Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FITTING THE MAN TO THE JOB HOW many people who read these lines are satisfied that they are filling their appropriate place in the world? How many believe that they are doing the particular work for which their talents and inclinations fit them? How many feel that there are other things which, if they were once given a chance, they could do much better ? How many believe that' their careers are the result of a well ordered, thought-out scheme, and how many realize that their present occupation is pure accident? The man who is doing the thing that he planned as a boy or young man is the rarest phenomenon. The human being who can deliberately set his goal and advance unwaveringly toward it has determination, almost genius, of a high order. Every one of us has some one thing that he can do better than anything else; in some one undiscovered particular we are all supermen. How many of us are doing that one thing? Questions like these, which most people constantly ask themselves, are now assuming a practical importance in industry. The healthy discontent that leads the average citizen to quarrel with his lot seldom assumes the proportions of a tragedy; but there are millions of flesh-and- blood ghosts who haunt the purlieus of modern enterprise — men and women who never seem to find an economic affinity. American industry is now searching its heart in the interest of these industrial waifs. To whatextent are the manufacturer and business men themselves responsible for the misfit? To what extent does the misfit present the possibility of cure? The latest development of scientific management is its attempt to solve this problem, to use profitably the vast amount of human material that is constantly going to waste. Drifting, not steering, is apparently the principle that regulate...