In Dewey’s example, another possible explanation interrupts a premature conclusion about a disordered room. The Executive parallel is to examine alternatives before confidence becomes somebody else’s commitment.

The man who disassociates his ambition, however disinterested, from the coöperation of his fellows, always takes this risk of ultimate failure.

Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source

Addams connects a reformer’s ambition with the cooperation of those involved. The passage concerns a historical social undertaking; it challenges a plan that treats affected people as background to its promised success.