Thinking Big Is Not Enoudh-chapter Five

           Americans are noted for their preference for scale. Magnitude is a measure of meaning. The bigger the better. ''Thinking Big'' is the distinctive and perennial American slogan. A few years ago it was only kooks, impecunnious student couples, and two-car suburbanites in high personal property tax towns who were presumed to be attracted by Volkswgen's peculiarly European slogan : ''Think Small.'' Volkswagen's slogan worked not because it competed with America's think-big attitudes but because it actually complemented and reinforced them. It was not a challenge to American values. Its ambitions were actually a playful affirmation of what really counts, namely, bigness.
           The Volkswagen slogan had an appropriately minority suggestion of miniaturness and quaintness. It is not only because of its silhouette that the car is called ''The Bug.'' A bug is small, close to the ground, even cute. If it isn't careful, it might get overrun and flattened. In the American rhetoric, to qualify as cute something must be viewed as only temporarily small-a cute baby, a cute kitten. In short, it does not merit serious adult attention except as a fetching or exceptional curiosity. It is not quite finished, not quite mature, not really legitimate in any pratical way. When the young married couple starts facing the serious business of life, the cute little Volkswagen will obviously have to give way in favor of a solidly adult Detroit chariot.Or so it seemed.
           America thinks big. Nobody has the slightest doubt that to bebig is to be great.Only the unschooled child says that it's a ''great big house'' or a ''great big airplane.'' No well-acculturated American adult would utter such an obvious redundancy, except occasionally to speak of Texas millionaires.
            Bigness isa dream that continues to animate American life and shape its business ethic. Yet, powerful forces operate to suggest that business succes will increasingly require an unaccustomed parallel capacity to thinks small. It is a neccessity imposed on American business by the rising tendency of both industrialand household consumers to be more discriminating in what they buy. The day of the universal brand is rapidly yielding to consumer demands for specialty brands and tailored products uniquely suited to the particular discriminate function or styles of life that people are learning to value nd assert. This imposes on American business the necesity for a way of thinking that is already having a profound impact on organization structure and cost of doing business.

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Selectivity and Segmentation

          New time are upon us. The traditional idea of the mass market, on which so many American business fortunes were built, is dying a gradual death. It may even be a complusive death. With fits and starts and occasional dramatic profits, it is still with us, but not, in the traditional sense, for long. It is being replaced by a new kind of market dominated by a new and powerfully different kind of consumer.
           The age of the indiscriminate mass consumer is in its twilight. We are rapidly entering an age of the discriminating consumer whose ambition is not to ''keep up with the Jonesess'' but to ''keep away from the Joneses.'' becoming a symbol of democratic affluence. They are becoming a symbol of mass-market anonymity, of deadening uniformity.
       For a good many  years to come, business success will depend less in an executive's capacity to think big and more on his capacity to think small-more correctly, to think selectively. He must stop thinking of his customers s part of some massively homogeneous market. He must start thinking of them as numerous small islands of distinctiveness, each of which reqires its own unique strategies in product policy, in promotional strategy, in pricing, in distribution methods, and in direct-selling techniques.
       An aggressively think-small attitude produced such enormous successes as Pepperidge Farm bread, Caedmon records, Early American cake mixes, compact cars and sporty personal cars, personal calculators, and even M&M candy. Enormous opportunity and profit await the company begins more aggressively to think small. And this applies most urgently to America's largest corporations, who seem so often to be so firmly married to the think-big formulas that produced such unmatched greatness in the past. For them, an unbending think-big attitude may be the surest road to ruin.
       In a world of system selling and broadly encompassing definitions of what an industry is, it is time we look again at the details of how the world now works.

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Conclusion

          All this raises a seeminglys frightenng question: If conformity and rigidity are necessary requisites of organization, and if these in turn help stifle creativity, and furthermore if the creative man might indeed be stifled if he is required to spell out the details needed to convert his ideas into effective innovations, does all this mean that modern organizations have  evolved into such involuted monsters of administration that they must suffer the fearful fate of the dinosaur-too big and inwiedly to survive?
          The answer is no. First, it is questionable whether the crative impulse will automatically dry up if the idea man is required to take some responsibility forfllow-through. The people who so resolutely proclaim their own creative energies will scarcely assert that they need a hothouse for its flowering. Second, the large organization has some important attributes that actually facilitate innovation. Its capacity to distribut risk over its broad economic base and among the many individuals involved in implementing newness is enormous. Its resources and capacities make it both economically and, for the individuals involved, personally easier to break untriedground.
          What often misleads people is the false assumption that to make big operating changes also requires making big organizational changes. Yes it is precisely one of the great virtues of a big organization that, in the short run at least, its momentum is irreversible and its organizational structure is, for all practical purpose, nearly impenetrable. A vast machinery exist to serious attention, no matter how exotically revolutionary a big operating or policy change may be. The boat can and may have to be rocked, but pne virtue of a big boat is that it takes an awful lot to rock it. Certain people or departments in the boat may feel the rocking more that others, and to that extent strive to avoid the incidents that produce it. But the built-in stabilizers of bigness and of group decision making can be used as powerful influences in encouraging people to risk these incidents.

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Adding Flexibility

           Finally, the large organization has alternatives to the alleged ''conservatizing'' conssequences of bigness. The realatively rigid organization can build into its own processes certain flexibilities that would provide fructifying opportubities for the creative but irresponsible individual. Some of these alternatives were discussed earlier.
            Some of them, however, have created their own organizational problems, some of them not terribly reassuring. The fact is that the problems and needs of companies differ. To this extent they have to find their own special ways of dealing with the issues discussed in this chapter. The important point is to be conscious of the possible need and value of finding ways to make creativity yield more innovation.
             Some companies have greater need for such measures than other. As pointed out earlier, the need hinges in part on the nature of the industry. Certainly it is easier to convert creativity into innovation in the advertising business than it is in an operating company, with its elaborate production pprocessses, long channels of distribution, and complex administrative setup.
              For those critics of, and advisers to, industry who repeatedly call for more creativity in business, it is well to try first to understand the profound distinction between creativity and innovation, and then perhaps to spend a little more time calling on creative individuals to take added resposibility for implementation. The fructifying potentials of creativity vary enormously with the particular industry, with the climate in the organization, with the organizational level of the idea man, and with the kinds of day-in, day-out problems, pressures, and responsibilities of the man to whom he addresses his ideas. Without clearly appreciating these facts, those who declare that a company will somehow grow and prosper merely by having more creative people make a fetish of their own illusions.

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The advices Business

It is to be expected, therefore that today's most ardent advocates of creativity in business tend to be professional writers, consultants, professors and often advertising agency executives  Not surprisingly, few of them have any continuing , day to day responsibility for the difficult task of implementing powerful new business ideas of a complex nature in the ordinary type of business organization. Few of them have ever had any responsibility for doing work in the conventional kind of complex operating organization. They are not really practicing businessmen in the usual sense. They are literary businessman. They are the doctors who say "Do as I say, no as I do," reminiscent of the classic injunction of the boxer's manager, "Get in there and fight. They can't hurt us."

The fact that these individuals are also so often outspoken about the alleged virulence of conformity in modern business is not surprising. They can talk way because they themselves have seldom had the nerve to expose themselves for any substantial length of time too rigorous discipline of an organization whose principal task is not talk about action, not ideas but work.

Impressive sermons are delivered gravely proclaiming the virtues of creativity and the vices of conformity. But so often the authors of these sermons, too are "outsiders" to the central sector of the business community  The best known asserters that American industry is some sort of vast quagmire of quivering conformity the men who have turned the claim into s tire some cliche are people like William H. Whyte, Jt,. authr of The Organization Man, " Who is a professional writer, Sloan Wilson, author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, who was  college English professor when he wrote the book, and C. Northcote Parkinson (more on him later). also a professor.

It is of course inevitable that it is writers, and not business practitioners, who write mostly about business. My purpose is not to condemn them, or to condemn consultants or professors. American business appears generally to benefit from their existence  But it is harmful when the abused executive fails to consider that the very role of these men absolves them from managerial responsibility. Still, it is hard to accept uncritically the doleful prophesy that so many United States companies are hypnotically following one another in a deadly march of confining conformity. It is hard to accept the tantalizing suggestion offered by outsiders that business's salvation lies a massive infusion of creativity and that from this will follow an automatic flow of profit building innovation  Perhaps the source of these suggestion should occasionally be kept in mind.

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The Psychology of " Idea Men "

The fact that a consistently highly creative person is generally irresponsible in the sense that we have used this term is in part predictable from what is known about the freewheeling fantasies of very young children. They are extremely creative, as any kindergarten teach will testify. They have a naive curiosity that stumps parents with question like, "Why can you see through glass?" Why is there a hole in a doughnut?" Why is the grass green?" It is this questioning attitude that produces in them so much creative freshness  Significantly, the unique posture of their lives is their almost total irresponsibility from blame, work, and the other routine necessities of organized society. Even the law absolves them from responsibility for their actions. But all spruces testify to their creativity, even biblical mythology, with its assertion about wisdom issuing from "the mouths of babes." Respectable scientific sources have compared the integrative mechanism of adult creativity with the childhood thought process that "Manifests itself during the pre-school period possibly as early as the appearance of three word sentences . . . "

Clinical psychologists have also illustrated the operating irresponsibility of creative individual in Rorschach and stroboscopic test. For example, one analyst says, "Those who took to the Rorschach like ducks to water, who fantasied and projected freely, even too freely in some cases, or who could permit themselves to tamper with the form of the blot as given, gave us our broadest ranges of movement. "In short, they were the least "form bound," the least inhibited by the facts of their experiences, and hence let their minds explore new, untried, and novel alternatives to existing ways of doing things.

The significance of this finding for the analysis of organizations is pointed up by the observation of another psychologist that "the theoreticians on the other hand do not mind living dangerously. "The reason is obvious. A theoretician is not immediately responsible for action. He is perfectly content to "live dangerously" because he does so only on the conceptual level, where he cannot get hurt. To assume any responsibility for implementation is to risk dangerous actions and that can be painfully uncomfortable. The safe solution is to steer clear of implementation and all the dirty work it implies.

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The Chronic Complainers

As I have said, "identation" is nit a synonym for "inovation," conformity " is bot its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of creative thinking. Indeed, what some people call conformity in business is less related to the lack of abstract creativity than to the lack of responsible action, whether it be the implementation of new or o;d ideas.

The proof of this is that in most business organizations, the most continually creative men in the echelons below the executive level are men who are actively discontent with the here and now. They are the creative men, but they are also generally known as corporate malcontents. They tend to complain constantly about the stand pat senility of the management, about its refusal to see the obvious facts of its own massive inertia. They complain about management refusing to do things that have been suggested to it for years. They often complain that management does not even want creative ideas , that ideas rock the boat (which they do), and that management is interested more in having a smoothly running (or is it smoothly ruining  organization than is having a rapidly forward vaulting business.

In short, they talk about the company being a festering sore of deadly conformity, full of decaying vegetables who systematically oppose new ideas with old ideologies. And then, of course, they frequently quote their patron saint, William H. Whyte Jr., with all his misinformed moralizing and conjectural evidence about what goes on inside an operating organization.

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WhyDoors Are Closed

The reason the creative malcontent speakers this way is that so often the people to whom he addresses his flow of ideas do, indeed, after awhile, ignore him and tell him to go away. They shut their doors to his endless entreaties ; they refuse to hear his ideas any longer. Why? There is a plausible explanation.

The reason the executive so often rejects new ideas is that he is a busy man whose chief day in, day out task is to handle an ongoing stream of pressing problems. He receives an unending flow of question on which actions must be taken. Constantly he is forced to deal with problems to which solution are more or less urgent but for which answers are far from self evident. It may seem stolen did to a subordinate to supply his boss with a lot of brilliant new ideas to help him in his job, but advocates of creativity must once and for all understand the pressing facts of the executives's life : Every time an ideas is submitted to him, it creates more problems for him and he already has enough.

Professor Raymond A. Bauer of Harvard has pointed out an instructive example from another field of activity. He notes that many congressmen and senators have the opportunity to have a political science "intern" assigned to "help" them. However, some congressmen and senators refuse this help on the grounds that these interns generate so many ideas that they disrupt the legislator's regular business.

Similarly, Dr. E Paul Torrence of the University of Minnesota found that teachers of highly creative children said they were less desirable to have in the classroom. They were measurably less studious and less hard working than highly intelligent students. They predictably departed in unpredictable ways from the expectations and order the teachers apparently felt required to institutionalize. Jonathan Kozol has written about quite similar problem in Boston's black ghetto schools.

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Making Ideas Useful

Innovations necessary in business, but it begins with an idea with some body's proposal. How can the man with a new idea also be responsible  in the organizational sense?At least two "ideas" may be helpful :
1. He must work with the existing situation. Since the executive is already awhile he shuns more new ideas to solve problems he did not even know existed. He needs to get things done, not just more advice about what things to do or how to do them. The "idea man" has to learn to accept this as a fact of life. He has to act accordingly.
2. When the creative man suggests an idea, the responsible procedure is to include at least some minimal indication of what it involves in terms of concrete activities, cost, risks, manpower, time, and perhaps even specific people who ought to carry it through. That is the essence of responsible behavior, because it make sit easier for the executive to evaluate the idea while anticipating and dealing with the problems that will invariably come quickly to his mind. That is the way creative thinking will more likely be converted into innovation.

It will be argued, of course that to saddle the creative individual with the responsibility of spelling out the details of implementation will curb or even throttle his unique talent. This may e true. But this could be salutary  both for him and for the company. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is their implementation. Until then they are in limbo. If the executive's job pressure mean that an idea seldom gets a good hearing unless it is responsibility presented, then the unthrottled and irresponsible creative man is useless to the company. If an insistence on some responsibility for implementation throttles him, he may produce fewer ideas, but their chances of getting a judicious hearing and therefore of being followed through are greatly improved. The company will benefit by trig the ideas, and the creative man will benefit by getting the satisfaction of knowing he is being listened to. He will not have be a malcontent any more.

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Need for discipline

Writers on the subject of creativity and innovation invariably emphasize the essential primacy of the creative impulse itself. Almost as an afterthought they talk about the necessity to teaching people to sell their ideas and stimulating executive to listen to the ideas of subordinates and peers. Then they often go on casually to make some unconscious statement about the importance of creating a permissive organizational climate for creative people. They rarely try to look at the executive's job and suggest how the creatives genius might alter his behavior to suit the boss's requirements. It is always the boss who is being told to mend his ways. The reason for their siding with the creative man is that the put side critics are generally as hostile to the very idea of the "organization" as the inside Creative men themselves. Both actively dislike organizations, but they seldom know exactly why.

Most likely the reason is that organization and creativity do not seem to go together. Organization and conformity do. Writers, critics, and other professionally creative people tend to be autonomous men, preferring to live by their personal wits. For them, to live in a highly structured organizational environment is a form of oppressive imprisonment. Hence, their advocacy of a "permissive environment" for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact : one of the collateral purposes of an organizational is to be in hospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity. Whether we are talking about the United States Steel Corporation or the United Steel Workers of America, the United States Army or the Salvation Army, the U.S.A or the U.S.S.R., the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predicable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of flexibility that are necessary to get the most pressingly intended job done efficiently and on time.

Creativity and innovation disturb that order. Organization tends to be inhospitable to creativity and innovation, though without creativity and innovation the organization would eventually perish. That is why small, one man shops are so often more animated and " inflationary  than large ones. They have virtually no organization and often are run by self willed autocrats who act on impulse.

Organization are created to achieve order. They have policies, procedures, and formal or powerfully informal rules. The job for which the organization exists could not possible get done without these rules, procedures, and policies. And these produce the so called "conformity" that is so blithely deprecated by the critics of the organization and life inside it.

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Limits of Servitude

Limits of Servitude

        The trouble with thinking of oneself as providing services-either in the service industries or in the service industrie-is s or in the customer-service sectors of manufacturing and retailing companies-is that one almost inescapably embraces ancient, preindustrial modes of thinking. Worse still, one gets caught up in rigid attitudes that can have a profoundly paralyzing effect on even the most resolute of rationalist.

         The concept of ''service'' evokes, from the opaque recesses of the mind, time-worn images of personal ministration and attendance. It refers generally to deeds one individual performs personally for another. It carries historictal connotations of charity, gallantry, and selflessness, or of obedience, subordination, and subjugation. In these contexts, people serve because they want to (as in the priestly and political professions) or they serve because they are compelled to (as in slavery and such occupations of attendance as waiter, maid, bellboy, cleaning lady).

          In the higher-status service occupations, such as in the church and the army, one customarily behaves ritualllistically, not rationally. In the lowerstatus service occupations, one simply obeys. In neither is independent thinking presumed to be a requisite of holding a job. The most that can therefore be expected from service improvements is that, like Avis, a person will try harder. He will just exert more animal effort to do better what he is already doing.

        So it was in ancient times, and so it is today. The only difference is that where ancient masters invoked the will of God or the whip of the foreman to spur perfomance, modern industry uses training programs in either our methods or our results.

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Promise of Manufacturing

Promies of Manufacturing 

          Now consider manufact, nuring. Here the orientation is toward the efficient production of resultot toward attendance on other. Relationship are strictly businesslike, devoid of invidious connotations of rank or self.
          When we think about how to improve manufacturing, we seldom focus on ways to improve our presonal performance or present tasks; rather, it is axiomatic that we try to find entirely new ways of performing present tasks and, better yet, of actually changing the tasks themselves. We  don not think of greater exertion of our animal energies (working physically harder, as the slave), of greater expansion of our commitment (being more devout or loyal, as the priest), or of greater assertion of our dependence (being more obsequious, as the butler). Instead, we apply the greater exertion of our minds to learn how to look at a problem differently. More particulary, we ask what kinds of tools, old or new, and what kinds of skills, processes, organiztional rearrangements, inecentives, control, and audits might be enlisted to greatly improve the intended outcomes. In short, manufacturing thinks technocratically, and that explains its successes. Service thinks humanistically, and that explains its failure.
        Manufacturing looks for solutions inside the very tas to be done. The solution to building a low-priced automobile, for example, dervis largely from the nature and composition of the automobile itself. (If the automobile were not an assembly of parts, it could not be manufactured on an assembly line.) By contrast, service looks for solutions in the perfomer of the tasks. This is the paralyzing legacy of our inherited attitudes: The solution to improve service is viewed as being dependent on improvements in the skills and attitudes of the prformers of that service.
        While it may pain and offend us to say so, thinking in humanistic rather than techocratic terms ensures that the service sector of the modern economy will be forever inefficient and that the service sector of the modern economy will be forever inefficient and that our satisfactions will be forever marginal. We see service as invariably and undeviatingly personal, as something performed by individuals directly for other individuals.
        This humanistic conception of service diverts us from seeking alternatives to the use people, especially to large, organized groups of people. It does not allow us to reach out for new solutions and new difinitions. It obstruct us from redesigning the task themselves; from eliminating the conditions that created the problem.
        In sum, to improve the quality and efficiency of service, companies must apply the kind of technocratic thinking which in other fieldsnhas replaced the high-cost and erratic elegance of the artisan with the los-cost, predictable munificence of the manufacturer.

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Field versus Factory

Field versus Factory

       People think of service as quite differnt from manufacturing. Service is presumed to be performed by individuals for other individuals, generally on a one-to-one basis. Manufacturing is presumed to be performed by machines, generally tended by cluster of individuals whose sizes and configurations are themselves dictated by the machines' requirements. Service (whether customer service or the service of service industries) is performed "out there in the field" by distant and lossely supervised pople working under highly variable, and often volatile, conditions. Manufacturing occurs "here in the factory'' under highly centralized, carefully organized, tightly controlled, and elaboratelyenginerred conditions.
       People assume, and rightly so, that these differences largely explain why product produced in the factory are generally more uniform in features and quality than the services produced (e.g., life insurance policies, machine repairs) or delivered (e.g., spare parts, milk) in the field. One cannot as easily control one's agents or their performance out there in the field. Besides, different customers want different things. The result is that service and service industries, in comparison with manufacturing industries, are widely and correctly viewed as being primitive, sluggish, and inefficient.
      Yet it is doubtful that things need be all that bad. Once conditions in the field get the same kind of attention that conditions inside the factory generally get, a lot of new opportunities become possible. But first management will have to revise its thinking about what service is and what it implies.

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Systems selling

It is fashionable to talk about systems selling. It is not so clear what it means and where it applies. The term originated, in fact, not with the seller but with the buyer. The federal military establishment developed the practice of buying major weapons and communications packages through a single prime contractor. Instead of buying individual items for a battleship, such as the ship's shell, the artillery, the electronic submarine sighting equipment, and the telecommunications devices, it bought them as a single package from a single company, even though no single company produced all the components. Package contracts were awarded to companies with the capability to design, engineer, build, assemble  and service the complete package. The package was the system, and prime contractors were compelled to bid on the system as a whole, getting in turn their own subsystem phrase, although in practice it was antedated by general contractors in a vast variety of fields from building dams to constructing oil refineries.

The growing complexity of products that have elaborate inter industry characteristics has made system buying an increasing necessity. Computers must be tied into communications networks, and warehouses tied into computers and transportation networks. The combination of competences, resources, and equipment needed to make a single piece of industrial equipment or to organize a totally efficient activity requires the elaborate coordination of a constantly expanding network of varied coming itself, but marketing plays a central role.

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Three 2 Kinds of Systems Selling

In doing this, Litton demonstrated that there are, using the conventional terminology, three different kinds of systems selling three different kinds of augmented products : the product system, the contracting system and the service system.

A conventionally defined product system consists of products combined through engineering and design into an operating unit to perform a specific function. The example of the battleship fills that bill admirably, as does Litton's integrated mix of retailer equipment.

Systems contracting does not sell systems, but uses systems to sell. Thus, while our earlier example showed American Airlines creating a product system, the result for Raytheon was its offering to its distributors a Friden Western Union communications devices that would better enable them to buy Rayttheon products. Similarly Beals, McCarthy & Rogers, Inc., an industrial distributor in Buffalo, New York, is a good example of providing a contracting system. It manufactures nothing, but offers customers the use of its computer and data transmission system to facilitate ordering, faster distribution, less paper work, and reduced acquisition cost. Litton's retailer system has the eventual potential of providing similar benefits by linking the Kimball control information directly from the selling floor to suppliers.

The service system achieves the ultimate of total integration. It sells a system, while the system sells both itself and a service. It is essentially an information processing and pseudo decision making mechanism to help customers manage their affairs better and in the process deal more constantly with their originating vendor.

The Carborundu Company also pioneered an interesting system. Instead of merely selling bonded abrasives in the usual fashion, it decided on the necessity of developing a completely integrated capability in steel conditioning. This resulted, as a first step, in its acquisition of the Tysamun Machine Company. At enormous cost over several years, Carborundum developed a method of machine chipping to augment the grinding process, such hat the user in one continuous activity could remove scale and surface defects from a cylinder of steel intone hour and fifteen minutes rather than in the eight hours required by former methods.

What characterized Carbordum's effort was not merely the development of a better method, but the discovery of the necessity for it. Instead of looking only at what potential customers were doing it looked more comprehensively at what they would have to be doing the future. Carbrundum concluded that steel industry would have to concert to continuous casting, which would require hot cutoff and hot grinding instead of the old methods of doing these jobs after the products cooled.

By making an arbor less grinding the wheel's running speed was increased by 25 percent. Then Carborundum's Bonded Abrasives Research Center devised a machine to grin hot steel at 1800o F, so that cooling, moving, devised a machines to grinding wheel, it became possible to more than double the amount of steel that could be removed in an hour.

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Conglomerates and Marketing

One of the best examples is Litton Industries. The company is known as a conglomerate, and yet many of Litton's acquisitions were a process of creating under a single roof the might otherwise have to buy separately on the open market. Thus, some years ago, Litton acquired and combined the Monroe Calculating Machine Company and the Swedish cash register company, Sweda. Subsequently it acquired Kimball, the company that manufactures the unit control punched tickets used by soft goods retailers for monitoring product movement and inventories. Then later Litton acquired Street er  a manufacturer of retail display cases.

Thee pattern was obvious. Litton was developing a vertically integrated competence to supply packaged systems to retails system that handle all the materials, information flow, and record keeping from warehouse to display counter to cash register to computerized inventory purchasing and financial centers. Litton was creating a new "product", a retail processing system. It hoped to alter the way large retailers planned and bought the equipment that was involved buying not be individual components from separate suppliers, but a whole system from a single supplier.

To call this effort a conglomerate is to mistake the apparent structure for the operating substance. Looked at in terms of how retailers traditionally operate, Litton expanded itself in order to provide its customers with a single, integrated product system. But looked at in terms of what this did to Litton (at least one segment of the company) the result was anything but conglomerate. We would not say that Ford Motor Company's acquisition years ago of its own steel mill and tire factory got it started as a conglomerate. We would call that "vertical integration." What Litton did in the retailing field is also vertical integration. The difference is that whereas Ford created or bought a series of suppliers for which it became the single customer, Litton put together a series of suppliers such that their customer, Litton put together a series of suppliers such that their customers might have a single source. Thus instead of Litton in this case being engaged in some sort of fiscal razzle dazzle, it was performing the perfectly respectable function of trying to better serve a new kind of customer buying need.

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"Tripping Out" and the Adult Dilemma

In such a world, combined with generic product standardization and far above subsistence living, it is not surprising that man responds eagerly to the fascinating shock of the unexpected. The enormous attractions of marijuana  contact sports, television violence, and literary "sex and sadism" are understandable. They provide man with escape not escape from reality but escape back to reality. He wants to escape from the artificiality that the machine has imposed on his life and return to  more primitive involvement of his senses with nature in the raw. The only reason teenagers and college students are greater consumers of marjuana than adults is simply that adults have greater obligations to the machine. They cannot "drop out" because they are too deeply in.They are prisoners of the world they made.

This accounts for the intensity of the adult furor over the seemingly aberrant life styles of their children. It represents less adults' concern about the health and happiness of their children than the fact that they are envious of their children's freedom. The young people who take trips and smoke pot need it least because they are already so much less thoroughly bound to society's rigid routines. The people who need most to escape, who are most firmly imprisoned by the world from which the trip is an escape and who have the greatest need to drop out, are the adults. They are understandably unhappy about the liberated behavior of their children.

The adult's reward for a life of hard work and scheduled dedication to his job is the anomalous necessity to work even harder and with more dedication. The juvenile beneficiaries of his inescapable attachment to the machine are most intent on escaping the machine. No wonder the adult world is so outspoken about the younger generation. It shows no gratitude for parental sacrifices indeed it pooh poohs them and seeks artificial escapes from what is already a condition of great relative freedom. The invocation of moral platitudes and self righteous calls for order and discipline have been the predictable outpourings of envious adults and social arbiters ever since Isaiah.

The adult too searches for and needs excitement the felicitous injection into his life of benignly unexcpected events. That is why excitement will increasingly, in spite and perhaps because of computers and management science, become a powerful ingredient in business success. The man, the company, the product that denies this most in practice will suffer most in the market.

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The sensate Society

Three factors combine to emphasize the accelerating necessity to build excitement into the very core of business activity. One is that we live in a society in which so many people have so many more things and so much more money than need to sustain life at some reasonable level of amenities. Second is that there is so little to set one generic product off from another. And third is the inevitable routinization of man's daily task, whether in business, at home, or at play.

Routine is a consequence of mechanization. Premechanized society routinized life according to the cyclical regularity of natural phenomena : the daily rising and setting of the sun, the periodic cycle of the seasons. Machines, however, have produced many more routines, and these in important respects deprive man of his freedom. The postindustrial farmer, even though the sun predictably roused him to the fields, had enormous freedom regarding how he could spend his time until sunset. On balmy summer days he could without a second thought take a siesta under an apple tree. In the fall he might hunt, and in the winter sleep. Industrial man does not use the sun as his alarm clock. He gets to work not at about eight o'clock, but at 8 A.M. sharp. That is when the assembly line is turned on and the office begins to hum. The siesta, no matter how tempting, is obsolete, as the rising industrialization is making clear in Latin countries. The machine cannot economically be turned off for the civilized midday privileges of preindustrial life. Not even so profoundly important a national ritual as baseball's World Series commands enough authority to slow the machine. Where the machine itself does not directly pace industrial life, such as in the office, the World Series gets attention only via the subterfuge of the transistor radio hidden in the desk drawer.

This fact tells us as well as anything how powerful are the routinizing and regimenting consequences of the underlying technology. The simple twelve hour rhythm of the preindustrial day is inverted to the complex and demanding clockwork of the preindustrial day is converted to the complex and demanding clockwork of the present. The industrial day is a series of highly involuted and programmed cycles, from the harsh ring of the morning alarm clock to the scheduled rush to work: from the periodic rest and coffee breaks to the standardized dinner hour at home : and finally to the closing weather report on late night television. The necessity of such routinization is so profound that we understandably begin acculturating the smallest child. Demand feeding of infants gives way to scheduled feeding. By the time the child is old enough to go to school, he doesn't view getting there on time as anything but routine. Even the acceptance of the necessity of organized routine is routine.

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Hello Kitty Crystal and Mother of Pearl Background White Band Watch & Hello Kitty Pouch + Extra Battery - Brand New

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High Sierra Powerglide Wheeled Book Bag

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The Slide Rule versus the Human Rule

The issue is a simple one : What is the relative importance of the slide rule versus the human rule ? the Human rule is more important, even in selling slide rules, than is generally conceded, more important than sellers are generally aware. The ingredient of excitement and other embellishments are central characteristics of the products themselves. They must be viewed as part of the essential characteristics built into the product from the beginning.

The importance of this is further ad perhaps best illustrated to the executive who frequently flies via commercial airline. Consider the setting. Here is  man of solid perspicacity and great responsibility about to enters massive tube of aluminum, plastics, glass, textiles, and copper wire. The tube will take him at incredible speed six miles up into the heavens, where the arctic winds can freeze him into an instant icicle and the air pressure can crush him like a champagne glass. A faulty part in the engine, a minor, defect in the pressurizing equipment, a suddenly berserk pilot, and the executives's life is extinguished. And how does our paragon of the managerial arts decide between TWA, American or United for the 8 A.M trip from New York's La Guardian Airport to Chicago's O'Hare? Ask the man from Mars, and he will be rational a moment to tell you that when his life at stake, man will be rational and decide on the basis of slide rule calculation regarding the safest airline to take. He will want at least to consult CAB records for the airline with the best record.

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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.

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Creating Actionable Product Definitions

Only philosophers can afford to define products in ontological terms and that is only because for them it makes no operational difference what the definition is. For any body to whom it makes a difference, the definition must have actionable content. It must suggest a concrete course of action.

The examples of he augmented products cited above have in common a single attribute, they contain features  that produce results a competitive plus. These key feature  the features that distinguish these products from those of competitors, are invariably external to the generic products in the old fashioned terms in which we are in the habit of defining industries.

In some cases the things with a product is surrounded are so visibly important to its success that we thoughtlessly take their importance for granted. Their significance is totally overlooked. Quick examples are clothing, cosmetics, and even cars.

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Survival for the Small company

Because this new competitions is costly, it creates survival problems for the small members of industries dominated by large firms. It is to be expected therefore, that survival for the small firm will increasingly take the form of carving out highly specialized niches in markets that the large, think big firms have not yet organized themselves to reach, or indeed cannot reach that. Faced with the thriving aggressiveness of mass merchandising stores that sell well known major appliances at relatively rock bottom prices, major department stores have difficulty impressing on the community that they are low priced sellers. Their cost structures generally prevent them from selling these highly advertised commodities at competitively low prices. Speed Queen and Gibson have helped them to make a competitive low price impression. They have chosen not to compete with the major producers in terms of either advertising volume or in the same distribution outlets, they offer their appliances almost exclusively to large metropolitan department stores at highly attractive prices. These stores use their own reputations and local advertising power to promote these brands, thus enabling themselves to make an impact as low price sellers of major appliances while giving otherwise obscure brands the benefit of their reputations.

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Organized Entrepreneurship

The president, whose ultimate job is to secure the organization's future cannot escape the fact that is successful future requires the creations of customers. This means that marketing's talent of studying the consumer must be developed and enlisted, while the entrepreneurial audacity to capitalize on its findings must be cultivated and employed, especially at the upper levels.

Unfortunately, it is difficult for person with little or no intimate exposure to the entrepreneurial process to know what it really is. Few men who, by common consent, are viewed as having achieved great deeds of entrepreneurship would agree that this term describes any of the things that large organizations call by that name  In the large organization the process of creating new things is distinguished by the risk reducing efforts that surround it. Large organizations do not have gambling instinct. Innovation, like other functions of the firm, is viewed as an orderly process in which uncertainties are sedulously avoided unless they can be converted into manageable risks. Indeed, as Schon shows, the whole process of innovation in the large organization may be described as that of converting uncertainty into risk that is, of describing probable outcome sin budgetary terms. Where this is not possible,nothing is ventured. The large organization cannot operate in uncertainty, but is well equipped to handle risk. Risk lends itself to quantitative expression. Its probabilities can be calculated. It can be controlled by the formal mechanisms of justifications and review.

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What the Chief Must do

Information, discipline, planning, structure, and order these are in escapble organizational requisites. The larger the organization, the more they are required. But the more they are required, the more their restrictive consequences must be offset by more emancipating styles at the apex.

Marketing is the one corporate function that is least effectively governed in a traditionally orderly manner. Unfortunately, it is the implicit recognition of this fact which so often causes marketing to be governed so sloppily. A great deal more order, system. planning, control, and even rigidity can be injected into most marketing organizations without injury to their success. The typical plea is that marketing deals with too many intangibles to be effectively governed in the conventional manner. In many cases this plea merely masks a congenial preference for a free floating, undisciplined shop. Often it represents an unwillingness to face the demanding requirements of professional and responsible behavior  The chief executive can and should except more from his marketing department than persuasively plausible arguments that "marketing is different."

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Unintentional Communication

The higher the person's rank, the more fully his unintentional commiseration will be seen and the more elaborately they will be interpreted. The higher his rank, the greater the significance that will be attached to his untended rather than his intended communications. Every body knows that the rules are less important than the ropes. The rules are that the intended communications be very carefully structured. The president's speeches are prepared with the penultimate care given to state documents. The object is to sound a ceremonial note of purpose, dedication, and progress without at the same time saying anything either too specific or too insufficiently promising. His letter in the annual report is so antiseptically conventional that, except for a few numbers, it would be perfectly suitable for the reports of a dozen other companies drawn out of a hat. Those are the rules. Anybody who knows the ropes knows that the trick is to hear what he is not saying that everybody listens so carefully.

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Where the Action Is

There is no question that a large , complex organization needs formal procedures and standards. But it is precisely because it needs them that it needs to guard against their unrestrained proliferation. Even more, it needs to guard against their becoming a crutch of management and a substitute for the executive getting his hands dirty.

For example  there is tendency in many large organizations to operate almost exclusively through written reports and to make judgments almost exclusively on the basis variances between budgets and actually  on the basis of the difference between formal standards and hoped for estimates. As a resit  often not enough attention is paid to the character, the methods, and the spirit of the men whose performance and promise are being evaluated in the process. There is , in short, not enough of a premium put on direct face to face evaluation of and "feel for," the man.

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The Power of Management Styles

The rigid requirements of management style are not without their helpful purposes, however. Therein lies the awful dilemma of modern leadership. The chief executive helps set the management style. If he does not for his own decisions insist on the requirement f completed staff work, neither will his subordinates. The result would certainly be catastrophic. The large, complex organization cannot effectively execute its day-to-day tasks without constant, careful study of its operations, without carefully systematic and documented inputs to its operating decisions. The Henry Ford Fashion of hunch is not enough.

Yet at the apex of the organization the central decisions about the future cannot be effectively facilitated with the kinds of materials that the method of "completed staff work" provides. Top decisions of certain limited kinds, of course, can be facilitated by this kind of staff work- decisions rearing legitimate extrapolations about the required size of future plan facilities  location of certain distributions  international markets to enter with existing products and the capital requirements for such ventures.

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Limits of Scientific Management

What distinguishes this analysis from the more common type of forecasting and staff reporting is that it is qualitative and protective rather than quantitative and extrapolation  It requires creative and cerebral inputs rather than quantitative and arithmetical ones. The available "facts" with which Xerox's top management dealt were entirely different from those used by the consultants and the staff. Not that the consultants and the staff were incapable of such inputs, rather, their reason for existence was precisely to avoid  such inputs. Consultants and staff exist in order that decisions will be based on "solid facts," not on the old seat-of-the-pants intuition or "feel for the market." They exist specially to replace what is viewed as the risky method of the past- the intuitive guesswork of sell willed entrepreneurs. Because that is the reason consultants exist, it is hardly legitimate for them to repeat, even in elaborately rationalized form what they have been hired to replace.

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What's at Shake

More is at stake than the life of the business. Also at shake is the kind of life the business will lead and the kind of people available to run the business. The manager of the R & D department may return from the campuses with magnificently promising "A" students who will produce products that the silent architect does not want. He wants only low-cost imitations of other companies  proved product. The R & D head could have saved himself lots of headaches and the company lots o money by going after soli "C" students. The marketing hes in the meanwhile would have gone after the campus's fast-moving promoters rather than careful product planners. The solitary silence of the architect at the top will have produced frustration  resignstiond, and really none of the objective he so jealously kept to himself

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The Task at The Top

Let us once again look at the special role of the chief executive and see how it imposes on him the special necessity for independent strategic thinking.

The central task of a business is to create and keep a customer. The chief function of the business's chief executive is to see that the business will constantly succeed in that endeavor  A great many chief executives confine their efforts in this regard to assuring that appropriate financial and management resources will be available. Some have answered very elaborately the question of "available for what?" They know where they plan their companies to be. Others know it by instinct. Many now only that they want to "keep going"

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Car Window Shade

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Decision or Choice?

Managers are increasingly withholding complex decisions until " all the facts are in " and the situation has been "thoroughly studied," Judgement is suspended until the staff has reported. But finally, when the decision is made at the corporate top, it is neither a decision nor a judgement. It is a choice- and generally not even a choice between alternatives, rather the choice is between accepting or rejecting the staff's elaborately documented and heavily supported proposal. It is, more over, a choice in which the line executive does not so much make a judgment based on his own independent thought as it is his going through a process by which he gives or withholds his blessing of the staff's recommendation  In more advanced or sophisticated, but rate, situations, he is given a set of alternatives from which to choose. He must make a choice or judgment as to which to use, but it is always expected in such cases that the staff will indicate its own preference.

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Thinking : The New Necessity

The irony is clear : The more data we get, the less time is available for their effective use. Hence the more effective we get at providing data, the greater the requirement that we spend more preparatory time deciding specifically what we want them for what are the relevant issues and questions? The necessity of thinking is intensified, not obviated, by the prodigality of data and information.

The feedback consequences of this are also clear. The computer must be harnessed to give the executive more time to think so that he can effectively use the computer. If the computer fails to do that, it will consume itself. It will be like a giant weed whose ungovernable growth creates a self-destructive imbalance in its metabolism.

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Thingking : By the Boss or by His staff ?

Yet high-echelon executive decision making in the large corporation seldom exhibits evidence of very much careful thinking  The decision making process is generally assumed to involve a heavy input of judgement. The implication is that thinking is what guides judgment. Yet when we look st the criteria by which men are chosen for top positions, no one will deny that it is successful experience the predominates, not evidence of competent thinking  Men are systematically rotated into various assignments in order that they may get a "breadth of experience in all our operations" before elevated finally to the upper ranks.

This premium on experience is powerfully attested to by the authority accorded to men who in meeting "talk from experience" and by the devastating opprobrium implied by the observation, "That may bell right in theory, but . . . " Theory, " which is the Siamese twin of thought, " is held in low esteem. TO think your way through to a solution is to imply a failure of the legitimate way to get it, by experience and brute energy.

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The Role of Marketing

Since produce line planning bears so visibly on the company's future posture, the chief executive has a particular responsibility to expect that the marketing department will supply him with the data and the advice necessary for informed decisions as to what is to be produced, now and in the future.

Data Are Not Information
 The enormous prodigality of the computer has so accelerated the process of data accumulation that we often actually know less than we did before. Great masses of data are disgorged in impressively magnificent print-outs. Yet they seldom improve our grasp of the elaborately quantified situations they are depicted.

Data are not information. Information is not meaning. Just as data require processing to become informational, so information requires processing to become meaningful

Yet the more abundant the information, the less meaning it will yield. We know that the surest way to destroy a man's capacity for discrimination is to overwhelm his senses with the relevant stimuli. The greater the variety of food consumed at a meal, the less you appreciate each dish. The louder the noise, the less impressive the message.

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ergo, air cargo

Similarly, supplementing a factory- produced product with services is completely different from running a factory, and it is different from the usual way of selling the product. A classic example is the work of American Airlines during its early efforts at promoting air freight. The motivation was obvious. Airplanes carried people all day long and halfway through the night. But from midnight until dawn these costly but highly mobile fixed assets remains idle. Searching for new uses, American sought out the distributors who resold largely to small radio and television repair shops throughout the nation. It had five warehouses supplied from a single factory warehouse near Boston.

American studied Raytheon's distribution operations in infinite detail  The result was a proposal to eliminate all five field warehouses and supply distributors directly to overnight air cargo. American proposed that all daily orders be assembled at the factory each night, picked up by American at the plant, and transported by air cargo overnight to fourteen break bulk locations throughout the nation. From there common carrier truckers would deliver the orders immediately to distributors.

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The Problem of Defining the Problem

The marketing concept views the customer's purchasing activities at being problem-solving activities. This view of what the consumer does can have a profound effect on how the supplier or seller conducts his affairs. It affects more than how he does business and how much business he does. It affect what the consumer is actually trying to do, the seller will see that his problem as a seller is quite different from what it is usually assumed to be.Only after he defines his problem properly can the seller decide what is proper for him to do. Never is this necessity more urgent than when competition is most serve. The most serve kind of competition is warfare. It is not surprising , therefore, that war strategy has so often focused so carefully on a prior definition of the specific problem at hand. Since one gets few second chances, it is essential that the first try succeed.

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART I

MARKETING IS NOT the devious art of separating the unwary consumer form his loose change. While it encompasses many commercial arts- selling, pricing, product policy, merchandising, promotion, advertising- marketing is these things and lots more.

Marketing is concerned with all the exhilarating big things and all the troublesome little things that must be done in every nook and cranny of the entire organization in order to achieve the corporate purpose of attracting and holding costumers. This means that marketing is not just a business function. It is a consolidating view of the entire business process.

Obviously, then, marketing is not just for marketing specialists. Marketing is also for presidents- which is what all other corporate departments also say so urgently about themselves. The lieutenants of each department constantly tell the president that his direct personal support is immediately needed lest the enterprise suffer irreparable harm. Every department calls for the chief's undeviating and sympathetic attention- production, finance, personnel, community relations, labor relation, R & D. If the poor man responded fully to everybody, he would scarcely have time to be president.

Though marketing is for the president, few things in marketing actually need his attention. Those which do can have a power full impact on the life and earnings of his company. Unless the chief executive is thoroughly ex per-fenced in the subject, the things in marketing that require his direct attention can pose treacherous problems. Because marketing deals so inescapably with intangibles and with data that are simultaneously incomplete, unreliable, and not usually very relevant, marketing is not an art easily masters in mid-life, like finance.

One thing that distinguishes marketing from other corporate functions is its unique operating environment. Instead of performing mainly against standards-as for example, manufacturing does- it performs mainly against competitors. Manufacturing has cost ad operating standards. It has a lot of control over its environment- production processes, machines, and employees. These are organized and manipulated under one corporate roof to produce maximum efficiencies. In contrast, marketing is all over the map : it has very little comparable control very its environment.

Both manufacturing and marketing must roll with the punches, except that marketing gets punched more often and more unexpectedly. It is in more continuous and direct contact with the enemy. Outside conditions constantly impose new and unexpected demands. Because of that, marketing's main thrust is less with efficiency than with magnitude. It is less immediately interested in how well (to continue the metaphor) it conserves its fighting strength than in how often or by what margin it wins the fight, no matter with what absence of style or grace.


to be continued

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART II

Of course marketing is interested in efficiency. But he most palpable fact  of its existence is that it cannot easily control the events or conditions that produce efficiency  The major events or conditions of its operations are the actions of its competitors and the behavior of customers. More than any other corporate functions, marketing constantly faces energetic adversaries against which i must struggle for success. Success is defined as consumer patronage. What makes success especially hard to attain is the fact that the consumer seems constantly to change the conditions under which he will deal with one rather that another supplier.

Marketing may not be harder than manufacturing, but it is enormously different. One of the most exasperating ways in which it is different is the difficult is determining which of several candidates will take a better marketing vice- president. Marketing is filled with uncontrolled, uncontrollable  unstandardizable, and unpredictable hazards. Like politics and sex, marketing is a squishy subject.

It is precisely because of that the boss can be so easily and disastrously misled- whether the boss is a president directing and evaluating the marketing vice- president or whether he is a marketing vice- president directing or evaluating a sales manager, a product planner, an advertising director, or a market researcher. No wonder the chief executive whose backgound lies outside marketing would rather deal with almost any other subject, like manufacturing and finance. Their seemingly solid and tangible manageability provide a reassuring.

Because marketing deals with thee sources of revenue, it can make a strong case for the chief's one-sided support-support he gneerally feels compelled to give because he has come to appreciate marketing's importance. For those in marketing, this is highly felicitous. Unfortunately, it may not be good for the whole company. Marketing decisions, because they deal with squishy matters, often require a good deal more wisdom, judgment, and prophetic insight than careful deductive reasoning.

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART III

Of course, the chief executive is not alone. He has staff,line lieutenants, and others to help him with decisions. He can insist, if proper documentation is not possible, certainly on proper reasoning from his marketing aides. Yet anybody who has diligently worked his way up to the upper echelons of an organization knows how easily the bodies can get buried, how easily bosses can be misinformed and even deceived by well-meaning subordinates taking fragile little liberties with the facts.

One major purpose of this book is to help two categories of corporate bosses- chief corporate executive and the chief marketing executive- to get better control over the marketing job, to make better choices regarding what to look at in marketing, and to make better decisions on what they end up looking at.Another major purpose is to help both presidents and marketing executive understand, in a more participial balanced fashion than has recently been the case, the pervasive yet limited role of marketing in achieving the corporate purpose.

The marketing department can do only part of the corporate job. To attract customers takes more than having the right price and the right pitch. It also takes having the right product. But marketing does not run the engineering department or the R % D department, which is generally where the products come from. Nor should it. Neither does it run finance, which has a lot to say about budgets. Nor should marketing run the plat, where product costs are generated and where customer shipments come from. And marketing certainly does not make mergers down on Wall Street, where a certain kind of action is. Yet marketing makes the sales where the revenue is.

This is a book for markets that is designed also for presidents- to give the chief of marketing new insights regarding the character and responsibilities of their jobs and to give the chief executive a modestly improved basis for thinking about their role in marketing. It is designed to help the marketing man do a better job in these troubled and changimg times and to help presidents understand more clearly their own responsibilities in the context of the corporation's marketing function.

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART IV

It is not a textbook. It is certainly not a dandy "How-to" book.Nor is it a book which, like a detective novel, proceeds with mathematical precision from some obvious beginning, step by to a clear resolution in the end. Only in fairy tales and pulp romances are things smoothly resolved in such a way that everybody "lived happily ever after," except  of course the evil villains, who get their just desserts. Real life is, as the real story goes, "one damned thing after the other," Hebce, this book makes no lyrical promises of liberating solutions. Nor does it present marketing in a highly structured order, as if to suggest that if we knew enough, we'd see both sense and other in the world with which we deal. Each day our scientists see how uncompromisingly non-Euclidian our world is. This explains why physicists working furthest out on the frontier of knowledge so often become philosophers. Science is too limiting- only speculation fulfills curiosity.

Our job in business is not to discover sense and order. It is to achieve other and more urgent ends. There is no presumption that sense and order are the roads to attaining these ends

This is a book with a point of view. It is designed to help men of high and awesome responsibility to think through the major problems of their corporate affairs in terms that have not always been accorded  the privileged place of such exalted activities as finance. Finance deals with the ultimate recording end- the famous "bottom of the line." Marketing deals with the meas- the generation of the customers whose patronage produces the revenues that go into the bottom of the line.

Every organization needs a purpose, some notion of why it exists and what it wants to accomplish- its goals, its objectives, and the kind of environment it wants to create for the people on whom it depends to achieve its purpose. Without some notion of purpose and detection  of knowing where it wants to go and why, it will drift in the competitive wind like a fallen leaf of an autumn day. It will do at any particular time whatever the transient pressure of the moment comas  Its life and posture will be determined not by what it has decided for itself but by what others have decides for themselves.

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART V

We are all fated to live in evironments and under conditions not of our own making. For that rezason we are all fated to lives of accommodation and compromise. But if we develop fot ourselves a reasonably clear notion of specific purpose and direction, we can, given effort and resolution, achieve considerable control over our destinies. We need not invoke the doctrine of free will to declare that we can be active agents of ous environment.
The purpose of this book is to talk about marketing and the corporate purpose inoperable terms-terms that are both relevant to the day-to-day activities of the men who work in marketing and crucial to the men who run the companies that must so inescapably perform a marketing function.
Consider the following :

In the yoar 1900 the American. Wind Engine and Pump Company was a magnificently thriving enterprise. Its majestic windmills stood like powerful giants astride the farm of American's vast prairies.

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The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART VI

Who was responsible for this company's awful fate? In the end, it is he chief executive who must be blamed, but if the company had been organized like today's large corporation, the original blame would have to rest with the marketing vice- president. His department is the company's eyes and ears to the world to which the company addresses all its efforts. His department is responsible for selling what the company addresses all its  efforts. His department is responsible for being in touch with the constantly evolving reality of the customer's world- what the customers needs, how he behaves, what he values, how he makes purchasing decisions, and the competitive options that are constantly becoming available to him.

The corporation's president, together with his inner cabinet, has many tasks and many demands on his time and attention. He depends on their advice to decide what should be done tomorrow.

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Product Line Planning and Corporate Strategies

According to Prof. E.Raymond Corey, one of the pioneer authors on the subject, "Product planning may be defined as the determination of the company's basic objectives, of what products it will make and sell, and of what the specification of these product will be.''

What a product's specification shall be requires, first, understanding that a product or service is not what most people think.

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Product Line Planning and Corporate Strategies

If we define a product in tis simplest commercial terms it is this: A product is something people buy-that is, in some magnitude that makes it profitable. If people don't buy it, it's not a product. The key is, "Do they buy it?"

Why do people buy poduct? Leo McGivena once said, "Last year one million quarter-inch drill bits were sold-not because people wanted quarter-inch drill bits but because they wanted quarter-inch holes."

People dont'buy product, they buy the expectation of benefits.
People spend their money not for goods and services, but to get the value satisfactions they believe are bestowed by what they are buying. They buy quarter-inch holes, not quarter-inch drills. That is the marketing view of the business process.

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Product Line Planning and Corporate Strategies

But it goes even further. The marketing vies also demands the active recognition of a new kind of competition that is in galloping ascendance n competition between what companies produce in their factories, but between what they add to their factory output in the form of packaging services, advertising, costumes advice, financing, delivery arrangements, warehousing, and other things that people value.

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what is a product

When the outputs of competing factories are essentially identical and their prices the same, the conversion of an indifferent prospect into a solid customer requires a special effort. Whether the product is cold-rolled steel or hot cross buns, whether accountancy or delicacies, competitive effectiveness increasingly demands that the successful seller offer his prospect and his customer more than the genetic product itself. He mmust surround his generic product with a cluster of value satisfactions that differentiates his total offering from his competitors'. He must provides a total proposition, the content of which exceeds what comes out at the end of the assembly line.

take cosmetics. The industry has factory sales of over $3 billion.

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fertilizer, sex, and cigarettes

The necessity of creating the proper buying atmosphere  of producing properly promising packaging, and of offering sufficiently appropriate customer services is so obvious to today's businessman that he is largehearted that he is responding to that necessity. Yet to do these things well, he must be aware of the fact that he is doing them at all. Any number of companies, upon being told of International Minerals and Chemical's customer consulting services, will respond with impressive examples of how they have done the same sorts of things for various customers. They may indeed have done the same sort of things for various customers.

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Bionic Hand

PART 3

A history of body-restoration attempts, in the form of man-made hands and legs and feet, lines the selves in Robert Lipschutz's office at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). "The basic technology of prosthetic arms hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, "he says. "Materials are different, so we use plastic instead of leather, butthe basic idea has been the same : hooks and hinges moved by cables or motors, controlled by levels. A lot of amputees coming back from Iraq get devices like these. Here, try this on, "Lipschutz drags a plastic shell off one of this shelves.

It turns out to be a left shoulder and arm. The shoulders part is a kind breastplate, secured scross the chest by a harness. The arm, hinged at the shoulder and elbow, ends in a metal pincer. To extend the arm, you twist your head to the left and press a lever with your chin, and use a little body English to swing the limb out. It is as awkward as it sounds. And hevy. After 20 minutes your neck hurts from the odd posture and the effort of pressing the levers. Many amputees end up putting such arms aside.

"It's hard for me to give people these devices sometimes," Lipschutz says, "because we just don't know if they will really help."What could help more, he and others at RIC think, is the kind prosthesis Amanda Kitts has volunteered to test-one controlled byte brain, not by body parts that normally have nothing to do with moving the hand. A technique called targeted muscle re-innervation uses nerves remaining after an amputation to control an artificial limb. It was first tried in a patient in 2002. Four years later Tommy Kitts, Amanda's husband, read about it on the Internet as his wife lay in a hospital bed after her accident. The truck that had crushed her car had also crushes her arm, from just above the elbow down.

"I was angry, sad, depressed. I just couldn't accept it, "she says. But what Tommy told her about the Chicago arm sounded hopeful. "It seemed like the best option out there, a lot better than motors and switches, "Tommy says. "Amanda actually got excited about it, "Soon they were on a plane to Illinois.

Todd Kiken, a physician and bio-medical engineer at RIC,was the person responsible for what the institute had begun calling the "bionic arm." He knew that nerves in a amputee's stump could still carry signals from the brain. And he knew that a computer in a prosthesis could direct electric motors to move the limb. The problemwas making the connection. Nerves conduct electricity, but they can;t be spliced together with a computer cable. (Nerve fibers and metal wires don't get along well.And an open wound where a wire enters the body would be a dangerous avenue for infections.)


to be continued

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Bionic Hand

PART 4

Kuiken need an amplifier to boost the signals form the nerves, avoiding the need for a direct splice. He found one in muscle. When muscles contract, they give off an electrical brust strong enough to be detected a technique to reroute severed nerves from their old, damaged spots to other muscles that could give their signals the proper boost.

Bionic woman Kitts imagines a hand movement, and muscle activity in her residual arm-decoded by a computer on her back causes the actual motion. When she straps on the actual motion. When she staps on the experimental Johns Hopkins-developed arm at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, she says, "often it feels like I'm not missing anything."

In October 2006 Kuiken set about rewiring Amanda Kitts. The first step was to salvage major nerves that once went all the way down her arm. "These are the same nerves that work the arm and hand, but we had to create four different muscle areas to lead them to, "Kuiken says. The nerves started in Kitts's brain, in the motor cortex, which holds a rough map of the body, but they stopped at the end of her stump-the disconnected telephone wires. In an intricate operation, a surgeon rerouted those nerves to different regions of Kitts's upper-arm muscles. For months the nerves grew, millimeter by millimeter, moving deeper into their new homes.

"At three months I started feeling little tingles and twitches," says Kitts. "By four months I could actually feel different places and feel different fingers." What she was feeling were part of the phantom arm that were mapped into her brain, now reconnected to flesh. When Kitts thought about moving those phantom fingers, her real upper-arm arm muscles contracted.

A month later she was fitted with her first bionic arm, which had electrodes in the cup around the stump to pick up the signals from the muscles. Now the challenge was to convert those signals into commands to move the elbow and hand.

"Now I'm able to see silhouettes of trees again," says Jo Ann Lewis. "That's oneof the last things I remeber seeing naturally. Today I can see limbs sticking out this way and hat."

A storm of electrical noise was coming from the small region on Kitts's arm. Somewhere in there was the signal that meant "straighten the elbow" or "turn the wrist." A microprocessor housed in the prosthesis had to be programmed to fish out the right signal and send it to the right motor.

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Bionic Hand

PART 2

Kitts is living proff that, even though the flash and bone may be damaged or gone, the nerves and parts of the brain that once controlled it live on. In many patients, they sit there waiting to communicate-dangling telephone wires, severed from a handset. With microscopic electrodes and surgical wizardry  doctors have begun to connect these parts in other patients to devices such as cameras and microphones and motors. As a result, the blind can see, the deaf can hear, and Amanda Kitts can fold her shirts.

Kitts is one of "tomorrow's people", a group whose missing or ruined body parts are being replaced by devices embedded in their nervous systems that respond to commands from their brains. The  machines they use are called neural prostheses or-as scientists have become more comfortable with a arm made popular by science fiction writers- bionics. Eric Schremp, who has been a quadriplegic since he shattered his neck during swimming pool dive in 1992, now has an electronic device under his skin that mind and machine an array of sensors tracks muscle movements that Amanda Kitts produces in her residual arm thanks to surgically rerouted nerves. Next generation prostheses obey relayed signals, increasingly working like her original limb. Lets him move his fingers to grip s fork. Jo Ann Lewis, a blind woman, can see the shapes of trees with the help of a tiny camera that communicates with the her optic nerve. And Tammy Kenny cans peak to her 18-month-old son, Aiden,and he can reply, because the boy, born deaf, has 22 electrodes inside his ear that change sounds picked up by a microphone into signals his auditory nerve can understand.

The work is extremely delicate, a series of trials fills with many errors. As scientists have learned that it's possible to link machine and mind, they have also learned how difficult it so to maintain that connection. If the cup atop Kitts arm shifts just slightly, for instance, she might not be able to close her fingers. Still, bionics represents a big leap forward, enabling researchers when Kitts thinks about flexing her elbow, the phantom moves, and the artificial elbow bends. "I don't really think about it. I just move it, "she says. To give people back much moreof what they've lost than was ever possible before.

"That's rally what this work is about : restoration," says Joseph Pancrazio, program director for neural engineering at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "When a person with a spinal-cord injury can be in a restaurant, feeding himself, and no one else notices, that is my definition of success."

to be continued ......

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