Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE TRAINING AND WORK OF THE COM- MERCIAL SECRETARY The functions of the secretary of a commer- cial organization are so varied and require so wide a knowledge of affairs that modern boards of trade may well be said to have created a new profession. The recent efforts of these bodies to do fundamental things by way of im- proving civic and commercial conditions have opened up a large field of activity. The sec- retary is the executive upon whom the respon- sibility for achievement largely rests. The history of American commercial organi- Three Periods zations is divided into three periods. The first of these covered the wide-spread impulse to form local bodies for the protection of trade interests. In the second period the trade bodies sought efficiency by combining in various interstate and sectional unions, the movement culminating in the formation of the United States Chamber of Commerce. Thusmethods and policies were formulated and the foundations laid for a new science. The recognition of this science by schools and universities and the recent installation of courses for the preliminary training of commercial secretaries marked the beginning of the third period. At the first annual banquet of the United secretarial States Chamber of Commerce in January 1913 Advocated President Taft said: "You will have to have a school from which the new chambers of commerce can draw their secretaries, who will train the new membership in the way in which the organization can be built up and give them a practical knowledge of how they can do what they are organized to do." This innovation in teaching had already been seriously considered at Harvard University, but definite action had been postponed until its practicability could be more fully determined...