How to influence men : the use of psychology in business / by Edgar James Swift.

  • Swift, Edgar James, 1860-1932.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: How to influence men : the use of psychology in business / by Edgar James Swift. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    rived, in great degree, from his close observation of every movement, enabled him to predict with astonishing ac- curacy how the enemy would act under given circum- stances.” ^ Jackson “appears to have thought out and to have fore- seen—and here his imaginative power aided him—every combination that could be made against him, and to have provided for every possible emergency. He was never sur- prised, never disconcerted, never betrayed into a false manoeuvre. . . . From Hannibal to Moltke [and on to Foch] there has been no great captain who has neglected to study the character of his opponent, and who did not trade on the knowledge thus acquired.” ^ It will be noticed that the author whom we have just quoted speaks of Jackson’s imagination as an aid in helping him to win victories, and undoubtedly no leader can be great without a fertile, productive imagination. But imagination requires raw material with which it may build. Only after information has been acquired and worked over into related knowledge can the imagination construct a method or plan that will achieve results. Imagination is admitted to be essential to leadership, but the belief is rather common that it is an easily mastered characteristic of man. The writer has had young business men ask for instruction in imagination. It is thought to be something that one acquires as one learns stenography, in a six months’ course. But constructive imagination, as we have said, is based on knowledge. Memory is the recall of an event or fact, and imagination is the reorganization and reconstruction of the items and details which memory places at our disposal. But facts are a part of our stock of knowledge, and the more facts we have in memory the greater will be the quantity of raw material upon which ' Stonewall Jackson, by G. F. R. Henderson, vol. II, pp. 12-13. (Long- mans, Green.) ^ Ibid., pp. 594-596.