An examination of the characteristics required by the employees and heads of undertakings of every kind leads to the same conclusions as the foregoing study, which was confined largely to industrial concerns. In the home and in affairs of State, the need for administrative ability is proportional to the importance of the undertaking. Like every other undertaking, the home requires administration, that is to say planning, organization, command, coordination and control. Nothing but a theory of administration, which can be taught and then discussed by everybody, can put an end to the general uncertainty as to proper methods, which exists in the isolation of our households. There is therefore a universal need for a knowledge of administration.

We usually think of an individual doing administrative work not as an administrator, but as a businessman, an Army officer, or a civil servant. More specifically, we think of him, if he is a businessman, as a merchant, a production man, a sales manager, or a financial expert; while the Army officer may be a company commander, a staff officer, or a tactician; and the civil servant, a diplomat, a postmaster, or a revenue collector. It is true that all of these jobs involve administration: yet each of them is intimately bound up with a more or less specialized subject matter and it does not follow that a good production man win make a good diplomat or company commander.

Though it is possible to develop various principles of administration by generalizing from particular cases, the resulting abstractions seem to have little significance. The process of administration involves action requiring the application of any given principle in infinitely varying actual situations. In brief, administration is an art requiring skill, practice, and judgment. However much it can be analyzed in the abstract, it becomes manifest only in specific concrete situations. In fact, the best administrators may have difficulty in relating their actions to explicit principles; the fully developed skill will most often lead to quasi-intuitive action without a conscious frame of reference or checklist of points to be considered.

Administration, like other fields of knowledge, may be defined in various ways, but there is wide agreement on the following aspects of the subject:

I am going to give you for what it may be worth what I think are some of the qualifications a public administrator should have. I have tried to think of it in terms of personality, of training, of experience, and in none of those terms have I been able to discover what to me is a satisfactory answer. And no doubt the one thing that does satisfy my searching is susceptible of being termed as an oversimplification, but as I have looked about for administrators over a quarter of a century, I think I have discovered one thing that characterizes those that have been successful in many administrative positions of different types. It characterizes those that have been successful so far as their administrative work is concerned in the position of Presidents of the United States and Governors of states and Mayors of cities. It characterizes equally those that have been successful as the head of a finance department, the head of a unit of the health department, the head of a minor division in the police department, and the foreman of a garbage collecting gang. That is, to be a successful administrator one must have a catholic curiosity.

Every employee in an undertaking, then, takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. This is why we often see men, who are specially gifted, gradually rise from the lowest to the highest level of the industrial hierarchy, although they have only had an elementary education. But young men, who begin practical work as engineers soon after leaving industrial schools, are in a particularly good position both for learning administration and for showing their ability in this direction, for in administration, as in all other branches of industrial activity, a man’s work is judged by its results.

The meaning that I have given to the word administration and which has been generally adopted, broadens considerably the field of administrative science. It embraces not only the public service but enterprises of every size and description, of every form and every purpose. All undertakings require planning, organization, command, co-ordination and control, and in order to function properly, all must observe the same general principles. We are no longer confronted with several administrative sciences but with one alone, which can be applied equally well to public and to private affairs and whose principal elements are today summarized in what we term the Administrative Theory.

According to the dictionary, to administer is to govern, or to manage a public or private business. It means, therefore, to seek to make the best possible use of the resources available in achieving the goal of the enterprise. Administration includes, therefore, all the operations of the enterprise. But as a result of the usual way of organizing things to facilitate the running of the business, a certain number of activities constitute the special departments; the technical department, the commercial department, the financial department, etc., and the scope of the administrative department is found to be reduced accordingly.

The administrative function has many duties. It has to foresee and make preparations to meet the financial, commercial, and technical conditions under which the concern must be started and run. It deals with the organization, selection, and management of the staff. It is the means by which the various parts of the undertaking communicate with the outside world, etc. Although this list is incomplete, it gives us an idea of the importance of the administrative function. The sole fact that it is in charge of the staff makes it in most cases the predominant function, for we all know that, even if a firm has perfect machinery and manufacturing processes, it is doomed to failure if it is run by an inefficient staff.

Administration is generic. It is a social science concept which applies to all organized group activity. Administration arises whenever organization occurs. There are common problems and processes in the household, the school, the church, the business corporation, and the vast modern state. After deciding upon objectives, means must be devised for carrying out the program. This latter process is administration. Anyone who is responsible for directing the work of others thereby becomes an administrator

This body of administrative literature can be taught to young men and women; perhaps also to the aged, if they are not hopeless. And it is possible by tests to discover whether or how far the process of communicating and imparting administrative knowledge has been successful, [although] not precisely in all cases. Moreover, and this is highly important, young men and women who have more or less mastered the principles, maxims, and axioms of administrative science can now, by what is called in-training, fortify their formal knowledge by living experiences in and with administration. There is, then, a science of administration, in the sense in which I have used the term, and it can be taught, learned, and used.

Administration is sometimes referred to by specialized words such as management or organization, by particular terms such as executive work, or by general concepts such as public administration. Regardless of the name or nature of this supposedly new science, it is an art and technique which reaches far back into the experience of civilized man. For this reason, we include in this book ideas about administration presented by many authorities ranging from Aristotle and Socrates to Wilson and Stalin. Also included are the contributions of some three hundred other writers less renowned but no less convincing as to the importance of administration and its related subjects of management and organization.

Administration, which calls for the application of wide knowledge and many personal qualities, is above all the art of handling men, and in this art, as in many others, it is practice that makes perfect. This is one of the reasons why we should release our future engineers for practical work as early as possible; there are many drawbacks to staying too long at school.

It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind.