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As for business, it is more than ever before a matter of long-term projection and growth rather than of quick profits. "It generally takes plain, simple, unappetizing patience to achieve a business goal," says Manhattan Stockbroker Armand G. Erpf. "The overnight fortune is a myth." Business leaders are notably patient. The typical top executive has been with his company for 25 years and worked up through the ranks. Salesmanship is also becoming an ever more complicated exercise in patience, supported by huge amounts of research and strategy; it is not unusual for a salesman to work years to land a new account, and some look back on decade-long campaigns.
The growing importance of labor-management relations has also put a premium on patience. It is perhaps significant that an expert in the field, Professor of Management Douglas V. Brown of M.I.T., who thinks that Americans are impatient generally, maintains that in labor relations they are more patient than any other people.
What of the world? Usual accusations to the contrary, the U.S. has been more spectacularly patient in its foreign relations since World War II than any other great power in history. Through billions of dollars of foreign aid and a generation of troops stationed in Europe and Korea, through the Berlin and Cuban crises, through endless haggles with Russia, through millions of words at the U.N., through wearisome ego-salving for scores of tiny new nations, through insults from foes, obstruction from allies, envy from all sides, the U.S. has shown incredible self-control. Under the most extreme provocation, the U.S. maintained links with Indonesia and Ghana, thereby strengthening the anti-Communist forces that in recent weeks moved against Sukarno and Nkrumah. Personifying the U.S. posture in the world are the airmen of SAC flying their long patrols around the globe, the sailors of the U.S. nuclear submarines cruising for months in the service of immense, but immensely restrained power.
The "Why" Questions
Obviously Americans have their impatient streak. They distrust patience when it seems only to mask indecision or lack of initiative, the kind of patience that Psychiatrist Eric Berne (Games People Play) has in mind when he says: "Most people spend their life waiting for Santa Claus or death." Americans occasionally admire but basically fail to understand the legendary Oriental patience, which is based on a religious view that sees existence as an inescapable treadmill. In fact, Asians themselves are impatiently copying Western civilization, and they are beginning to recognize that what is seen as patience is often merely resignation to a lack of alternatives.