Sales Manager Academy

The corporate manager who achieves success by honest efficiency in giving the best service to the public should be favored because we all benefit by his efficiency. […] he should be helped by the Government because his success is good for the National welfare. But a man who, grasps and holds business power by breaking the industrial efficiency of others, who wins success by methods which are against‘ the public interest and degrading to the public morals, should not be permitted to ‘ exercise such power. Instead of punishing him by a long and doubtful process of the law after the wrong has been com- mitted, there should be such effective Government regulation as to check the evil tendencies at the moment that they start do develop.

It is impossible to understand the American public without taking into account the tremendous psychological effect of bringing up a generation of people in a daily environment of advertising. It is impossible to escape the advertising man; his sales talk assaults us in the morning newspaper, in the street car, with billboards along the highways, and in his shameless use of the radio. This means that from morning till night, in the midst of our work as in our recreation, we live constantly in an atmosphere of intellectual shoddiness. Every popular prejudice and vulgar conceit is played upon and pandered to in the interests of salesmanship. Everywhere material interests and herd opinion are strengthened to the loss of personal independence. The tendency is to think and speak for effect rather than out of one's inner life. There is a marked decline the ability to play with ideas, or to live the spiritual life for its own sake. Hence a decline in civilization of interest, humor and urbanity. Advertising tends to make mechanized barbarians of us all.

In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations.