Also in this week's C&EN, a fun little letter:
C&EN’s recent article on the shortage of vanilla beans (Sept. 12, page 38) brought to mind a story from the early days of cellophane at DuPont.
The cellophane marketing organization was being introduced to a new series of films coated with polyvinylidene chloride from Dow Chemical rather than nitrocellulose from DuPont. The marketing organization was, by design, made up of nontechnically trained personnel.
After the presentation of the virtues of the new films, two high-ranking marketing managers were heard involved in a discussion on “where would they get all of the vanilla beans?”
Elwood P. Blanchard Jr.I'm amused to see that the sniping between technical types and marketing types has always been with us.
Mendenhall, Pa.
Well, apparently Dow did pretty well for themselves so complete ignorance of what your company does is not a penalty towards making money for it, and maybe it was a plus. Still, if I was there at the time and I was the CEO, I would have been tempted to fire them. That's why I'm not the CEO of a big company though. Apparently we need all kinds of idiots around to run a successful business these days.
ReplyDelete