page_0005

5.

To avoid waste and unnecessary toil, to give our work the maximum o:f
effect, we must be able to see round our task. This cannot be done
while we are engaged in its minutiae. It can only properly be done
when the mind is free, in its hours of leisure. Then only can we get a
proper view-point and the right perspective. Leisure is as essential
for true efficiency as is the long spying of the ground when you are
hunting, before you begin your stalk.

Let me take one or two examples from different callings. I
will begin with business. The staple of nearly every business is, of
course, a mass of detailed duties which must be fulfilled, and which
require no special qualifications except industry and experience. Now
and then comes the need for a critical decision, and now and then the
need for a synoptic view of the prospect. But the ordinary work may
correctly be described as routine. The danger is that we allow the
routine element to get the upper hand, and refuse to consider the shape
of the wood, or even of the trees, because of our absorption with the
undergrowth. We have seen the consequences o:f this in Britain since
the War. Too many business men did not realise that world conditions
had changed, and were content to plod on in the old ways. They may have
redoubled their energy in their detailed work, but they did not look
around them until it was too late, and the time for reconstruction and
readjustment was gone, and they found themselves left with a machine
which was out of all relation to current needs.

America before 1929 was an interesting case. Many of my
younger American friends had been given an education for business, to
which I think there is no parallel elsewhere; an education in the humanities,
in law, and an experience of foreign countries, in addition to