Experience(263 words)
Jun 28th, 2009 by Chand Arora
Personal experience is not enough in the management of any business. This is the basic fallacy which always & everywhere prevents improvement- that experience is to be the main guide & teacher of businessmen.
Experience means a knowledge of what has been done. It means facing the past, not the future. It creates routine-uniformity-stagnation.
It is necessary upto a point. But when it is blindly followed it becomes obstructive & deadening. It prevents development. The methods founded upon by experience must, every now & then, be questioned & tested in the light of the new facts & conditions that have arisen.
Many a firm has been slowed down or even destroyed by too much experience. Every businessman knows that. If experience walks hand in hand with research, then all is well. But the firm that is led by experience alone is in great danger of decay.
Often a man says-"Do I not know my trade? Have I not worked at it for 30 years?" The answer is that he knows the traditional part of his trade. He has accepted passively the prevailing ideas & methods of his trade, but he has not studied them to see if the ideas were true & if the methods could be improved.
The fact is that it is harder to teach people who have to unlearn. When Henry Ford wanted to make glass by a new continuous process, he hired men who had no experience at all. And when Hertz wanted to have courteous drivers for his yellow taxi-cabs, he hired men who had never been drivers before.
The young people are more closely in touch with the future-with the new opinions & methods & trends. The older man for his own sake & for the sake of his business as well, must have young people around him. Every big firm should have a "Junior board of directors". Every older man should take a young man to lunch now & then. OLD AGE has just as many faults as YOUTH. That is a hard pill for some older men to swallow. But it is true.
All of us who are older are inclined to regard young men of from twenty to twenty-five as mere lads. No doubt most of them are. But now & then there is a young man of twenty-five who is mentally fully grown & fit for big responsibilities. To keep him in a small job is a big mistake.