Success Quote by Charles Schwab

Schwab is selling a management philosophy with the smooth certainty of a man who built an empire by making incentives feel like morality. The line flatters everyone at once: the worker, who wants to believe effort is unlocked by dignity, and the boss, who gets to cast himself as an enlightened cultivator rather than a disciplinarian. That universality clause, "however exalted his station", is doing heavy lifting. It’s a democratic gesture that also reinforces hierarchy: even the powerful, Schwab implies, are basically employees of their own ego, responsive to the same simple lever.

The intent is practical, not sentimental. Schwab isn’t arguing that criticism is wrong; he’s arguing it’s inefficient. Approval becomes a technology of output, a cheap form of compensation that can be dispensed in place of (or alongside) material rewards. The subtext is that workplaces run on emotional economies as much as financial ones, and smart managers should treat praise as capital.

Context matters: Schwab comes out of turn-of-the-century American industrial capitalism, when "scientific management" and mass production were redefining labor as a system to be optimized. In that world, criticism is associated with policing, turnover, and resentment; approval is framed as lubrication for the machine. The quote’s rhetorical strength lies in its apparent humanism while keeping the ultimate goal intact: greater effort. It’s soft power dressed as kindness, and it works because it tells both sides what they want to hear - that productivity and respect can align, as long as approval flows from the top.