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.