WHAT'S RIGHT WITH BIG BUSINESS
WATERMAN, THOMAS J. PETERS, ROBERT H Jr.
WHAT'S RIGHT WITH BIG BUSINESS BY THOMAS J. PETERS & ROBERT H. WATERMAN, JR. For the past three years, Thomas J. Peters, an independent consultant, and Robert H. Waterman Jr. of McKinsey & Co....
...These companies encouraged innovation and risk-taking among their workers...
...and, using two Sears, Roebuck camp burners, cooked up a smelly 350-degree brew...
...My suggestion: let our people get the job done...
...But during the same decade, its grievance rate fell to a tiny fraction of the overall UAW average...
...Skunk works are notoriously pragmatic, as yet another vignette about this group shows...
...I figured if 1 became a fanatic on housekeeping, which was easy to improve, they would naturally begin to buy in to some other changes...
...Other companies talk about it...
...of 66 "major improvements," 85 percent came from users...
...What is striking about Frito is not its brand-management system, which is solid, nor its advertising program, which is well done...
...another: "Ask Dumb Questions...
...If ten such initiatives are launched, the law of probability tells us that the odds that at least one thing will work go up to 65 percent...
...When tiny Alaska Airlines needed landing gear that could put a jet down on a dirt strip, Boeing was there...
...There is surprising and powerful theoretical support for what P&G and others are doing...
...the excellent companies do it...
...I was humiliated and disgusted by how badly I skied,' he recalls, 'and, characteristically, 1 was inclined to blame it on the equipment, those long, clumsy, hickory skis...
...We recently finished an analysis of the past 20 years' performance of a dozen or so major American and Japanese companies...
...Studying the same subject, economist Burton Klein found that major firms are seldom if ever responsible for the major advances in their industries...
...Their success led McPherson to say, in a statement that could get someone else kicked out of most board rooms in America, "lam opposed to the idea that less government, fewer regulations, capital formation incentives, and renewed research and development activity are what we need most to improve productivity...
...we had a program to develop a bacterial skin barrier, called a surgical drape, for surgeons to use during surgery...
...The Japanese think this is nonsense...
...One of the fellows from the skunk works happened by...
...A simple statement of what our research uncovered on the customer attribute is that the excellent companies really are close to their customers...
...Perhaps our favorite example of service overkill is Frito-Lay...
...No champions, no innovations...
...We found less obvious structuring and certainly less layering in most of the excellent companies...
...For heat, he welded together an iron, coffin-like tank, filled it with motor oil...
...There would be some dollar efficiencies on paper...
...Teams of engineers wrestled with the problem for months...
...Because of 3M's diversity the conviction spreads easily that someone in 3M will be able to use almost anything," a commentator notes...
...The best companies are pushed around by their customers, and they love it...
...At one bank in Japan, several hundred branch managers report to the same person, proving that the flat organization is possible...
...SMALL IS PROFITABLE In the excellent companies we studied, the emphasis on innovation and risk-taking was usually matched with a passion for simplicity...
...Needing pressure and heat to fuse the materials together, Head concocted a process that would have made Rube Goldberg proud...
...Finally it was decided to mount a one-ton air conditioner on the machine...
...What is striking is Frito's nearly 10,000-person sales force and its "99.5 percent service level...
...Suppose that a new initiative is launched and its odds of succeeding are only ten percent...
...An IBM executive in San Jose added, "When I look back over the last dozen products we've introduced, I find in well over half the instances the big development project that we 'bet on' via the system came a cropper somewhere along the way...
...When McPherson took over in 1973, one of his first acts was to destroy 221/2 inches of policy manuals and substitute a simple one-page statement of philosophy...
...And if the management does see them, it won't be aggressive in rooting them out, because it doesn't have control of them...
...Schlumberger, the $6 billion diversified oil service company, runs its worldwide.empire with a corporate staff of 90...
...Of the nine failures, just three were champion-led...
...McPherson encourages the process, because he believes that peer pressure is what makes it all go...
...Six either had no champion, or the champion left early and the project consequently fell apart...
...You can always make a case for saving money by cutting back a percentage point or two...
...In the field, the swarm effort is equally notable...
...Champions are pioneers, and pioneers get shot at...
...This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which asserts that consumer market dominance requires large-scale activity...
...We had expected few champions in the purportedly more collectivist Japanese environment...
...In every instance—and I do mean every—there were two or three (about five once) other small projects, you know, four- to six-person groups, two people in one instance, who had been working on parallel technology or parallel development efforts...
...Chairman Lewis Lehr recalls: "Shortly after World War II...
...The mainspring is simple numbers...
...By the late 1970s, and without massive capital spending, Dana's sales per employee had tripled while the all-industry average had not even doubled, a phenomenal productivity record for a huge business in an otherwise uninteresting industry...
...Bloomie's was buying our jeans and bleaching them...
...Most of our excellent companies have comparatively few people at the corporate levels, and what staff there is tends to be out in the field solving problems rather than checking on things in the home office...
...It is done primarily to make places for more managers...
...Not surprisingly, most champions fail most of the time...
...According to Inc...
...H]e put the ski mold into a huge rubber bag and then pumped the air out through a tube attached to an old refrigerator compressor that was hooked up backward to produce suction...
...We keep these stories alive and often repeat them so that any employee with an entrepreneurial spirit who feels discouraged, frustrated, and ineffective in a large organization knows that he or she is not the first to face considerable odds...
...Even though none of the companies is truly independent in the sense of having stock of its own, the "boards of directors" are active and buffer the divisions from unwanted (and usually unneeded) corporate interference...
...Mc Donald's has more experimental menu items, store formats, and pricing plans than any of its competitors...
...scientists and engineers on its payroll...
...In our first three hours of interviewing at Dana, we heard mention of more than 60 different productivity experiments that were going on at one plant or another...
...If you had looked at Dana as a proposition in strategic management, you would undoubtedly have labeled it a loser...
...It is a cost analyst's dream target...
...They are also better listeners...
...A Lanier data-processing executive in Atlanta, a competitor in some areas, swears by IBM mainframes: "I remember the last time we had trouble...
...They're great, Mr...
...Six weeks later, out of the stench and smoke, Head produced his first six pairs of skis and raced off to Stowe to have them tested by the pros...
...It's just amazing what a handful of dedicated people can do when they are really turned on...
...Do it, fix it, try it" seems to be the common operating principle among these companies...
...The classic illustration of the point is the failed ribbon material that became a failed plastic cup for brassieres that became the standard U.S...
...Decades ago Americans got hooked on the notion of optimal spans of control...
...They willingly trade any marginal loss of competitive information for the added commitment...
...McPherson deplores management's unwillingness to listen: "I wanted a picture, fora slide presentation, of a worker talking to his foreman...
...One part was an indepth study of 24 major business initiatives, such as GE's unsuccessful foray into computers and its success in engineered plastics and aircraft engines...
...It pays off...
...P&G is especially well known for what one analyst calls its "testing fetish...
...We had 14,000 photos in the file, but not one of a supervisor listening to a worker...
...Most of their real innovation comes from the market...
...The group's first product, now a $300 million per year sales item, was fully developed (prototyped) in 28 days...
...McDonald's numbers are similarly low, following former chairman Ray Kroc's longstanding dictum: "I believe that 'less is more' in the case of corporate management...
...Indeed, for us, the story on plant size was nothing short of astonishing...
...Even if big companies don't stop innovating entirely, their rate of innovation invariably goes way down...
...Otherexamples from wellmanaged companies pour in .daily...
...Each time one of them broke,' says Head, `something inside me snapped with it.' "Instead of hanging up his rubber bag, Head quit Martin the day after New Year's 1948, took $6,000 in poker winnings he had stashed under his bed, and went to work in earnest...
...But we believe that a lot of the efficiencies you are supposed to get from economies of scale are not real at all...
...From inviting the customer into the company...
...To gauge the ski's camber, an instructor stuck the end of one into the snow and flexed it...
...Copyright © 1982 by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr...
...When Air Canada had a problem with ice clogging in some air vents, Boeing flew its engineers to Vancouver, where they worked around the clock to solve the problem and minimize disruption of the airline's schedule...
...You don't make money that way, it would seem...
...He has run ads that, as he says, "made many middle managers very nervous at first...
...Dana is a $3-billion corporation, making unexotic products like brass propeller blades and gearboxes, primarily supporting the unexciting secondary market in the automobile and trucking industry...
...Letters about such acts pour into the Dallas headquarters...
...SERVING THE CONSTITUENTS That a business ought to be close to its customers seems a benign enough message...
...When a salesman, not the technical people, invented the handy desk-top dispenser for what had previously been a narrow-use industrial product...
...According to one analyst, "Bloomingdale's is the only largevolume retailer that experiments store-wide...
...Procter & Gamble was the first consumer goods company to put the toll-free 800 phone number on all its packaging...
...Excessive layering may be the biggest problem of the slow-moving, rigid bureaucracy...
...Do it," "fix it," "try it," are the by-words of successful companies...
...The excellent companies have a deeply ingrained philosophy that says, in effect, "respect individuals," "let them stand out," "treat people as adults...
...They called in about eight experts on my problem...
...emerge because history and numerous supports encourage them to, nurture them through trying times, celebrate their successes, and nurse them through occasional failures...
...Their purpose was to identify those attributes shared by excellent companies—" excellent" defined here by such standard measures as a company's growth and its rate of return on shareholders' equity over a 20-year period...
...As a result, we coined our rough "rule of 100": With rare exception, there is seldom need for more than 100 people in the corporate headquarters...
...That's just where they happened to be...
...In its 1979 annual report, P&G says it got 200,000 calls on that 800 number, calls with customer ideas as well as complaints...
...The key ingredient is productivity through people, pure and simple...
...He required that there be a monthly face-to-face meeting between division management and every member of the division to discuss specifically all of the corporate individual results in detail...
...But you can't hide from your peers...
...McPherson is a bug on face-to-face communication and on discussing all the results with all of the people...
...His idea was to make a 'metal sandwich' ski consisting of two layers of aluminum with plywood sidewalls and a center filling of honeycombed plastic...
...In practical terms, what does this mean...
...In hours the horde descended, from everywhere...
...If such layers exist, a kind of Parkinson's law of management structure sets in: extra levels of management create distracting work for others in order to justify their own existence...
...Boeing is another excellent example...
...Digital has more inexpensive experiments going on than any of its competitors...
...Who at Levi Strauss invented the original Levi's jean...
...Paul, Minnesota...
...The numbers game is most obvious in a business like oil...
...I did...
...Yet in the 1970s, this old-fashioned midwestern business became the number two Fortune 500 company in total return to investors...
...The result has been a preoccupation with short-term profits—at the expense of productivity, worker morale, and the long-term health of the entire economy...
...It had been with scrounged time and bodies...
...One of the major support mechanisms is something often called "skunk works"—small bands of zealots off in the corner, often outproducing product development groups that number in the hundreds...
...We see that time and again in the excellent companies...
...Over the last 24 months, Ford, in an effort to become more competitive with the Japanese, has cut more than 26 percent of its middle-management staff...
...Whereas there are five levels between the chairman and the first-line supervisor at Toyota, Ford has over 15...
...Few Emerson plants employ more than 600 workers, a size at which Chairman Charles Knight feels that management can maintain personal contact with individual employees...
...Champions don't emerge automatically...
...Perhaps the most important element of their enviable track record is an ability to be big and to act small at the same time...
...The customer, especially the sophisticated customer, is a key participant in most successful experimenting processes...
...For instance, under chairman John Swearingen, Amoco has achieved a record of domestic oil exploration success that is at the top of the industry—better than Exxon, Arco, or Shell...
...magazine, a National Science Foundation study found that "small firms produced about four times as many innovations per research and development dollar as medium-sized firms and 24 times as many as large firms...
...This article is adapted from In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., Harper & Row, publisher...
...One said: "Talk Back to the Boss...
...Though 3M is one of the nation's corporate giants—with 1980 sales of $6.1 billion it ranked 51st on the Fortune 500 list—in many ways it's a company in which Howard Head would have felt at home...
...Says a Wall Street Journal analyst of Boeing: "Nearly every operator of Boeing aircraft has a story about the company's coming through in a pinch...
...Each is with a user, on a user's premises...
...While people are in this position, they spend their entire, typical three-year stint doing only one thing— answering every customer complaint within 24 hours...
...Clearly, the odds are stacked against them, yet they foster innovation just the same...
...Then he dumped the rubber bag with the ski mold inside into the tank of boiling oil and sat back like Julia Child waiting for her potato puffs to brown...
...In the early 1970s, the sales per employee at Dana were the same as the allindustry average...
...A characteristic of such companies is the attention they pay to producing and nurturing potential innovators, also known as champions...
...In recent years, most corporate executives and business school graduates have embraced the bureaucrat's taste for strict quantitative analysis and an obsession with the bottom line...
...The major pressure at Dana—and it's a very real one, as in most of our other excellent companies— is peer pressure...
...There, some of the best salesmen are made assistants to the company's top officers...
...The skunk works consists of eight to ten people and is located in a dingy second-floor loft six miles from the corporate headquarters...
...The desire for simplicity shows in the excellent company's penchant for small, streamlined operations...
...Yet almost none really lives it...
...The economic theorists may disagree, but the evidence of excellent companies is clear...
...The experiment is at the very heart of a new approach to managing, even in the midst of the most staggering complexity at a 3M or IBM...
...It broke...
...That is the other half of the close-to-the-customer equation...
...But chief executive James Burke observes, "We have periodically studied the economics of consolidation...
...So the excellent companies are not only better on service, quality, reliability, and finding a niche...
...At least four were from Europe, one came from Canada, one from Latin America...
...In fact, in response to that observation, an employee from Levi Strauss who was attending a seminar piped up and said, "You know, that's where Levi got the faded jeans idea...
...It filled the bill, lowering the temperature sufficiently to fix the problem...
...The companies that get the most from champions, therefore, are those that have rich support networks so their pioneers will flourish...
...They are obsessed with sharing information and preventing secrecy...
...President Donald Petersen believes this is only the beginning...
...In a litany repeated at Disney and Delta (where top executives often help handle luggage during the busy Christmas season), they were made responsible for learning all the jobs in the plants...
...Yet for all the lip service given this notion, far too often the customer is either ignored or considered a bloody nuisance...
...Says McPherson: "Almost every executive agrees that people are the most important asset...
...When Emerson was named as one of Dun's Review's "best-managed companies," a simple success ingredient was highlighted: "Emerson rejects giant factories favored by such competitors as General Electric...
...I didn't know where to start...
...A major new machine was overheating...
...They get a benefit from market closeness that for us was truly unexpected—unexpected, that is, until you think about it...
...They did...
...On my way home I heard myself boasting to an army officer beside me that I could make a better ski out of aircraft materials than could be made from wood.' "Back at Martin [Aircraft Company], the cryptic doodles that began appearing on Head's drawing board inspired him to scavenge some aluminum from the plant scrap pile...
...have conducted an intensive study of several dozen of the nation's largest corporations...
...The study's major conclusions should not surprise long-time readers of this magazine and others familiar with large institutions (public and private) and their enthusiasm for fatuous memowriting, meaningless number games, never-ending task forces, and managerial featherbedding...
...McPherson quickly reduced his corporate staff of 500 to 100 and the number of layers in his organization from eleven to five...
...We don't need a 5,000-person plant to get our costs down,' he says, 'and this gives us great flexibility.' Emerson puts heavy stress on those personal contacts with employees...
...The point of smallness is that it induces manageability and commitment...
...They have enviable records of growth, innovation, and consequent wealth...
...At a $5-billion survey company, for example, three of the last five new-product introductions have come from a classic skunk works...
...And they were given the autonomy to get the overall job done...
...CHAMPIONS & ENTREPRENEURS The most discouraging fact of big corporate life is the loss of what made it big in the first place: innovation...
...Insiders report that the 800 number is a major source of product improvement ideas...
...Another example of simplicity in form despite size is Johnson & Johnson...
...One crisp day in 1950, Head stood in the bowl of Tuckerman's Ravine in New Hampshire and watched ski instructor Clif Taylor come skimming over the lip of the headwall, do a fishtail on the fall line and sweep into a long, graceful curve, swooshing to a stop in front of the beaming inventor...
...This point is so important it's hard to overstress...
...Nobody...
...The divisions are called "companies," and each is headed by a "chairman of the board...
...And failure is supported...
...the exception rather than the rule...
...But the institution is filled with tales of salesmen braving extraordinary weather to deliver a box of potato chips or to help a store clean up after a hurricane or an accident...
...Emerson Electric has 54,000 employees and makes do with fewer than 100 in corporate headquarters...
...Smallness works...
...His plant managers— about 90 of them—all became "store managers...
...Peters and Waterman discovered that the corporations that performed best over time were those that took great pains not to behave like typical bureaucracies...
...Furthermore, Dana is largely unionized, with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in most of its plants...
...Along with smallness comes a lack of bureaucracy...
...It becomes risky in the excellent companies not to take a little risk, not to "step out and do a little something...
...All this sets the whole notion of risk taking on its ear...
...No support systems, no champions...
...The Digital, Hewlett Packard, and 3M magic is to let the user see it, test it, and reshape it—very early...
...To understand what champions are really like, we know no better source than Sports Illustrated's discussion of Howard Head's long road to inventing the metal ski: "In 1946 Head went off to Stowe, Vt...
...We believe that no one can control more than five to seven people...
...At $1 billion Intel, there is virtually no staff...
...Obvious as this conclusion might sound, among American businesses such behavior is still...
...Legend once more shows the way...
...He] wrestled with his obsession through three agonizing winters...
...Repeatedly, we found that the better performers had determined that their small plants, not their big ones, were most efficient...
...They are elusive...
...At $2 billion Wal-Mart, founder Sam Walton says that he believes in the empty headquarters rule: "The key is to get into the stores and listen...
...On the other hand, we have the excellent companies...
...The ribbon-to-brassiere-to-face-mask champion was likewise told to knock it off...
...Reductions in the neighborhood of 50 percent, or even 75 percent, in levels and bodies are not uncommon targets when businessmen discuss what they honestly could do without...
...How then do we reconcile repeated failure and overall success...
...From listening...
...So, eventually, did all six pairs...
...With the distaste for bureaucracy comes far more emphasis on individual responsibility...
...In most companies "assistant to" functionaries are usually bag carriers, paper shufflers, gofers...
...In his off hours he set up shop on the second floor of a converted stable in an alley near his one-room basement flat...
...They made concerted efforts to decentralize their operations and avoid traditional chains of command...
...P&G responded to every one of those calls and the calls were summarized monthly for board meetings...
...The freedom to persist, however, implies the freedom to do things wrong and to fail...
...There is magic and symbolism about the service call that cannot be quantified...
...Hands-on management becomes a lot more workable when there are fewer people in the middle...
...Robert Adams, head of R&D at 3M, puts it this way: "Our approach is to make a little, sell a little, make a little more...
...The refinements were several: steel edges for necessary bite, a plywood core for added strength, and a plastic running surface for smoother, ice-free, runs...
...A manager really can understand something that is small and in which one central discipline prevails...
...Middle managers, says Carlson, are a sponge...
...The excellent companies are also better listeners...
...It means that Frito will do some things that in the short run clearly are uneconomic...
...The best imaginable reinforcement for all the major points we've made—champions, systems of championing, numbers of experiments, numerous and interlocking supports—can be found at the 3M company of St...
...They know what's really going on...
...Emerson Electric is the best example...
...Much as some might wish them away, large corporations have become a permanent part of American life...
...A colleague, Julian Fairfield, had as an early management job the problem of turning around a wire and cable plant that was performing miserably...
...IBM is fanatic about its service beliefs...
...It was the one thing everyone could agree on, and it was easy to fix...
...They...
...In short, the companies that performed best acted least like large government bureaucracies—and far more like the small companies they once had been...
...This company represents the extreme of keeping structure simple, divisionalized, and autonomous...
...Everyone appears busy...
...We used to have 14,000 photos in the file, but not one of a supervisor listening to a worker," said Rene McPherson of the Dana Corporation...
...In 1873, for $68 (the price for filing the patent application), Levi's obtained the right to market steel-riveted jeans from one of its users, Jacob Youphes, a Nevada buyer of Levi's denim...
...But Frito management, looking at market shares of 60 to 70 percent in most of the country and high profit margins, won't tamper with the zeal of the sales force...
...Much of the excellent companies' experimentation occurs in conjunction with a lead user...
...We wink at it...
...He ended up doing most of the product development work on the case at home.] But continued persistence ultimately produced a successful drape and led the way toward our $400-million-a-year health care business today...
...A Fortune commentator notes: "The passion for exploration by whatever means are available sets Amoco sharply apart from the other majors...
...He says, "You can always fool the boss...
...But that's a time-honored thing...
...Champions at Hitachi and GE...
...They are big...
...3M's value system is specific in indicating that virtually any idea is okay...
...The bottom line is fewer administrators, more operators...
...Many companies, on the other hand, wait until the perfect widget is designed and built before subjecting it—late in the game, often after millions of dollars have been spent—to customer scrutiny...
...One of the biggest contrasts between Japanese and American corporations, in fact, is in the number of middlemanagement levels...
...Dana employs 35,000 people and cut its corporate staff from about 500 in 1970 to around 100 today...
...Dana's effort to foster it is capped by Hell Week...
...They stressed action and experimentation rather than constant studies and playing it safe...
...Exxon, for instance, rarely drills a well unless it owns the whole deal...
...Only one way: innovation success is a numbers game...
...The management task becomes one of nurturing good tries, allowing modest failures, labeling experiments after the fact as successes, leading the cheers, and quietly guiding the diffusion process...
...Eric von Hippel and James Utterback of MITare longtime students of the innovation process...
...This study, portions of which are excerpted below, provides valuable lessons in how companies can be reformed for the benefit of not only their own employees and stockholders, but the entire nation's economy...
...He looked at the problem, then proceeded to the corner pharmacy to pick up an $8.95 household fan...
...Everything was wrong," he said...
...Once you get your big monster going, you're going to create inefficiencies that you don't know are there...
...Almost all early IBM innovations, including the company's first computer, were developed in collaboration with its lead customer—the Census Bureau...
...for his first attempt at skiing...
...Perhaps most important is the user connection...
...The customer is truly in a partnership with the effective companies, and vice versa...
...Not so at IBM...
...His conclusions: of eleven "first of type" major inventions he looked at, all came from users...
...Now consider United Airlines's Ed Carlson's hourglass theory of middle management...
...It will spend several hundred dollars sending a truck to restock a store with a couple of $30 cartons of potato chips...
...One of the most impressive success stories in people and productivity is that of the Dana Corporation under the leadership of Rene McPherson, now dean of the Stanford business school...
...If 25 such initiatives are launched, the odds go up to more than 90 percent (the odds of at least two successes are almost 75 percent...
...To our surprise, the Japanese and American data matched...
...The numbers in many companies—both levels and employees—are staggering...
...James Brian Quinn, reviewing a quarter century of IBM history, says: "It was difficult to find any successful major IBM innovation that derived directly from formal product planning rather than this championship process...
...Twice a year about a hundred managers get together for five days to swap results and productivity improvement stories...
...So I started with housekeeping...
...of 83 "minor improvements," about twothirds came from users...
...But given the supports, the would-be champion population turns out to be enormous, certainly not limited to a handful of creative marvels...
...McPherson has even stressed face-to-face contact in institutional advertisements...
...There is a related correlation in the kinds of slots—i.e., hierarchical levels—that the staffers fill...
...The crystal-clear message is that no matter what the odds are of any one thing's working, the probability of something's succeeding is very high if you try lots of things...
...To help ensure that innovative ideas do not die prematurely, excellent companies pay attention to how and where their experiments begin...
...To be sure, the company manufactures airplanes, but what makes it outstanding is its service orientation...
...Looking at the projects where the initial bet failed, the subsequently developed project came in ahead of the original schedule in three instances...
...The fact that these companies are so strong on quality, service, and the rest comes in large measure from paying attention to what customers want...
...Head, just great.' At that moment, Head says, 'I knew deep inside I had it.' " The presence of champions like Head is the single most important key to sustained innovative success in the excellent companies...
...In most organizations middle management really has little role beyond "makework" activities, such as stopping ideas coming down and stopping ideas going up...
...More important, even in institutions that employ hundreds of thousands of people, if the divisions are small enough, or if there are other ways of simulating autonomy, the individual still counts and can stand out...
...In 15 of the 24 cases that were successful, 14 involved a clear champion...
...J&J is a $5billion company broken up into 150 independent divisions (up from 80 ten years ago), average size just over $30 million...
...The technical genius is a fellow whose highest degree is a high-school equivalency diploma earned in the army in Korea (although the company has literally thousands of Ph.D...
...worker safety mask after the advent of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration...
...When did 3M's Scotch Tape business take off...
...but in reality it is simply management featherbedding...
...Hewlett Packard and Wang are close on Digitals's heels...
...Small is beautiful...
...The program was twice killed by senior management...
...Not lone ago von Hippel looked carefully at the source of innovation in the scientific instruments business...
...Yet 100 percent (six out of six) Japanese successes had a champion, and three of the four Japanese failures had none...
...Yes, and at IBM too...
...All staff assignments are temporary ones given to line officers...
Vol. 14 • December 1982 • No. 10
