MEN’S TIMIDITY

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 7, 30 March 1927, Page 1

MEN’S TIMIDITY

AFRAID TO THINK MODERN BUSINESS MAN SOME DELIGHTFUL CANDOUR (From Our Resident Correspondent.) WELLINGTON, To-day. The business man was given some- | thing to think about by the remarks of Professor B. E. Murphy, professor in economics at Victoria University, when speaking to a gathering of Rotarians yesterday. "The business man,” he said, “is concerned with means, the thinker with ends. Why bother about the means if we do not know the ends we are aiming at? Why bother with the ends if we have not the means? Cannot we get these two branches of human thought and experience to work together for the good of the community? "No thinker really undervalues the work of the modern business man who is, under the present circumstances, the dynamo that turns the economic machine. “It is realised that all the higher arts of life depend on a sound material basis, and that welfare, in every sense, depends on wealth. A union of effort would make the significance of both means and end, of soil and plant, more plain to all, and would make the path to improved conditions much easier than it is at present.” The professor became delightfully candid in summarising the general outlook of people. He attributes the strength of both s unions and employers, and the proliferation of .organisations to the timidity of most men to hold and express opinions of their own. Men, he said, fear to express views, and sink with a sigh of relief into the comfortable sea of crowd psychology where their thinking is done for them. Especially where men are dependent on one another’s goodwill is this timidity manifest.