Payoff from Excitement

Excitement is a fragile and abstract commodity not  likely to attract the serious attention of solid executives schooled in the arcane arts of finance  law, and manufacturing. Yet it is as crucial for new product success in cars, computers, and cutting tools as in cosmetics. That is why the annual machine tool trade show in Chicago increasingly has the extravagant appearance of Pucci's Paris showings. Elderly, gray- haired presidents of stolid Milwaukee machine- tool companies, austerely encased in tightly buttoned herringbone vests,appear pridefully beside their huge machines in McCormick Place amid a flashing circus of crepe- paper banners, rotating psychedelic lights, and alluringly under dressed young ladies hires to produce fetching come- hither looks that draw like magnets  other equally austere men into the fiscal vicinity of $ 100,000 milling machines designed to cut massive hunks of steel into smaller sculptured pieces. These stone faced president, who watch so carefully over each fleeting penny in their manufacturing operations, at converted into big spending good time Charlies in Chicago, where hospitality suites are a twenty-four-hour staple, and where there is an obvious presumption that ballyhoo, babes, and booze not only will attract the translucent attention of well - educated engineers armed with pocket slide rules, but will actually help convert them into serious prospects who might then and there possibly place on order.