English Test 87
Directions for Questions from 1 to 5:
Today’s growth product is tomorrow’s buggy whip – and often management does not seem to realize it. A company must learn to think of itself not
as producing goods and services but as buying, creating and satisfying customers. This approach should permeate every book and cranny of the
organization; if it doesn’t, no amount of efficiency in operations can compensate for the lack. Marketing myopia is not easy to overcome, but unless
it is, an organization cannot achieve greatness. This is the lesson learned by many companies in many industries, including the most glamorous
“growth” industries.
Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of
decline. Others which are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case the reason growth is threatened,
slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management. The failure is at the top. The
executives responsible for it, in the last analysis, are those who deal with broad aims and policies.
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble
today not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones), but because it was not filled by the railroads
themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the
transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented,
they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.
Generally, all the established film companies went through drastic reorganizations. Some simply disappeared.
All of them got into trouble not because of TV’s inroads but because of their own myopia. As with the
railroads, Holly