Read carefully the passage given below and answer the questions that follow:
Apart from
initial tastes and nature, a man is bound to be moulded by the aims, ideas,
ideals and whole nature of the career to which he devotes practically his
entire energies and time. For a businessman that fundamental fact is, and is
bound to be, profit. Having made money, the businessman may be, as he often is,
more generous and careless with it than an aristocrat or a Churchman; but that
does not alter the fact that the main function of his work, his main
preoccupation, and the point from which he views everything connected with his
work is that of a profit.
This fundamental
pre-occupation with making profit has been much emphasized by the shift of
business from the individual to the corporate form. A man may do what he likes
with his own and if he chooses to be quixotic he can be; but in the triple
relationship of workmen, executives and shareholders in the modern corporation,
there has ceased to be personality anywhere. The American is a great believer
in the magical power of words. The bare facts of business are now being covered
over by the new American gospel of ‘service’, but when we analyse this, does it
not come down to the obvious facts that, the businessman performs a highly
useful function
in society and
that, so far as he can, he should see that the public gets its full money’s
worth?
Moreover,
dealing inevitably with material things and with the satisfying of the world’s
material wants, the businessman tends to locate happiness in them rather in the
spiritual and intellectual unless he constantly refreshes his spirit away from
business during his leisure. When the pressure of business on his time, or his
concentration on it becomes so great as to preclude his reasonable use of
leisure for the development of his whole personality, he is apt to become a complete
materialist even if, as is now frequently not the case, he ever had it in him
to become anything else.
Questions:
1. What helps
shape the character of a man?
2. What is a
businessman’s principal motive?
3. What does the
shift of business from the individual to the corporate form indicate?
4. What is the
difference between an aristocrat and a businessman in the matter of money?
5. What is a
businessman’s duty to society?
6. When does a
businessman tend to become an out and out materialist?
7. How should a
businessman spend his leisure and why?
