Portal:Business/Selected quote/65
The attempt which extreme radicals all over the world are making to get control of both the political and business systems on the theory that they would make the industrial and business system serve the community, is a real danger so long as our present system does not accomplish that end; and this danger is real irrespective of the fact that they have as yet nowhere proved their case.
Is it possible to make our present system accomplish this end! If so, there is no excuse for such a change as they advocate, for the great industrial and business system on which our modem civilization depends is essentially sound at bottom, having grown up because of the service it rendered. Not until it realized the enormous power it had acquired through making itself indispensable to the community did it go astray by making the community serve it. It then ceased to render service democratically, but demanded autocratically that its will be done. It made tools and weapons of cities, states, and empires. Then came the great catastrophe.
In order to resume our advance toward the development of an unconquerable democratic civilization, we must purge our economic system of all autocratic practices of whatever kind, and return to the democratic principle of rendering service, which was the basis of its wonderful growth.
Unless within a short time we can accomplish this result, there is apparently nothing to prevent our following Europe into the economic confusion and welter which seem to threaten the very existence of its civilization.
- —Henry Gantt, Organizing for Work, 1919