The subjects covered in this paper are ranging and diverse, more so than I would have liked. But then, the world of business is ranging and diverse as well.
In this I have attempted to lay out some of the business lessons I have learned in the past three years, and relate them to underlying theories. Either theories I have studied such as Herzberg or Maslow, or new ones that I have thought up, such as Roger's Rules of Meetings. I have tried to explain the why's and what's behind some of the common phenomenon we observe in the business community. Things like: the fact that big organizations move slower than little ones, but still get a lot done; that companies today are buying a lot more design work from outside than they used to even though they have big engineering staffs of their own; that good engineers in these big staffs are often frustrated and do a lot of moonlighting.
The investigation of these problems led me into exploring three areas. The first was defining the functions of the players in the Product Innovation Cycle. As I was doing that I realized that an awful lot of work in this cycle was being done by very small companies. In exploring that question, I came up with the discourses about fitting size to how much intercommunication the group had to do, and the rules of thumb I developed about group size. In the process of exploring why people prefer working with big or small companies, I started exploring motivation, and it's most important component--compensation. Finally came the first chapter--my favorite starting point--the historical perspective.
I have learned a tremendous amount from doing the interviews that were the heart of my research for this paper. I learned a lot about how diverse people's thinking on a subject can be. (And I learned a lot about how job function affects a person's availability for interviews.) The people I interviewed spoke frankly about failures as well as successes, and there is much to be learned from both.
Finally, I hope you, the reader, find the revelations I have made as exciting and useful to you has they have been to me. If you have comments to add or further insights in these matters, I would love to hear about them.
Sincerely yours,
Roger Bouke White Jr., 1986
[[[ 19 -- Sailing into the Sunset ]]]