Success Quote by John Henry Patterson

Survival, Patterson implies, is not won by conquest but by submission - or at least by the appearance of it. Coming from a Gilded Age businessman best known for building National Cash Register into a modern corporate machine, "serve" reads less like altruism than strategy. It’s an ethic that flatters the marketplace: if the public is the judge, then a company can frame profit as a byproduct of usefulness, not extraction. In a period when corporations were rapidly scaling up, consolidating power, and attracting public suspicion, service becomes a kind of moral camouflage.

The line is also doing careful work with its grammar. Patterson stacks "men and business and corporations" as if they’re points on a single evolutionary ladder. Individuals, firms, and institutions all face the same Darwinian test: adapt to the needs of others or become obsolete. That’s a sharp pivot away from the era’s popular myth of the self-made titan, the lone genius who bends society to his will. Patterson sells a counter-myth: the successful enterprise is the one that anticipates demand, builds systems, and disciplines itself around the customer.

The subtext is managerial. "Serve" doesn’t necessarily mean "care"; it can mean "organize", "standardize", "train", "measure". Patterson pioneered sales scripts, quotas, and corporate paternalism - forms of service that also tighten control. The quote reassures workers and consumers that big business has a purpose beyond wealth, while quietly asserting that legitimacy itself is a business necessity.