November/December 1997

Aut@lJ~ EXP070 JANUARY 15·21, NEW DELHI,

IETF 199

13th ~

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THE INDIAN ENGINEERING TRADE FAIR

12·17 FEB, 1999 NEW DELHI, INDIA AN ALL INDUSTRY FAIR Iit";j i:I~;'0(.111: ii;i" :<.];) :N

1998 INDIA

ASIA'S lARGEST All·INDUSTRY FAIR

ASIA'S lARGEST AUTOMOTIVE SHOW

12th IETF '97 - in retrospect Highlights of Auto Expo '98

• Japan - Partner

• Spread over an area of 60,000

• Exhibitors from 35 countries

sqm • 800 leading corporations from 20 countries single Indian vehicle facturer

• Over 2,00,000 focussed visitors

• Every

• 3 Concurrent Fairs

manu13th IETF'99 with The Republic of

• 17 Global Auto

Majors • 400 Auto Component manufacturers

For more details please contact:

Confederation

of Indian Industry

23, Institutional Area, Lodi Road, New Delhi 110003. India.

Tel: 91-11- 4629994.

Fax: 91-11- 4626149, 4633168. email: Indus%cii@sirnetd.ernel.in

A AM

Country

[ell] ACMA

Korea as the partner

country,

promises to be an even biggershow.

A LETTER

E

FROM

nvironmental protection has become an \, issue of worldwide concern. This edition of SPAN focuses on the environment and conservation of na tural resources.

Our centerpiece photo essay "The Last Wildernesses" features some of the most remote and beautiful wildlife refuges in the United States. Conservation is achieved not only by actual wilderness preservation, but also by development of "green," environment-friendly industries.

"Manufacturing for Reuse" forecasts that more products may be made of recycled parts in the near future. On the other hand, Stephen Budiansky muses in "Being Green Isn't Always What It Seems," some "green" philosophies may need re-thinking.

"Something in the Water" introduces a microbe detective whose work is about another critical international environmental concern-public health.

Public relations, publicity, image-making and marketing have an impact on all of our lives. SPAN surveys the practice of the art of image-making in India and America.

S.P. Khanna traces the evolution of public relations in India from its beginnings to its explosion in the 1990s, quoting MelCole's M.L. Kaul, who says, "The change for the better is already discernible on the PR horizon of India, and PR companies with global clientele are equipping themselves with sophisticated tools and techniques as well as creativity." From America, Harry Hurt III profiles PR wonder Mark "the Shark" McCormack, whose tale is a tour de force of PR entrepreneurship.

He made his name marketing sports heroes, and is now taking on cities.

Departing SPAN Managing Editor Krishan Gabrani chats with Charge d'affaires and former SPAN Publisher Ashley Wills at a retirement ceremony in the Ambassador's office.

After 37 years as a SPAN staffef; Krish retired September 30th.

THE

PUBLISHER

A different success story is told by Krishan Gabrani in "The Glass Masters." The Indian company Gujarat Machinery Manufacturers Limited makes industrial glass-lined equipment in a joint venture with the American manufacturer Pfaudler. The company has managed the Indian factory so well that Pfaudler put Gujarat Machinery's principal executives in charge of operations at the American company's new joint venture in China.

Continuing along the fast track to success, Lee Edson advises those ready to make their fortunes from patents on what to do when an important patent expires. Close cousins to patents are copyrights, which protect written and recorded intellectual property. Copyright lawyer and expert Judith Saffer recently visited South Asia and gave an interview to SPAN. She discusses how copyright laws may be enforced internationally in the age of unbridled digital dissemination.

Is your CEO under pressure and even in a state of decline? See if you recognize the symptoms. In "Death and Dying," Eiton Zur compares a failing chief executive to a person with a terminal disease. On a lighter note, eminent management adviser Peter Drucker tells of the most important influences in his life in "My Life as a Knowledge Worker."

SPAN draws its literary offering from the New Yorker's landmark special issue on Indian fiction, published last summer. "Emigration of an Indian Doctor" by Abraham Verghese is a personal account of an Indian doctor who goes to America to practice medicine.

Scott Russell Sanders explores the importance of "The Most Human Art," storytelling. It is an art practiced in all cultures to very similar ends. And for a little punch, we look at jazz "ghost bands" and interview American jazz singer transplanted to Delhi, Ericka Smith-Thomas.

I want to thank those many people who have written warm responses to our last two issues, and letters of welcome to our new staff. We all hope you enjoy this issue.

GMM¡PFAUDLER

Gujarat Machinery Manufacturers Limited's joint venture with American inventor of glassed steel Pfaudler Inc. has not only brought quality glass-lined equipment to India, but also brought Indian expertise to China. here is no documentary proof of what ancient civilization first invented glass, or when. The earliest glass objects are beads found in Egypt, which date from c. 2500 B.C. What we do know is that over the millennia glass-making has been refined to a precision science and art. Glass is the most exquisite and versatile of man-made materials, touching our lives in more ways than we can count.

Everyone knows its myriad uses in everyday life, but not many people know how crucial some varieties of glass have been in the development of chemical industries. Pharmaceuticals, insecticides and herbicides, textiles, dyes and dyestuff could not be where they are today without glass.

"Chemicals are highly volatile and they cause corrosion and abrasion," says Ashok 1. Patel, chairman and managing director of Gujarat Machinery Manufacturers Limited (GMM), India's biggest company making glass-lined equipment. "So you need a material which is inert, which is tough, which is strong, to withstand large variations in temperatures and pressures under which most chemicals work. These are the properties of specially formulated glass which make it indispensable in industries using different types of chemicals.

"But you can't have containers made of just glass. So what you do is to line containers made of steel with a coating of this specially formulated glass, which is as strong as steel," says Patel, who has been making glass-lined equipment for decades at his

T

factory located at Karamsad, about 40 kilometers from Vadodara, Gujarat.

Patel fits the image of an intense, hardboiled industrialist. He talks in a level voice and his suave, calm demeanor gives no hint of the man who, as a bashful youth some 25 years ago, quit a lucrative job with a Wall Street firm in New York and decided to come back to India.

"Soon after I completed my MBA from Columbia University in New York in 1970," Patel says nostalgically, "I landed a good job with a Wall Street firm. I worked there for about a year. America is a great country offering tremendous opportunities. If you have the potential and the determination to pursue your dream, America is one country where you can realize it. But," Patel continues, "I always wanted to come back. And just about then my father had bought six sick engineering companies and he wanted me to help him to turn them around."

People tend to admire those who have the courage of their convictions, who chuck successful careers to do their own thing. But, given the enormous advantages America offers and the fact that young people the world over dream of going there to seek their fortunes, Patel's decision to return to India was daring. Given the problems of revitalizing the loss-making companies his father had acquired, his decision might even have seemed foolish. "It was a tough decision to make, but once I made it there was no looking back, and I have never regretted it."

Patel's coming back to his roots in 1971

to assist in his family's business was only the beginning of the long haul to prove not only his entrepreneurial and business prowess but also to vindicate the faith his father had placed in him. Instead of giving in to the usual temptations of youth-doing the clubs with friends, or playing sports-Patel nurtured the sick companies.

By the early 1980s, his labors started to bear fruit-the units began showing profits and winning clients' respect for the products and processes. "It was a great feeling of satisfaction to see them change from being in the red to becoming profitable," Patel says.

Having passed the litmus test, Patel turned his attention to GMM, which was established in 1963 and was the pioneer in the manufacture of glass-lined equipment in India. "When my father called it a day somewhere around 1983 and retired, I took on the responsibility of running GMM," he says. "We were then the biggest company in the country making glass-lined equipment, but spent precious little on R&D. Our technology had become old and outdated. The only way to protect our preeminent position was to acquire state-of-the-art technology from overseas. So I started looking for a foreign partner."

As Patel talks, he deviates from the narrow focus on his own company and offers insights into the world of Indian industry, drawing from his own professional knowledge and experience. "All these years because of various restrictions on imports,

Top: Aforklift at the Gujarat Machinery Manufacturers Limited (GMM) plant in Karamsad near Vadodara places a steel container inside a vertical firing furnace, where it will be lined with a coating of specially formulated glass. The equipment is then given several coats of corrosion-resistant paint (above, left) and put through rigorous testing to checkfor weak points (above). Left: Ashok J. Patel, chairman and managing director ofGMM.

India has been a sheltered market, a seller's market, by and large, and there was little incentive to improve. No matter what the quality, whatever was produced in the country was sold because there was hardly any competition. By this I don't mean that there were no Indian companies that didn't make world-class goods; there were several. The result was that Indian industrial houses didn't pay as much attention as they should have to R&D, which, I believe, is one of the greatest strengths of multinationals. I strongly believe that India has done the right thing to open our economy to the multinationals. It is very important for a developing country to have access to the world's latest technology, instead of spending our energies and time in reinventing the wheel ourselves." He speaks with such conviction that it is hard to question his wisdom.

Patel's search for a foreign collaborator for GMM ended in New York, the city he "loved" as an MBA student, with Pfaudler Companies Inc. Pfaudler invented glassed steel more than a century ago. "No other maker of glass-lined equipment comes even close to pfaudler," says Patel. "Its commitment to excellence and its unmatched track record for manufacturing the world's most proven corrosion-resistant equipment have helped Pfaudler stay right at the top."

Fortunately for GMM, Pfaudler was impressed with the Indian company's credentials, and it bought 40 percent of the GMM's equity for $800,000 in 1988. Pfaudler also signed a separate agreement with GMM for transfer of technology for which the American company receives royalty.

It is a mutually beneficial relationship.

The partnership has enabled GMM to remain India's-and perhaps world's-biggest manufacturer of glass-lined equipment. It makes about 3,500 containers each year for local and export markets. Recently, GMM sold two massive reactors, each with a capacity of 25,000 liters, to Australia.

"We are now an ISO 9001 company, which is the hallmark of international quality," Patel says. "Glass-lined equipment is a critical component in industries using chemicals. You just can't be lax with quality; containers must be literally error-free. Even

the smallest defect can play havoc as temperatures and pressures inside these containers can be extreme."

How does Pfaudler look at its Indian connection? "They have no reasons to complain," says Patel unhurriedly. "They get dividends, they share in profits and they receive royalty. The basic ingredient of any successful joint venture is the mutual trust that you establish. Of course, the bottom line is the profits. When Pfaudler became our partner in 1988, they bought 40 percent of our equity at the then market price of Rs. 25 a share. Today the market price is about Rs. 800. That is more than 30 times in under ten years."

In fact, Pfaudler is so happy and satisfied with GMM's performance that "it has left entirely to us the day-to-day management.

They have reposed all the proxies in me," Patel says. "It is an arm's-length management, a distant management."

In many ways, more important than the money Pfaudler makes from its tieup with GMM is how the Indian joint venture partner has helped the American company gain a foothold in emerging Asian markets.

Riding piggy-back on each other's strengths, GMM-Pfaudler chugged along merrily until the early 1990s when a real threat emerged. Soon after India began to liberalize its economy in 1991 to integrate it with the global marketplace, several pharmaceutical products from China began flooding the Indian market. Priced much less than the local products, these greatly affected the profit margins of Indian pharmaceutical companies. To find out how the Chinese could sell so cheap, executives from several Indian companies visited China. They discovered, to their surprise, the Chinese glass-lined equipment cost a fraction of what Indian-made containers, such as GMM's, cost.

Faced with this stark reality, the Indian companies did what, under the circumstances, seemed the right thing to do: they imported the containers from China. Even after paying the customs duty, the containers cost less than half the price of GMM equipment.

As a consequence, GMM's sales, profits and reputation began to plummet. The situ-

ation, as Patel admits, was "quite serious. In fact, grim." But he was not ready to throw in the towel, and went to China to see for himself how the Chinese could manage to fabricate such a "sophisticated equipment so cheap."

Patel discovered that manufacture of glass-lined equipment in China was something like a cottage industry-hundreds of small companies make these containers.

But the quality of their glass was poor and even their technique of fusing it with steel containers was rudimentary. "So," says Patel, "on two of the most important parameters, quality and durability, they were no match to our equipment. Naturally, they cost much less than our containers. Because

"The basic ingredient of any successful joint venture is the mutual trust that you establish. Of course, the bottom line is the profits."

-Ashok

J. Patel

of the poor quality, their containers would not last much beyond a year or so, while our equipment is good even after operating it for eight to ten years. So, in the long run you end up spending much more in replacement costs."

Patel thought of a brilliant strategy to lick the problem-fight it head on by introducing Pfaudler's technology into China. He proposed to Pfaudler the idea of starting a joint venture in China. They were receptive to the idea, and entrusted Patel to do the groundwork of short-listing Chinese firms with whom they could collaborate. 'The Chinese, who opened their doors to the multinationals much before we did, had amply grasped the advantages of importing foreign technology and they were also very keen on starting a joint venture with pfaudler," says Patel. "Once we had done our groundwork and decided on the Chinese company as a partner, it took us less than a week to get all the clearances and sign the agreement. This kind of thing is still unimaginable in India."

Although it's a joint venture between the American company and the Chinese partner, Pfaudler has so much faith in Patel that they made him one of the three directors of this company. The second director is also from GMM-GMM's vice president, who is stationed in China as general manager.

The third director is the president of Pfaudler. "You see, when Pfaudler appointed the GMM vice president as head," Patel says, "it almost came as shock to the Chinese; it was difficult for them to accept an Indian as their head. They expected that Pfaudler would appoint an expatriate Chinese or an American as the chief."

Patel adds, "pfaudler doesn't think parochially. It is a multinational with a global vision, drawing talent from wherever it can tap. They are quite appreciative of my initiative that started the Chinese project.

Over the years GMM-Pfaudler have built such a bond of trust and faith that Pfaudler recently invited me to join their core team for strategic planning, not only for Pfaudler but for its whole group of companies which manufacture several other products in addition to glass-lined equipment." Besides India and China, Pfaudler has operated plants in Brazil, Germany, Japan, Mexico and Scotland.

While talking of China, it is difficult for Patel to resist the temptation of comparing India with this new emerging economic superpower. "The progress that China has made is unbelievable," he says. "China is way ahead of India in terms of foreign investment. Their economy is booming, their exports are booming. True, there's corruption, a lot of it, but we, the business people, look at the law and order situation, we look at the cleanliness, the discipline, we look at development, and you find them all there."

Patel concludes, "But there is a fundamental difference. We are a democracy and China is not." Patel is quite optimistic and upbeat about India. "We have some of the best brains in the country. I think what the government needs to do is to stop interfering with the business activities. It should allow the businesspeople a free hand. I have no doubt in my mind that once we do that, we can be one of the world's leading economic powers."

0

Meet the Real Jerry Maguire Mark "the Shark" McCormack is America's biggest marketing success story. Starting with sports idols in the' 60s, he now represents about 1,500 clients worldwide: performers, models, athletes, and even Pope John Paul II. hat do Tiger Woods, Tyra Banks, Itzhak Perlman, Pope John Paul II, the British Government and New York City have in common? Their fans and devotees might claim they are all guided by divine inspiration. But when they are seeking corporate endorsements or promoting special events, each of these celebrated figures and institutions relies on the more worldly guidance of Mark ("the Shark") McCormack and his International Management Group (IMG), the largest sports management and marketing agency on Earth.

Still blond haired and sharp tongued at age 66, McCormack, who is an attorney and the author of What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, almost single-handedly invented the sports marketing business more than 35 years ago. "I had dinner with Tom Cruise in London recently, and I told him, 'I'm sure we're the company you left [in the movie Jerry Maguire],''' McCormack confided in an interview.

Indeed, the real IMG is far more powerful than its Hollywoodinvented counterpart and Maguire's former employer, Sports Management International. Although the privately held companywhose sole private holdw is McCormack-does not release earnings reports, industry sources estimate IMG's revenues to be well in excess of $1 billion a year. Headquartered in Cleveland, the agency has 78 offices in 38 countries and some 2,000 employees serving roughly 1,500 clients worldwide. Representation of athletes, models and performing artists in contract negotiations, endorsement deals and personal financial planning reportedly makes up only a third of IMG's business. The agency also owns or manages more than 1,000 special events, and its television subsidiary, Trans World International, claims to be the world's largest independent producer of sports programming, providing close to 2,000 hours of shows each year.

W

Eventful business. According to the trade publication lEG Sponsorship Report, worldwide spending on special-events marketing alone has mushroomed from $10.9 billion in 1994 and is expected to rise to $ I5.3 billion this year. Spending on sports sponsorship in North America has grown from $2.85 billion to $3.84 billion in that time, while sponsorship of non-sports projects in entertainment, in the arts and on behalf of various causes has nearly doubled to $2.1 billion annually.

Having played a role in fostering the merger of sports and entertainment, McCormack is now pioneering a similarly commercial merger of the public and private sectors by applying his distinctive sports-marketing methods to financially strapped cities and nations.

IMG is handling the British Government's effort to attract corporate sponsorship for the "Millennium Experience," a series of festivals, exhibits and events scheduled around New Year's Day 2000 (the official moment will be signaled when the clock strikes midnight, Greenwich Mean Time; not surprisingly, IMG is expected to target watch companies as potential sponsors). The agency is also assisting Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in his efforts to balance New York City's budget by raising revenues through the sale of corporate licenses for municipal assets and services.

Along the way; McCormack and IMG are stirring controversynot only among competitors but also among skeptics and prospective clients outside the industry who criticize the agency's previous forays into the arts and other nonsports areas. The Shark himself remains typically unfazed, shrugging off criticisms as unfounded and underscoring the pragmatism that motivates his latest choice of client. "An institution like New York City has more longevity than an athlete," he notes. "It's not going to quit because of injury, and it's not going to retire because it's too old."

Much like the fictional Jerry Maguire, McCormack started his agency back in 1960 on a handshake deal with a single client. His name was Arnold Palmer. Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player soon joined the IMG fold, forming the remaining two-thirds of what McCormack shrewdly marketed as golf's "Big Three." As TMG grew rapidly over the next three decades, it suffered several big-name defections. In 1970, Nicklaus left IMG to start his own management company, reportedly because he tired of playing second fiddle to Palmer. In 1993, Greg Norman concluded he was giving up too much of his off-course

What do Pope John Paul II, Andre Agassi, Monica Seles and Tiger Woods have in common? They are brought to you by Mark McCormack, one of America's most dynamic management and marketing moguls.

revenues to IMG and formed his own company with a slew offormer IMG executives. Despite such setbacks, the agency expanded deeper into and beyond golf, taking on ever more famous clients.

Thanks to John Paul II, IMG garnered flattering worldwide publicity, if only modest fees, for marketing the official book and memorabilia rights during the Pope's 1982 visit to Great Britain.

Unholy notices ensued three years later, however, when McCormack began a spree of takeovers and talent raids on agencies representing such classical-music stars as Perlman, with the self-stated goal of becoming "the domjnant [marketing] force in the world." Although IMG Artists succeeded in becoming the second largest in the field, its tactics left many walking wounded, including rival agent Jasper Parrott, whose agency lost 60 singers in a single raid. "McCormack and many of ills senior staff disdain classical music," Parrott groused last summer.

A rough sport. IMG's detractors complain ever more bitterly

about the agency's apparent conflicts of interest and allegedly questionable client development ploys. When golfing phenom Woods was still a schoolboy, for example, his father was put on the IMG payroll to scout junior golfers, a move critics scored as a sly circumvention of rules governing amateur status. In tennis, IMG represents Martina Hingis, Monica Seles, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, and, at the same time, negotiates the broadcasting rights for Wimbledon and promotes its own made-for-television tennis events.

"IMG is the octopus-its arms are everywhere," says an independent sports agent who requested anonymity. "You have to wonder whose interests they are really serving other than their own."

McCormack and other IMG officials reply that they neutralize any apparent conflicts by making all parties aware of the agency's various involvements, adding that one of IMG's greatest strengths is the ability of its many arms to work together without internecine back stabbing. And no one denies that the agency produces when its famous clients bellow, "Show me the money!" In his first year as a profes-

The latest and perhaps most controversial industry trend is applying sportsmarketing methods to public-sector clients. sional golfer, Woods has signed IMG-negotiated contracts with Nike, Titleist, Rolex and American Express. McCormack refuses to reveal the exact amounts of the deals but claims that most estimates reported in the media, which range from $70 million to more than $100 million, are "low." Long term, IMG has done even better by client No. I, helping Palmer amass an empire worth $175 million.

Not surprisingly, IMG's well-documented success is now prompting a wave of consolidation among real-life rivals, which are arming themselves with far more financial muscle than the mythical Jerry Maguire possessed. In May, the Interpublic Group, a conglomerate of advertising agencies including McCannErickson Worldwide, acquired the sports agency Advantage International and 60 percent of U.K.-based Alan Pascoe International. In June, the Marquee Group, a newly formed public company led by former Madison Square Garden boss Robert Gutkowski, agreed to buy the ProServ agency. But even taken together, the Advantage, Pascoe and ProServ units boast less than half the number of clients represented by IMG. While competitors hasten to remind that bigger does not necessarily mean better, IMG's size and operating record give it the upper hand in capitalizing on the latest-and perhaps most controversial-industry trend: applying sports-marketing methods to public-sector clients. IMG's association with the Pope and its long-standing and mutually profitable alliance with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the game's international rulemaking body and sponsor of the British Open, surely contributed to the British Government's selection of the agency to represent the "Millennium Experience." The fact that IMG has agreed to raise $240 million for a relatively paltry 6 percent fee suggests that

McCormack has his eyes on larger prizes to come.

Official paint. IMG's pending five-year deal with New York City, currently in the final stages of negotiation, calls for the development of a proposal identifying opportunities for the parks, transportation and sanitation departments to sell licensing rights to 10 to 15 corporate sponsors starting in 1998. Similar smaller-scale programs are already underway in Los Angeles, where county beaches use vehicles provided by Ford and lifeguards sport official swimwear by Speedo, and in Buffalo, which chose an official paint (Pratt & Lambert). Annually, Los Angeles County gets roughly $1.4 million in cash and in-kind contributions from its marketing program. But, as David Jacobson of lEG Sponsorship Report notes, "The fact that New York City is working with IMG takes municipal marketing to a new level."

The prospects are indeed mind-boggling-and downright appalling to critics who fear that the entire planet and every cultural and political event under the sun might one day be plastered with corporate brand names. "Cities should be immune to this," says Robert Weissman of Ralph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law. "Municipal marketing results in the commercialization of limited public spaces and subordinates public and democratic values to private profit....When corporations get too cozy with city government, the systems of accountability are endangered."

IMG officials counter that cities are coming to them out of economic necessity, not the other way around. "As federal funding becomes less and less, municipal marketing will become a bigger factor," predicts TMG Senior Executive Vice President Robert D. Kain. "It can be a pretty big deal if Pepsi or Coca-Cola buys the exclusive pouring rights for Central Park. If it's done tastefully, there's no reason why all the trash cans in New York City can't bear the Rubbermaid logo, for example, or why city-owned vehicles can't use Goodyear tires. But we're not going to put a [corporate sponsor] name on Central Park."

Ironically, industry leaders and independent analysts insist that given the unlikely prospect of government regulation (governments, after all, are the clients here), the most powerful tempering force on tasteless commercialization will come from the often overlooked element in the marketing equation: fans, consumers, and voters. "It's all about money and voting with wallets," notes lEG's Jacobson. "Consumers will draw the line just as ex-baseball fans have been voting with their wallets by not attendrng majorleague games. As long as they say, 'We appreciate your sponsors,' [public sector marketing] will expand. If consumers are turned off by what they see, corporate sponsors will put on the brakes."

Weissman, for one, thinks the public will reject the idea of auctioning off public space to the highest corporate bidder. To underscore his point, he cites the experience of Taco Bell. The fast-food chain was deluged with angry phone calls after it put out advertisements on April 1, 1996, announcing that it had bought the Liberty Bell and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. The ads were an April Fools' joke. The public didn't get it.

0 About the Author: & World Report.

Harry Hurt [II is a contributing editor of

u.s. News

Public Relations in India The Changi ng Scenario

Following economic liberalization, Indian companies are adapting public relations methods of multinationals to help them face the challenges of global business.

"A lot of people can talk about what PR can do for business. But I can tell you about what it can do for your survival."

That was Lee Iacocca, the management guru, relating to public relations practitioners how Chrysler Corporation, during his days as chief executive, was able to recover from its "gloom doom" phase.

"You can point to three or four reasons why Chrysler is alive today-and right at the top is effective communication," he said. "Think about it. We were going broke. People were reading our obituaries every day. And we were trying to get them to buy our cars when they didn't know for sure if we'd be around the next day to stand behind them.

"And it wasn't just customers. We had to convince Congress, the banks, our dealers, our suppliers and the whole American public that the death notices were premature.

"Effective public relations was our life

support for a while, and believe me, I'm not overstating the case. We weren't running on fumes anymore, we were running on faith. The faith of the public allowed us to stay in business. And we kept that faith only through our ability to communicate."

Credibility is important in business for the simple reason that lack of it is bound to make business vulnerable. This is even more true in the global context in which business operates today.

Politicians, wri ters, orators, salesmen, advertisers communicate to make themselves credible. Is public relations communication any different? Not really, except that PR communication is more through deeds than words. Performance backed with transparency and accountability makes for credible PRo The hushhush approach creates more problems than it solves.

This brings to mind the remarkable PR success following the blowout at India's Natural Gas Commission's (ONGC) oil well at Bombay High. The case study, presented at the Asian Public Relations Congress held at New Delhi in 1984, received well-deserved national and international acclaim. Noting the credibility and communication aspect behind the PR effort, Ambit, the journal of Bombay Management Association, said in its editorial: "Blowout is a universal phenomenon in the oil industry especially offshore.

In spite of the best effort on the part of companies engaged in oil exploration, it is

not generally possible to carry the shareholder (the government and people in this case) in such a situation. It is in this context that the offshore blowout-the first of its kind in India-stands apart as an exar:npie of excellent communication management...academic institutions and others interested in this subject will find this case study valuable in the practice of PR in an emergency situation."

Much has been written and said about the need for public relations orientation of managements-the CEO in particularand whether PR is a management or a staff function. M.L. Kaul of MelCole Public Relations, who designed and executed the Bombay High blowout communication program as the then chief of public relations at ONGC, believes that PR is most effective when it is an integral part of management. "It takes time for managements to appreciate this. Whether PR is a management function or merely a staff function is beside the point. What is important is PR initiative and its own credibility. That ensures full management backing," he says.

Important elements of public relations-transparency, accountability, fair practice, social responsibility, harmonizing with environment-can be discerned in the company's business objectives. By guiding its managers-and through them employeesto its business philosophy of "Provide, Perform and Project" the company tries to achieve two things: identifi-

among companies in image trouble. Corporations spend enormous sums toward imagebuilding and regard it as good investment. PR professionals devote most of their time thinking how best to create, repair or improve the image of their clients. This, in turn, calls for constant management of changing public perceptions based on authentic feedback resting on scientific research and evaluation.

A favorable image Drawing by Eric & Bill. Š 1997 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved. creates goodwill all round. It is the key to success.

Nobody knows it better than public men and cation of their interests with company's women-be they in business, politics or interests and conferring on them the status the entertainment world. Image is the key of the company's ambassadors, a crucial relaying point for effective, credible proto success and a favorable image depends upon good products, good selling and jection. good management. Performance and imConceptually, it is teamwork. But projection is a skilled communication job. It age are mutually supportive. Company is better left to the PR specialist with supimage and image of its product, normally porting inputs from other members of the handled by advertising, have a rub-off effect on each other. In a competitive marteam. One corporation enumerated its business objectives in its manager's ket, when quality and prices of a product are comparable, institutional image has a guide as follows: "Our objective is to have all people who definite edge.

The essence of improving the business come in contact with us regard it as a good image rests not in trying to conjure up a company to work for, to invest in, to buy from, to sell to and a good company to good story when performance fails, but in have as a citizen in any community. sharpening corporate perceptions of emerging social, political and other rele"We want the public to know the company not only as an efficient, economic or- vant trends and in adjusting performance so that there is indeed a good story to tell. ganization that designs, manufactures and sells products at a fair price, but also as a An image is only as good as it is credible. useful and desirable institution, recognizing and meeting its responsibilities to all PUBLIC RELATIONS IN INDIA Public relations, as the term is undergroups that it serves." stood today, had its beginnings in India when the Public Relations Society of IMAGE India (PRSI) was set up in 1958. Before Image-management is what public relathat, it was practiced as press relations. tion is commonly thought to be all about.

Most clients look for PR professionals to Although this is not so today, relations with the media still constitute one of the give them a favorable image. Public relamost important aspects of PR work. tions people look for prospective clients

Public relations was sometimes misunderstood as publicity and liaison.

Quite a few multinational corporations then operating in India regarded PR as an integral part of business-a concept new to traditional Indian business. The House of Tata was probably the first Indian company to adopt modern concepts of public relations as part of its business culture.

Public relations in India received a further fillip with the public sector emerging as a major business player during the 1960s. It developed, in this sector, as an instrument of accountability at various levelsParliament, state legislatures and local.

As the concept of industrial democracy gained ground in the country, managements realized that conventional methods of handling labor relations were no longer adequate. As education of employees on several labor-management issues and positive attitudinal changes became imperative, PR's role as internal communicator became important.

Public relations in India received its biggest impetus in recent times as major multinationals started operations in the country after the economic liberalization in 1991. Even before setting up shop in India, the foreign investors looked for public relations support to acquaint themselves with India's investment climate, industrial culture, legislative influence on major economic decisions and for an analytical view of the prevailing political environment. They also came in through advertising companies having global affiliations.

Indian companies, inspired by the multinational styIe of business, are involving PR consultants and agencies to equip them with researched information on foreign markets so that they are in a better position to face the challenges of globalization.

Companies beset with labor problems also now seek PR expertise to draw up and execute internal communication programs to develop harmonious employer-employee relations on long-term basis.

Many Indian PR firms have already tied up with leading foreign public relations firms operating worldwide. Hindustan Thompson, which is an Indian subsidiary

literature, parti cularl y the case studies."

M.L. Kaul adds: "PR in its modern ethos is of American origin. PR in U.S. has developed as a science and art of communication in its multifarious and myriad forms to suit business needs. It has evolved parallel to proliferation of business as well as the needs of society, unlike advertising, which has been influenced by the British as an aggressive device to influence and to create Drawing by Eric & Bill. Š 1997 Tribune Media Services, Inc. desire for consumer AU rights reserved. goods." He continues, "PR traveled to India via of 1. Walter Thompson of the USA, has set multinational corporations. But it is not as up a PR wing IPAN, an associate of Hill & if the PR profession did not exist in India before liberalization and deregulation of Knowlton-also part of 1. Walter Indian economy. It has been there for Thompson.

Globally, PR business is dominated by more than three decades functioning in a professional manner, especially in the the U.S.-based Burson Martseller Fleishmann, Edelman PR worldwide and public sector. After liberalization, the definition of PR in India became somewhat the U.K.-based Shandwick, while Ketchum, which associated with MelCole clearer for the private sector where it was Public Relations, was the first company to confused with liaison. With the coming of have American affiliation way back in the MNCs in India, PR has become more 1989-90. It has since been taken over by visible."

K.R. Singh, a PR veteran in India and a Omnicom, one of the world's top commuformer president of the Public Relations nication companies.

Society of India, agrees that multinationals have had a profound influence on Indian AMERICAN INFLUENCE "PR in India," says Nikhil Khanna of PRo But he points out that it did not happen Good Relations, "has been influenced by only after their recent influx. He recalls the development of PR all over the world, how after PRSI was formed, the PR and including the United States. It is difficult other top executives of multinationals then to quantify the influence of American PR operating in India, dominated the society on Indian PR but it has definitely been a proceedings and national conferences orgamajor influence." Khanna is impressed by nized by PRSI for many years with their new concepts and presentation styles. That the multinationals' public relations orientation. "They regard the PR consultant as impressed and inspired many PR practitioners in India. "In concrete tenns," says they would their legal adviser," he says.

Singh, "the Americans initiated us into PR Prema Sagar of Genesis Public research and evaluation. They showed how Relations, which has links with the multinational PR firm Menning Selvage and modern business ought to work to a PR plan--even a five-year plan."

Lee, echoes similar views: "PR in India has developed professionally under the Kaul rejects the idea that visibility of combined influence of British and consumer products is the basis of MNCs' American PRo We have learned from their or American PR though he admits that vis-

ibility is an important factor. He says: "Public relations is based on enduring values. It has to be transparent in its practice in order to succeed."

Public relations has evolved over several decades to its present level of sophistication in the U.S. It has lot to do with the American way of business-openness, fair practice and social commitment. It is under this kind of influence that PR in India has grown to its present professional stature, comparable to the best in the world. With a vibrant new generation of entrepreneurs now emerging, more and more clients wi II look for professional counseling and information technology inputs to go global.

"PR firms that can meet the demand of clients who seek such advice will certainly thrive-in terms of quality clients and assignments," says Prema Sagar adding that this will call for investment in building a sound network of well-defined systems, latest communication equipment and professionally trained assistance.

"There is no shortcut," admits Sagar, "and if we are to deliver satisfactory services to world-class client companies, we ourselves must have world-class systems in place first."

M.L. Kaul agrees. He says, "The change for the better is already discemjble on the PR horizon of India, and PR companies with global clientele are equipping themselves with sophisticated tools and techniques as well as creativity. Technlogy is already changing the PR scenario the world over. With the advent of computers, E-mail, multimedia, Internet and World Wide Web, etc., the Indian PR scene is fast catching up with its counterparts in the U.S. and rest of the advanced world."

With India firmly on the path of economic freedom, business and PR in India may well look forward to a prosperous future. In the long run, the more successful corporations will be those that can achieve both social responsiveness, good economic performance-and know how to communicate effectively.

D About the Author: S. P. Khanna, a public relations consultant, is a fonner chief of public relations, Hindustan Machine Tools Limited.

My Life as a Knowledge Wor~er

I was not yet 18 when, having finished high school, I left my native Vienna and went to Hamburg as a trainee in a cotton-export firm. My father was not very happy. Ours had been a family of civil servants, professors, lawyers and physicians for a very long time. He therefore wanted me to be a full-time university student, but I was tired of being a schoolboy and wanted to go to work. To appease my father, but without any serious intention, I enrolled at Hamburg University in the law faculty. In those remote days-the year was 1927-one did not have to attend classes to be a perfectly proper university student. All one had to do to obtain a university degree was to pay a small annual fee and show up for an exam at the end of four years.

The First Experience Taught by Verdi

Influences as diverse as Phidias, Verdi, Calvinists and Schumpeter helped management adviser and author Peter Drucker evolve his method for livingand conclude that one thing worth being remembered for is the difference one makes in people's lives.

Adapted from Drucker all Asia: The DrllckerNakallchi Dialogue, by Peter F. Drucker and Isao akauchi, copyright Š 1996. Reprinted with permission of Butterworth Heinemann, a division of Reed Educational and Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.

The work at the export firm was terribly boring, and I learned very little. Work began at 7:30 in the morning and was over at 4 in the afternoon on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays. So I had lots of free time. Once a week I went to the opera, On one of those evenings I went to hear an opera by the great 19th-century Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi-the last opera he wrote, Falstaff It has now become one of Verdi's most popular operas, but it was rarely performed then. Both singers and audiences thought it too difficult. I was totally overwhelmed by it. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like that. I have

never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.

When I made a study, I found that this opera, with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man of 80! To me 80 was an incredible age. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at that age, when he was already a famous man and considered one of the foremost opera composers of his century, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one.

"All my life as a musician," he wrote, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try."

I have never forgotten those words-they made an indelible impression on me. When he was 18, Verdi was already a seasoned musician. I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. But I resolved that whatever my life's work would be, Verdi's words would be my lodestar. I resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up but would keep on. In the meantime I would strive for perfection, even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me.

The Second Experience Taught by Phidias It was at about this same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I read a story that conveyed to me what perfection means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He

was commissioned around 440 B.C. to make the statues that to this day stand on the roof of the Parthenon, in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it.

"These statues," the accountant said, "stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round-that is, for doing their back sides, which nobody can see."

"You are wrong," Phidias retorted. "The gods can see them." I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff, and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.

The Third Experience Taught by Journalism A few years later I moved to Frankfurt. I worked first as a trainee in a brokerage firm.

Then, after the New York stock-market crash, in October 1929, when the brokerage firm went bankrupt, I was hired on my 20th birthday by Frankfurt's largest newspaper as a financial and foreignaffairs writer. I continued to be enrolled as a law student at the university because in those days one could easily transfer from one European university to any other. I still was not interested in the law, but I remembered the lessons of Verdi and of Phidias. A journalist has

to write about many subjects, so I decided I had to know something about many subjects to be at least a competent journalist.

The newspaper I worked for came out in the afternoon. We began work at 6 in the morning and finished by a quarter past 2 in the afternoon, when the last edition went to press. So I began to force myself to study afternoons and evenings: international relations and international law; the history of social and legal institutions; finance; and so on. Gradually, I developed a system. I still adhere to it. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject, but they are enough to understand it. So for more than 60 years I have kept on studying one subject at a time. That not only has given me a substantial fund of knowledge. It has also forced me to be open to new disciplines and new approaches and new methods-for everyone of the subjects I have studied makes different assumptions and employs a different methodology.

The Fourth Experience Taught by an Editor-in-Chief The next experience to report in this story of keeping myself intellectually alive and growing is something that was taught by an editor-in-chief, one of Europe's leading newspapermen. The editorial staff at the newspaper consisted of very young people. At age 22 I became one of the three assistant managing editors. The reason was not that I was particularly

good. In fact, I never became a first-rate daily journalist. But in those years, around 1930, the people who should have held the kind of position I hadpeople age 35 or so-were not available in Europe. They had been killed in World War 1.

Even highly responsible positions had to be filled by young people like me.

The editor-in-chief, then around 50, took infinite pains to train and discipline his young crew. He discussed with each of us every week the work we had done. Twice a year, right after New Year's and then again before summer vacations began in June, we would spend a Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday discussing our work over the preceding six months.

The editor would always start out with the things we had done well. Then he would proceed to the things we had tried to do well. Next he reviewed the things where we had not tried hard enough. And finally, he would subject us to a scathing critique of the things we had done badly or had failed to do.

The last two hours of that session would then serve as a projection of our work for the next six months: What were the things on which we should concentrate? What were the things we should improve? What were the things each of us needed to learn? And a week later each of us was expected to submit to the editor-in-chief our new program of work and learning for the next six months. I tremendously enjoyed the sessions, but I forgot them as soon as I left the paper.

Almost 10 years later, after I had come to the United States, I remembered them. It was in the early 1940s, after I had become

a senior professor, started my own consulting practice, and begun to publish major books.

Since then I have set aside two weeks every summer in which to review my work during the preceding year, beginning with the things I did well but could or should have done better, down to the things I did poorly and the things I should have done but did not do. I decide what my priorities should be in my consulting work, in my writing and in my teaching. I have never once truly lived up to the plan I make each August, but it has forced me to live up to Verdi's injunction to strive for perfection, even though "it has always eluded me" and still does.

The Fifth Experience Taught by a Senior Partner My next learning experience came a few years after my experience on the newspaper.

From Frankfurt I moved to London in 1933, first working as a securities analyst in a large insurance company and then, a year later, moving to a small but fast-growing private bank as an economist and the executive secretary to the three senior partners. One, the founder, was a man in his seventies; the two others were in their mid-thirties. At first I worked exclusively with the two younger men, but after I had been with the firm some three months or so, the founder called me into his office and said, "I didn't think much of you when you came here and still don't think much of you, but you are even more stupid than I thought you would be, and much more stupid than you have any right to

be." Since the two younger partners had been praising me to the skies each day, I was dumbfounded.

And then the old gentlemen said, "I understand you did very good securities analysis at the insurance company. But if we had wanted you to do securities-analysis work, we would have left you where you were.

You are now the executive secretary to the partners, yet you continue to do securities analysis. What should you be doing now, to be effective in your new job?" I was furious, but still I realized that the old man was right. I totally changed my behavior and my work. Since then, when I have a new assignment, I ask myself the question, "What do I need to do, now that I have a new assignment, to be effective?" Every time, it is something different.

Discovering what it is requires concentration on the things that are crucial to the new challenge, the new job, the new task.

The Sixth Experience

learning discipline.

Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance-making a key decision, for instance-he is expected to write down what results he anticipates.

Nine months later he traces back from the actual results to those anticipations. That very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally, it shows him what he has no gift for and cannot do well. I have followed that method for myself now for 50 years. It brings out what one's strengths are-and that is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out areas where improvement is needed and suggests what kind of improvement is needed.

Finally, it brings out things an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do.

To know one's strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do-they are the keys to continuous learning.

Taught by the Jesuits and the Calvinists Quite a few years later, around 1945, after I had moved from England to the United States in 1937, I picked for my three-year study subject early modern European history, especially the 15th and 16th centuries. I found that two European institutions had become dominant forces in Europe: the Jesuit Order in the Catholic South and the Calvinist Church in the Protestant North. Both were founded independently in 1536. Both adopted the same

The Seventh Experience Taught by Schumpeter One more experience, and then I am through with the story of my personal development.

At Christmas 1949, when I had just begun to teach management at New York University, my father, then 73 years old, came to visit us from California. Right after New Year's, on January 3, 1950, he and I went to visit an old friend of his, the famous economist Joseph Schum peter. My father had already retired, but

Schumpeter, then 66 and world famous, was still teaching at Harvard and was very acti ve as the president of the American Economic Association.

In 1902 my father was a very young civil servant in the Austrian Ministry of Finance, but he also did some teaching in economics at the university.

Thus he had come to know Schum peter, who was then, at age 19, the most brilliant of the young students. Two moredifferent people are hard to imagine: Schumpeter was flamboyant, arrogant, abrasive and vain; my father was quiet, the soul of courtesy, and modest to the point of being selfeffacing. Still, the two became fast friends and remained fast friends.

By 1949 Schumpeter had become a very different person. In his last year of teaching at Harvard, he was at the peak of his fame. The two old men had a wonderful time together, reminiscing about the old days.

Suddenly, my father asked with a chuckle, "Joseph, do you still talk about what you want to be remembered for?" Schumpeter broke out in loud laughter. For Schum peter was notorious for having said, when he was 30 or so and had published the first two of his great economics books, that what he really wanted to be remembered for was having been "Europe's greatest lover of beautiful women and Europe's greatest horseman-and perhaps also the world's greatest economist." Schumpeter said, "Yes, this question is still important to me, but I now answer it differently. I want to be remembered as having been the teacher who converted half a dozen brilliant students into

first-rate economists."

He must have seen an amazed look on my father's face, because he continued, "You know, Adolph, I have now reached the age where I know that being remembered for books and theories is not enough. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in the lives of people."

One reason my father had gone to see Schum peter was that it was known that the economist was very sick and would not live long.

Schumpeter died five days after we visited him.

I have never forgotten that conversation. I learned from it three things: First, one has to ask oneself what one wants to be remembered for. Second, that should change. It should change both with one's own maturity and with changes in the world. Finally, one thing worth being remembered for is the difference one makes in the lives of people.

I am telling this long story for a simple reason. All the people I know who have managed to remain effective during a long life have learned pretty much the same things I learned. That applies to effective business executives and to scholars, to top-ranking military people and to first -rate physicians, to teachers and to artists. Whenever I work with a person, I try to find out to what the individual attributes his or her success. I am invariably told stories that are remarkably like mine.

D About the Author: Peter F. Drucker is Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate School in California.

PERSONAL

HISTORY

Etnigration of an Indian Doctor The New Yorker did something last June that was unprecedented in the venerable magazine's history. It published a double issue devoted to Indian fiction, in recognition ofIndia's 50th year of independence. Among the distinguished people of letters who contributed was Abraham Verghese, an Indian doctor settled in America who has become better known for his writings than for his labors in the Texas hospital where he practices medicine. His book In My Own Country-about treating AIDS patients in Tennessee-is being made into a film. The following is his account of how expectations of a young intern were matched by his experiences upon emigration to the United States. nenightin ]979, toward the end of my internship at the Government General Hospital in Madras, I was summoned from my bed to the contagious-diseases ward, where an elderly Brahmin priest with rabies needed to be sedated. He was in one of two "dog bite" rooms: well-ventilated, high-ceilinged structures with no hard furniture, a padlocked door and wire mesh on one wall. When I admitted him, two days previously, he had been lucid but had complained of fever and a tingling around the site of a healed bite wound. Now, as I stood, with the matron, peering into the cage, he was agitated and mumbling incoherently. I fished out a needle from the tabletop sterilizer and fitted it onto a syringe. I entered his room, squatted by his mat, gently rolled him to one side and injected pethidine (Demerol) into his gluteus muscle. A plate of puri and potatoes lay untouched next to him; water had been taken away, because the sight of it gave him pharyngeal spasms.

I thought of my father's older brother, who was 10 when he chased away a dog that had strayed into the compound of the family home in Kerala. When the boy turned back to the

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house, the dog came up behind him and bit him on the hand.

The wound was treated with a poultice by an Ayurvedic physician, but within a few weeks the child developed fever and confusion. The family knew what this meant. They made preparations to take him downriver by boat and from there by car to Trivandrum and the nearest big hospital. But the little boy screamed in terror at the sight of the river, it threw him into a fit of choking. Nothing could induce him to get on the boat. He died in the house where he was born.

The night matron ushered me out. "Cent percent fatal, Doctor," she said as she locked the door after me. Then she added, "By morning? Allover."

She would have laughed at my stupidity if I had told her that, according to Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, my American textbook, a rabid patient could survive. One patient, the book said, had been maintained for months on a respirator, in a state-of-the-art intensive-care unit, until the virus burned itself out. But then in America only a few human rabies cases occurred every year. Around 25,000 people died of rabies annually in India. Our intensive-care beds were needed for people who had better chances of survival.

I walked back to my quarters, through a maze of walkways that led past the open wards. When I first entered the hospital, as a third-year medical student, the redolence of the wards had been exciting-a vindication for the years of sitting through dry lectures on anatomy, biochemistry and physiology. My hero was Professor K. V. Thiruvengadam.

During my first day on the wards, as 15 of us students trooped behind him on rounds, we came to a patient giving off a strange smell, and it seemed to animate Professor K.VT. He rattled offalitany of odors-the acetone breath of diabetic coma, the freshly-baked-bread odor of typhoid fever, the stale-beer stench of scrofula, the sewer breath of a lung abscess, the just-plucked-chicken-feathers emanation of rubella-before arriving at the ammoniacal, mousy odor that rose from the patient before us. "Hepatic coma," he said, and he proceeded to demonstrate all its other signs.

K. V.T. could percuss a lung and predict precisely what the

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chest X-ray would look like. He would quote Thackeray, Nature and the most recent edition of Harrison's. As chief of medicine, he was a busy man, but he made us feel that there was nothing more important to him than guiding our fingers to feel what he felt, and guiding our eyes and ears to see and hear what he saw and heard.

But three years after I met him-halfway through my compulsory internship-my excitement had worn off. It had given way to a sense of impotence. Oh, yes, our hospital performed open-heart surgery; we had a giant neurosurgical institute; and we provided yeoman service in many other areas.

But the demands always outstripped the resources. In the lines that wove and doubled back on themselves at the door of the outpatient clinic each morning, almost every patient would have been deserving of hospital admission by American standards. But only some were picked for admission, and then often because the patient was a good "teaching case." At exam time, professional patients would come to the hospital and receive a week's lodging and food in return for being fodder for the examinees. Takedown Govindraj, for instance, would, if you got him as your assigned case, signal to you to get your pen out. (A few rupees would have had to pass between examinee and patient before this step.) "Take down, Doctor," he'd say, adopting the tone of the many clinicians who had used his body to instruct medical students. "Take down: jaundice, spider angiomas, palmar erythema, Dupuytren's contracture, flapping tremor, breast enlargement, splenomegaly, shrunken liver, testicular atrophy." He would point to each of the stigmata of cirrhosis and pronounce the words pretty well, considering that he spoke no English. But it was best for the examinee to know this stuff on his own. Takedown occasionally sent out for mutton biryani, which was more protein than his liver could handle.

The corridor outside the operating rooms was now dark and silent. The daytime cacophony of auto rickshaws, scooters, mopeds, cars and buses outside the hospital walls and the crush of people within had lessened. The white-washed pillars that held up the buildings were faintly visible. It was possible, in the dim glow of the metal-caged light bulbs, to ignore the betel-juice stains and to imagine the colonial era, when British medical officers had ruled like emperors here and had trained "native" medical students, teaching them about Pott's disease and Hansen's disease and Sydenham's chorea and other whitemale-eponym conditions, and instilling in them the desire to wear pith helmets and white cotton suits and own Raleigh bicycles and, one day, sail to England and bring home a cherished FRCP (Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians) or FRCS (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons).

Once again, I calculated how many days of my internship I had left before I could leave India. I was 25 and restless and I had decided to pursue specialty training in America. I had been educated in India for the most part, but was born in Ethiopia, where my expatriate-Indian parents were teachers. By the time I reached medical school, my parents had

emigrated to America. My older brother had finished engineering school in Madras and was now at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. My parents had filed all the necessary papers, and I had a green card. The door was open for me to leave.

OSt of my friends in India had, like me, grown up speaking English in the house, thinking in English, reading first Enid Blyton's Famous Five books and then the Hardy Boys. Increasingly, by the late 1970s, it seemed as if we merely had our physical existence in India; mentally, we lived in a fantasy world that was somehow removed from the dust and the traffic and the chaos outside. It often appeared to me that my friends' parents and grandparents were doing the same thing we were. Their escape was the world of "the old days," by which, strangely, they meant the British days and the era of the maharajas and princely states and the rituals of afternoon tea. Our escape was the America of Woodstock, the documentary (which, like most things, came to India years after the actual event, but seemed to trigger its own revolution among the already Westernized kids I knew). For us, America was defined by the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and by the novels of John Irving and Joseph Heller. Our preference for America was also a form of rebellion against the British fixation of our elders. England seemed to be a dead-end place, particularly for a young medical student. You could get your FRCS but you would almost never be appointed a consultant. You either stayed as a perpetual intern or took your precious FRCS back to Madras and hung up your shingle and competed with all the other " 'phoren' returned" doctors on Sterling Road.

Those of us who planned to get to America abandoned British and Indian texts, which tended to be dogmatic, imperious tomes. Harrison's had numerous authors, and it quoted the pivotal, and even controversial, studies-the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis, for example-that formed the basis of modern practice. I would pick out names from the seven-page list of contributors to the seventh edition and read them aloud, enjoying the way the elegant titles rolled off my tongue and fantasizing about one day being the Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic (Medicine), Harvard Medical School.

It was possible to get an internship as a foreign medical graduate (FMC) in America. Residency programs in many inner-city American hospitals needed foreign medical graduates, and recruited them vigorously. These were institutions that rarely attracted American medical-school graduates. The hospitals' residency programs were supported by Medicare educational money, and they served an indigent patient population. The annual influx of foreign medical graduates was vital to the hospitals' functioning.

Yet while it was possible to get an American internship, it wasn't easy. First, you had to pass a day long examination that tested your medical knowledge, and another that tested your

M

For us, America was proficiency in English. By the end of met a friend of a friend who was just findefined by the music of ishing his internship at an East Coast the I960s, the exam was no longer ofhospital. We slipped into the easy fafered in India. The closest places where Crosby, Stills, Nash the exam could be taken ended up being miliarity of expatriates. Over dinner at a and Young and by the in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnamese restaurant, I told him the novels of John Irving Singapore. It seemed to us that, through places I hoped to apply to. and Joseph Heller. the 1970s and '80s, the bar kept being He laughed. "Don't be so bloody raised; the exam became more specialnaive," he said. "Learn from the experience of others. Look." He pushed a ized, with the two parts given at different times of the year. Undaunted, medical students, their chili-sauce bottle to the center of the table. "This, my dear heads buried in study guides, packed the twice-a-year charter friend, is an Ellis Island hospital. Mark my words, every planes that took off from Madras or Bombay. city has one. Such a place is completely dependent on forThe biggest hurdle, though, came after the exams, with the eign medical graduates, and that's where you will go. No attempt to get a visa from the American Consulate. In the late ifs and buts. Think of it as a quarantine period, before you 1970s, it was exceedingly difficult for an Indian doctor to ob- can move on and do your land-of-opportunity fantasy. tain a visa to go to America. But this didn't stop people who Your elders and betters have passed through these places. had passed the exams from trying. The main visa officer was a Why should you think you are different?"

Now he puta saltshaker as far away from the chili-sauce botblack gentleman who, rumor had it, hated his posting. The lines outside the Consulate would form the night before. Most tle as he could. "That," he said, "is a Plymouth Rockhospitalpeople were dressed in their consulate best, but some scruffyuniversity- and medical-school-affiliated, of course. It has looking touts wearing sarongs squatted in line all night and never taken a foreign medical graduate. Except for the occamade a good living selling their spots to late arri vals. For a fee, sional South African white or Brit or Australian, who-don't a pundit whose credentials were dubious-after all, if he ask why-is a different species of foreign medical graduate knew how to get a visa, what was he doing in Madras?from you and me. Don't even bother with that kind of place." would coach you on how to be "cent percent successful."

Contrariness made me visit a Plymouth Rock hospital in From the sweltering humidity outdoors I entered the spotBoston. The secretary in the internal-medicine office was less, air-conditioned antechamber of the Consulate, with its barely cordial. She soon ascertained what my appearance had United States flag, its orange carpets and its photograph of already suggested: that I was a foreign medical graduate. I exJimmy Carter. My visit was routine, since I had a green card. plained that, since I had never received a reply to my letter of But my classmates who were applying for tourist visas or inquiry, I thought that perhaps their letter to me had been lost in the mail. "Not likely," she said. There was a long silence. work visas needed an "interview" to prove that they planned A wiser traveler, I continued my journey across America. to return to India. They carried with them surety bonds, land certificates, bank statements and anything else that signified I discovered that the patient population at a Plymouth Rock hospital was not necessarily different from that at an Ellis wealth in India, as proof that they were not going to America to better themselves-they were doing just fabulously in Island hospital. What ultimately stigmatized an Ellis Island India, thank you very much. Relatives often transferred all hospital was not its patients but its doctors. The very fact that their assets to an applicant for 24 hours, so that the applicant it had become dependent on foreign medical graduates made could be rich for one day. Or else "instant wealth" agencies American medical students avoid the place. At Ellis Island provided papers, good only for the few hours spent in the hospi tals, I was welcomed by the secretaries in the residency Consulate. And, of course, despite all the pledges to return, I offices and had interviews with program directors who were didn't know anyone who had any intention of coming back. eager to sign me up. I thought that I could read their thoughts: Hmm ...speaks well not muchof an accent...moreof aBritish accent, if anything great exam scores ...not the never-raisemerica was the land where there was no dichotomy the-toilet-seat, spit-out-of-the-window type. between what the textbook said you should do and what you could do-or so we thought. In America, I applied to a new medical school-East Tennessee State your talent and hard work could take you to the very top. It U ni versity in Johnson City, Tennessee, in the foothills of the was the land of defibrillators on every ward and disposable Smoky Mountains. The residency program was so new that everything, by God-no more mucking around in the murky it had not clearly defined itself as foreign-medical-graduate-dependent or not. I was given a contract. My fellowwaters of a lukewarm sterilizer for a needle that could actuinterns included a couple of Americans as well as foreign ally penetrate skin. medical graduates from India, the Philippines and Haiti.

I arrived in America a few months before my internship was due to start. My graduation gift from my parents had On the first day of orientation, I was nervous. But nothing been a IS-day airline ticket that allowed multiple stops about the wards, the lab, the medical library or the intensive(Continued on page 49) around America. My mood was euphoric. On my first stop, I

A

MANUFACTURING

This is not an ordinary automobile assembly line. It is a special shop run by Detroit automakers to learn to make cars with components that can be easily recycled and reused.

orREDSE Designing products to be tom apart into reusable pieces keeps the earth greener and can make a profit for practitioners. na big gray brick building in Highland Park, Michigan, a halfdozen technicians and engineers in shirtsleeves are hard at work killing American ingenuity. Armed with air-powered socket tools, screwdrivers and hammers, they are tearing apart showroom-new cars-a red Ford Aspire here, a blue Chrysler Neon over there. They dissect subassemblies, weigh each component, videotape and time the procedures. Black wire electrical harnesses are removed and hung on tall white boards as if they were the innards of cats on display for a freshman anatomy class.

This most unusual lab is the Vehicle Recycling Development Center, a joint effort of the Big Three American auto makers that went into full operation in 1994.

Specialists from collaborating recycling associations do most of the demolition, but engineers from Chrysler, GM and Ford visit frequently to observe, often to participate.

The aim is to teach the Big Three to better design cars for easier dismantling-for instance, by improving access to key parts for future removal.

The men and women at the center are riding the hottest new production trend in the world: design for disassembly (DFD). The goal is to close the production loop, to conceive, develop and build a product with a long-term view of how its components can be refurbished and reused-or disposed of safely-at the end of the product's life. Tn a world where the costs of disposal are rising, ease of destruction becomes as important as ease of construction.

The idea has fired manufacturers from

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Rochester, New York, to Palo Alto, from Tokyo to the tiny village of Uebersee in the Bavarian Alps. Siemens coffeepots and Caterpi lIar tractors, Xerox photocopiers and Eastman Kodak cameras, American PCs and Japanese laser printers, German locomotive engines and Canadian telephones-plus many other products-are beginning to be built to be taken apart.

The forces behind this newfound environmentalism have more to do with return on capital than with a return to nature.

Unlike prior environmental schemes, green manufacturing holds out the promise for companies to do well as they do good.

Some American companies, including Xerox and Kodak, are already coining money designing for disassembly and component reuse.

Green machines, with their emphasis on reducing parts, rationalizing materials and reusing components, are proving more efficient to build and distribute than conventional ones. That's because green production meshes with today's favored manufacturing strategies: global sourcing, design for manufacture, concurrent engineering and total quality.

If that isn't enough, new laws across Europe will soon compel manufacturers of everything from autos to telephones to take back used products. In Germany, the root of the green movement, manufacturers are already responsible for the final fate of their products' packaging.

This green wave of German legislation is rolling across the Atlantic. The Germans have established a de facto global manufacturing standard. Companies from other

countries wishing to compete globally must start making products that will comply with the green dictates of the huge European market. "Things are moving too fast, with 12 countrie~ already participating in green manufacturing," says Joanna D. Underwood, president of Inform, a New York City-based company that advises corporations on environmental matters.

Green product design could also be the antidote to an astonishing depletion of the earth's mineral riches. And it might cut the amount of junk that threatens to flood landfills in the industrial world. Design dictates a whole chain of events both pre- and postmanufacturing that governs the use, or misuse, of natural resources. Take raw materials extraction, for instance. Judicious use of finished materials like steel could reduce mining demand that totals more than 9,000 kilograms annually for each American. The consequences of this are enormous.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, 94 percent of the stuff that is pulled out of the earth enters the waste stream within months.

European lawmakers are encouraged by the fact that Germany's packaging takeback legislation is working. It has worked so well that the private company organized by manufacturers to collect and dispose of packaging materials has been gathering too much trash-almost going broke in the process because sufficient facilities to remold plastics, for instance, are not in place. But the take-back law reduced the amount of packaging waste by 600 million tons, or 4 percent, during its first two years of operation.

Although corporations fight such regulations, the green laws in Germany have stimulated companies to develop imaginative ways to market goods with less packaging. Colgate, for instance, designed a toothpaste tube that stands on its head, sans box; it now sells some products that way in the U.S. too.

Hewlett-Packard's (HP) workstation designers in Germany literally moved the packaging inside, substituting plastic foam for the metal skeleton that holds interior parts, thus reducing the need for metal inside and for wrapping outside. A polypropylene foam chassis has cutouts for each component so that all nestle snugly.

Channels cut in the foam carry cooling air and cabling to connect the components.

The new chassis reduces transport packaging by 30 percent, while disassembly time has been cut 90 percent. This idea will be applied to HP personal computers as well.

Luckily for manufacturers, the main principles of design for disassembly-use fewer parts and fewer matelials, use snapfits instead of screws-also fit into modern efforts to make assembly more efficient, such as concurrent engineering and total quality control. Concurrent engineering brings different specialists into a design team from the beginning; DFD experts fit into these teams easily. And waste is an enemy of total quality management; hence, DFD also fits in here nicely.

Theoretically, anything from a coffeemaking machine to a Caterpillar tractor can be designed for disassembly. The more value in an item, of course, the more sense it makes to reuse its parts.

Some examples follow of how valuable products are being redesigned in the U.S. and in Germany to fit the new closed-loop economy.

AUTOMOBILES Almost everywhere cars are built, efforts are in high gear to make them more suitable for disassembly and to reuse component parts. Obviously, no one wants to make a car fall apart. Cost, customer appeal and performance still come first. But car companies are changing some of the ways of automaking to enhance auto breaking. BMW

BMW's Series 3 auto has parts made of recycled plastics and parts that can be recycled.

estimates that by the end of this decade, 20 million cars a year in Europe will make return trips, 250,000 of them BMWs. To put this many cars into reverse, BMW and other German automakers have been setting up experimental disassembly plants and even executing new-car models to learn more about how to take them apart.

The Germans could take a lesson from the U.S. and its robust, market-based industry. "Frankly," says auto-recycling Chrysler's Vice President Fran~ois Castaing, "I prefer the more natural, more cost-effective way of what happens in the U.S. We don't have to involve the government and to subsidize anybody in any fashion." Arguably the world's most efficient auto recycler, the U.S. already reuses a remarkable 75 percent by weight of nearly every American car. Cars are first stripped of valuable parts such as engines, generators, alternators and other components that can be refurbished and resold by some 12,000 auto parts recyclers. Next, the metal carcasses wind up in the gaping maws of some 200 shredders that reduce the metal skeletons to steel fragments, which are shipped to steelmakers to make more new car bodies. This is already a profitable, multibillion-dollar-a-year business in the U.S. But it is also fraught with problems, such as disposing of tires, glass and plastic.

Green manufacturing-thinking these problems through beforehand-can lower recycling costs dramatically and reduce environmental hazards.

There are probably insect species with longer life cycles than a PC-now obsolete less than 12 months after it leaves the factory, according to scientists at CarnegieMellon University.

"Seventy million obsolete computers are sitting in the basements of various organizations and will eventually end up in landfills if they are not recycled," says the university's D. NavinChandra. 'Today two computers become obsolete for every three purchased. By 2005, the ratio will be one to one, which means we should be able to recycle computers as fast as we make them. For this reason, recycling must be treated like any regular manufacturing task."

In the U.S., laws concerning toxic wastes are scaring computer makers and other manufacturers out of their wits.

Reason: If their old machines wind up in landfi lls and commence polluting the ground, the makers are held responsible.

So most U.S. computer companies have begun so-called reverse distribution for old machines, especially from big customers. Some big corporate computer buyers are now writing take-back clauses into purchase orders. The users simply don't

want to be burdened with storehouses full of obsolete hardware.

Disassembling old computers isn't new. It began a few years ago, mainly to retrieve precious metals like gold and platinum.

These metals were used in larger quantities in the older machines, deposited as paths to connect chips on a board. The boards were then sold to chip retrievers, which resold the chips to such users as toy manufacturers.

Computer makers that can reduce the number of parts and the time it takes to disassemble a PC will profit when the product, like a sort of silicon salmon, returns to its place of origin. IBM, HP, Digital Equipment and other makers are rapidly introducing DFD technology across the board. As early as 1991, IBM designed two models of its PS2E both for easier disassembly and lower energy consumption.

Now all IBM designers are being urged to switch to green schemes. For more than a year HP has used a design-for-disassembly approach to build all 12 models of its Vectra Pc. Each Vectra now contains only tlu¡ee screws, a construction that also allows easy upgrade by users. "Our customers love it," says Gilles Bouchard, who heads Vectra's mechanical design team in Grenoble, France.

For more than three years, in Research Triangle, North Carolina, IBM has been practicing take-back and disassembly at a facility called the Engineering Center for Environmentally Conscious Products. (It might think about disassembling that name.) The computer colossus is evaluating how such collection could be done at minimal cost, or even at a profit, says center director 1. Ray Kirby. IBM takes back its old machines in eight European countries for a small fee, as do most other computer manufacturers.

HP, which has been in the disassembly business longer than IBM, already runs a profitable operation, according to executives there. DEC says its Resource Recovery Center in Contoocook, New Hampshire, is "cost effective." Germany's Siemens Nixdorf, on the other hand, says its recycling is not yet profitable because not enough old machines are being processed.

HP's record with its workstations is unparalleled. It rebuilds and recycles every

machine that's returned.

Says Tom Korpalski, HP's manager of product stewardship for small computers: "In the hierarchy of the three R's of design for the environment, the first two-reduce [the number of product parts] and reuse [the parts]-rank above recycling."

TELEPHONES When monopoly prevailed in telephony, manufacturers leased telephones and then refurbished and rebuilt them to lease anew.

The breakup of the Bell System disrupted this process, since most phones are now purchased rather than leased. But profitable leasing continues in Canada. In a big plant outside Toronto, Northern Telecom breaks down old telephones, puts their innards into new plastic housings, and sends them out agall1.

Beyond that traditional activity, Northern Telecom is switching to companywide DFD. "We're on the threshold of moving to a new platform that will truly change the philosophy behind our entire product strategy," says Margaret Kerr, senior vice president for environment and ethics at Northern Telecom in Toronto.

AT&1', moving a bit more deliberately, is in the midst of a demonstration project. called "green product realization" to generate guidelines for green product design.

FORTUNE500 companies such as IBM, Ford and Digital Equipment have joined consortiums at universitsies such as Carnegie-Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley and Tufts to learn more about green product design. The U.S.

Green machines, with their emphasis on reducing parts, rationalizing materials and reusing components, are proving more efficient to build and distribute than conventional ones.

Department of Commerce plans to help small companies master the techniques at the Great Lakes Manufacturing Technology Center in Cleveland.

Also coming to manufacturers' aid today are sophisticated software programs such as the pioneering ReStar from Green Engineering Corp. of Pittsburgh. A brainchild of Carnegie-Mellon's Navin-Chandra and his associates, who founded the company less than a year ago, ReStar carries a hefty price tag: $19,600. (You can even get it downloaded via Internet.) But the user gets a remarkable amount of help. First and foremost, ReStar answers the key question about disassembly: Exactly where and when do you stop it before you start losing money? Navin-Chandra calls this "the crux of successful disassembly."

A ReStar user can also determine what materials to employ most profitably and whether the retired product should be bought back or sold to a third-party recycler. To make ReStar do its magic, the user enters data on each part that goes into the design, including the part's weight and material content. Each point at which parts connect is also described and identified from a roster in ReStar's database. If the database lacks that information, the user can add new joint- and material-type descriptions to the database. The assembly is described in terms of geometric relationships between the parts. For each direction from which a target part can be removed, for instance, the user lists the other parts that have to be removed before the target part comes off.

The user can have ReStar generate disassembly plans with full cost and timing information. Navin-Chandra calls ReStar's "what if' capability the program's "biggest feature." The model also keeps track of such questions as: How much has been spent on disassembly until now? Are separated parts composed of compatible materials? If not, how much will it cost to get rid of them? Among ReStar's early users: Motorola (to design a yet unidentified consumer product), Whirlpool, IBM and a German affi Iiate of Daimler Benz.

Valuable lessons come from two successful green manufacturers. Kodak and Xerox (Continued on page 60)

Let's hear it for the lowly sound blte~:... ,. .:q

.~.

Text by ROBERT WERNICK Illustrations by GOPI GAJWANI

Past ages produced rich and colorful sound bites long before the term was invented. Today there are more sound bites than ever dreamed of, and a dreary lot they are -or so says author Wernick.

the n year 1525, King Francis I of France led his troops into an indefensible position in some fruit orchards outside Pavia in Italy and, in the subsequent battle, lost his army and was himself taken prisoner. That night, in a long letter rambling through the tangled thickets of 16thcentury prose, a disorderly jumble of subordinate clauses and dangling participles, the captive king wrote to his mother to explain how the unthinkable had happened, and pour out all his grief and rage and humiliation and unconquerable determination to survive. By the time his mother, her royal counselors and her ladies-in-waiting had read it and commented and gossiped about it, the message had been reduced to a single sentence: "All is lost but honor."

It was recognized at the time, and has been recognized ever since, as a perfect expression ofthe noble side of the brutal aristocratic culture that Francis personified, just as Leo Durocher's "Nice guys finish last" has been recognized as a perfect expression of the dark side of the individualist-competitive culture of the 20th century. Picayune scholars will go to any lengths to prove that deathless lapidary phrases like these were not actually said in precisely their reputed form by their reputed authors.

They have asserted with footnotes that Richard III never said "My kingdom for a horse" any more than Yogi Berra said "It's deja vu all over again." But the pedants miss the point. These

I

phrases were what these people meant to say, and would have said if they had had more time and more verbal facility. You cannot expect a man like Francis I, covered with dust and blood, who has just seen his life crumble around him, his best friends screaming in agony, to produce a polished phrase following the rhetorical rules and devices fashionable at the moment. The phrase nevertheless belongs to the man who is said to have said it, and itis a part ofliving history.

Does it matter if Bishop Latimer, tied to the stake in Bloody Mary's England, said to his comrade in martyrdom, "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be putout," or if he only said something like it and the words were refashioned by the Protestant propagandist John Foxe? Those were the words that were learned and repeated and treasured by the people who turned England from a Catholic to a Protestant country in the years that followed. Honor, if not approval, has therefore been deservedly paid to Francis I and Durocher and Bishop Latimer and many others for having encapsulated or summarized whole eras, whole cultures, whole mass movements in a few memorable words. Just so, in more recent times, honor and approval (or disapproval) have been paid to Harry Truman for summing up his conception of the Presidency and of his own character with the words, "The buck stops here." And to Walt Kelly's

Every nation that goes to war produces sound bites to prove its cause isjust.

Pogo when he reduced the philosophical uncertainties about degradation of the environment to the single compound sentence "We have met the enemy and he is us." Not to mention Nancy Reagan when she miniaturized the case for an individual-voluntaristic (as opposed to a macroeconomic-bureaucratic) approach to controlling substance abuse into three words, "Just say no"; and Walter Mondale when he skewered his political rivals with "Where's the beef?" a line lifted from the little old lady in the Wendy's ads. Calvin Coolidge, the most taciturn of U.S. Presidents, is remembered for concentrating a thousand books of theology into his description of his preacher's Sunday morning sermon on sin: "He was agin it."

Honor will no longer be paid, however, if we listen to the TV commentators and newspaper editorialists who are daily shaping the minds of the new generation, Generation Z. According to these authorities, the old world of civilized rational discourse-in which Presidents wrote their own two-hour speeches in longhand, and ideas were exposed calmly and at length to the people-a leaky craft that in fact began taking water years ago, has now been sunk without a trace by a new form of torpedo called the sound bite.

Editorialists and commentators have taken this technical phrase from the radio and TV studios and turned it into a general term of abuse for any short statement they disagree with-a bet-

ter term might be "unsound bite." It may be defined as a device used by wicked people to reduce complex issues to simple formulas in order to sway public opinion. Only take away the adjective "wicked" and you have a definition of one of the oldest and most honorable devices known to man.

In fact, it is hard to see how we could have made much progress at all without it. For civilized life, or any kind of life, demands a series of decisions, choices of roads taken and not taken. Ideally, you should take long and careful thought before any decision, and sound bites by themselves are no substitute for thought. But in the world of things as they are, it is impossible to think without them. The time available for careful thought that takes in all the variables and weighs every pro against every con is limited. We could not cross a street, much less fight a war or pass an omnibus appropriations bill, without having a mass of ready-made formulas available to summarize previous experience.

These formulas may be right or wrong, wise or foolish. They may be fiercely partisan or they may express universal beliefs. Every nation that goes to war produces sound bites to prove its cause is just, but not many can pass the test in the judgment of future historians.

Everyone, however, accepts and acts upon the principle popularized in a sound bite by a U.S. Senator, William Learped Marcy, in 1832: "To the victor belong the spoils." Similarly, politicians and theologians can debate the merits and demerits of capitalism from here to doomsday, but the system itself runs on, merrily or not, following the principle reduced by Adam Smith to a commonsense sound bite: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

You could spend years, for example, trying to achieve a precise calculation of the relati ve merits of U.S. presidential candidates. Unless you are the kind of person who can analyze stacks of newspaper files and Congressional testimony, your decision will almost certainly be made on the basis of sound bites picked up from television and lectures in high school civics classes, and things you have heard in coffeeshops or bars, and tales your mother told you.

This was as true when America was full of wise founding fathers as it is today, when it is full of talk show hosts. Political speeches were longerin those days, and the voters may have vociferously enjoyed them, but that does not mean they were listening in the sense offollowing a closely reasoned argument. If audiences came away with anything at all permanently fixed in their minds, it was a sound bite, often the one that brought the speech to a triumphant close: Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty

or give me death!"; Daniel Webster's "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable"; Abraham Lincoln's "Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"; William Jennings Bryan's "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

It has been the same in the 20th century: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"; "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" Structurally, these famous phrases that once stirred multitudes to action in war and peace are no different from advertising slogans-from "You deserve a break today" to "Just do it"-that have also stirred multitudes, in their own way. They are short, they are forcefu I, they are resonant. If not, they do not linger in the memory of the people, they do not survive.

Julius Caesar understood this princi pie, when, after defeating Pharnaces II in Anatolia in 47 B.C., he sent back to Rome not an orderly exposition of his strategy and tactics but the

Punchy, effective sound bites can come in any fa rm you want.

three-word sound bite, "Veni, vidi, vici" -"I came, r saw, I conquered"-to convince the Roman public that he was a man who could get things done expeditiously with maximum panache and minimum cost, just the man they wanted to reclaim the vacant post of dictator.

Among the first sound bites with which most of us come into contact are the Ten Commandments. If Moses had come down from Sinai with a tablet saying, "Violent suppression by sharp or blunt instrument of the life of another human being is hereby prohibited except under conditions as specified hereunder in sections 76( c) to 348( d) of the penal code or as may herei nafter be amended by a two-thirds vote of the Sanhedrin operating under the bylaws of the tribe of Ephraim or by the Fourth Session of the Third Lateran Council, Section XVIII, folio xxiii, Paragraph 12," he would have lost his audience in short order.

Instead he said, "Thou shalt not kill," and most of us ever since have been willing to accept it as an overriding law of our lives, even if we know that there are enough exceptions and interpretations and clarifications to fill whole libraries. (Only two chapters further on in Exodus we are told not to suffer a witch to live.)

Unscrupulous rabble-rousers have often used sound bites to lead whole populations astray. The American voters of 1840 who voted with their feet to the rhythm of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" and ran Martin Van Buren out of the White House, did not have the slightest idea of what they were getting in his place. The Russian peasants who rallied around Lenin's sound bi te "Peace, Land, Bread" in 1917 did not foresee that he was heading them toward years of civil war and the confiscation of all their land. The Louisiana voters of the 1930s who elected H uey Long on his promise to make "Every man a King" are sti II looking for their c.rowns. A political outsider, the late Professor Timothy Leary had only to leer at the forlorn teenagers of California and tell them to "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and it was deja vu all over again.

Sound bites, like any other form of human experience, must have values attached to them, and as with most other forms of human experience, the values are up for grabs. "Ein VoLk, Ein Reich, Ein FUhrer," which helped sweep Adolf Hitler into power, is in today's world everyone's idea of a repulsive and destructive sound bite. If Hitler had won the war, it would have been carved on our monuments and printed on our currency.

Woodrow Wilson won re-election to the Presidency of the United States by a very narrow margin in 1916, probably owing to the success of a sing Ie sound bite, "He kept us out of war," five months before he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

Whether his re-election was a good or a bad thing for America or the world, or whether it really made any difference at all, are questions historians will be debating with decreasing vigor for decades. Punchy, effective sound bites can come in any form you want. They can even be long (within reason). Take, for example, the unforgettable 3S-word sentence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of

The best sound bites may fail if produced at the wrong moment.

Happiness") in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, an otherwise mostly unremembered document.

Mostly, of course, they are quite short, and have always necessarily been so, for the attention span of human beings is limited, though they are rarely as short as General McAuliffe's reply to the demand for surrender of his troops at Bastogne in 1945 ("Nuts!") or the operating instructions of Thomas J. Watson to his employees at IBM ("THINK").

Just as important as what is said in a sound bite is when it is said. When Prince Hamlet, one of the most prolific producers of sound bites ever, said, "There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he might with no loss to either the rhythm or the sense have substituted "timing" for "thinking."

For what seem like the best sound bites may fail if produced at the wrong moment. "I shall return," uttered in 1942, became a brilliantly successful sound bite only when General MacArthur did wade ashore in the Philippines in 1944. Later he tried another one, after being relieved of his command in Korea in 1951: "In war, there is no substitute for victory." But

since that war ended in a draw, the phrase has gone into the old curiosity shop of history along with "Disperse, ye rebels" (reportedly shouted by a British officer to the minutemen at Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1776), "Hang the Kaiser" (a rallying cry in the first World War) and "Mother of all Battles" (fighttalk by Saddam Hussein in 1991).

In this field as in so many others, quantity is no substitute for quality. Today there may be more sound bites than were ever before dreamed of hovering through the fog of TV and the Internet, but when did you last hear one that could move a mountain or even win an election? Past ages have produced a rich garland of colorful sound bites that changed the world and echoed down the years (William Randolph Hearst to artist Frederic Remington in Cuba in 1898: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war"; Louis XIV to Parliament, and the world in general: "L' hat c' est moi"; the cool Yankee, wise in the unreliable ways of 18th-century muskets, to the recruits at Bunker Hill: "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes"). But the recent record is one of almost unrelieved dreariness. Look through all the files of news magazines and 60 Minutes and spin doctors and media consultants of the past 10 years, and you will come up with nothing more memorable than George Bush's appeal in 1988 to "Read my lips: No new taxes," which of course blew up in his face in 1992 when Democratic strategist James Carville fired back into the whites of his eyes with his war room slogan, "The Economy, Stupid."

If this is the best that our generation can do, what are our great-grandchildren, and future historians, going to think of us? It is true that such a poverty of invention is not necessarily fatal to the republic. The America of the late 19th century, held up to us as a model iJ.1some of the unsoundest bites of modern politicians, was a land faced with racial and sectional enmities, unbridled immigration, greed, rape of the environment, growing disparity between rich and poor, rampant criminality, homelessness. The statesmen who tried to deal with those problems won their elections more often than not by using a set of undistinguished and by now completely forgotten sound bites known collectively as "Waving the Bloody Shirt," the message of which was a claim to represent the heroes of the Civil War and an implication that the opposing candidate was a traitorous rebel at heart. Somehow America survived, and perhaps we will, too.

Still, we are more prosperous, better educated and better informed than our great-grandparents were. Is it not time for the critics and commentators to stop whining and wailing about the nefariousness of sound bites, and devote their considerable energies to raising the level of public discourse by turning out a few good ones oftheir own? It would require some literary talent and a good sense of timing. But that has been the way of sound bites since God said, "Let there be light."

0 About the Author: Robert Wernick contributes frequently magazines and Esquire.

including

the Smithsonian,

The Saturday

to several

Evening

Post

The

Last Wildernesses "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature's peace willflow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. " -JOHN

MUIR

Uchhas changed in the 130 years since naturalist John Muir began exploring the American wilderness and advocating its conservation.

His efforts and those of other nature lovers helped establish an agency for conservation of America's natural treasures. It began when the U.S. Congress named Yellowstone in Wyoming the first national park in 1872. California's Yosemite and Sequoia were added in 1890, and Mount Rainier, Washington, in 1899.

Perhaps the most enduring accomplishment of President Theodore Roosevelt's term in office was the creation of federal wildlife refuges, which gave momentum to the fledgling park system. In 1916 the national parks became official government entities under the National Park Services Act. Outdoorsman Roosevelt would be gratified to see the extent to which this conservation agency has grown. Now an intricate network of national parIes, grasslands and wildlife refuges encompassing wetlands, rain forests, prairies, deserts, seashores and mountain ranges, it covers about 4 percent of the surface area of the United States. The National Wildlife Refuges, more than 500 of them, outnumber the National

M

Left: The Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, ytyoming, photo taken by Ansel Adams, 1942. Yellowstone was the first U.S. national park. Adams documented America natural treasures in classic black and white photographs from the 1930s until his death in 1984. Right: Trees in autumn, Lenox, Massachusetts.

New England towns value surrounding countryside. Most have laws protecting rural areas from haphazard development.

s

Parks. The entire system is the largest umbrella for nature protection in the world. Individual American states and towns also contribute to conservation by maintaining state and local parks, and enacting city and rural development codes aimed at protecting the natural environment.

Some environmentalists say this is still not enough.

Since the days of Muir and Roosevelt, new problems have emerged for conservationists. More and more tracts of land are gobbled up for housing developments or

Above: Walruses lounge on the shore at Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Remote it may be, but low-flying airplanes startle walruses into stampedes which kill and injure animals. Refuge staff have successfully prosecuted offenders. Top, right: Wood storks congregate in Florida's Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Florida hosts precious ecosystems in its cypress and mangrove swamps. The firstfederal wildlife reserve was created here by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, when he declared Pelican Island a bird sanctuary.

Right: American bison stolidly endure a rainstorm, Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge. Nebraska. Millions of bison once thundered across the plains until they were nearly wiped out by over-hunting.

Now tens of thousands populate national refuges and private ranches.

industry, and a proportionate number of ecosystems are destroyed, never to revive. Loss of wilderness areas has doomed many plant and animal species to extinction.

Increased tourism, logging and chemical industries, military weapons testing in wilderness areas, all may have an adverse impact on ecosystems. The challenge is in balancing the needs of the environment with the demands of today's vigorous global marketplace and other national concerns. U.S. Park Service speCialists strive to find solutions, as they manage biodiversity from the soaring bald eagle to obscure swamp algae. What is learned from the vast regions they study and conserve helps conservationists worldwide. Oases of conservation in our wellmapped, well-traveled world are the last wildernesses in which many life forms may continue to thrive.

A relatively new movement to create biosphere reserves has added a fresh dimension to the conservation movement. These biosphere reserves include protected sites as well as research centers with gene banks that conserve humble microorganisms potentially useful in medicine, science and industry. Biosphere reserves are being established not only in America but around the world, encouraged by organizations such as the United Nations and the World Conservation Union. There is also a new sensitivity toward context and the impact of biosphere reserves on the people living there. National parks in some countries have run into trouble where there was failure to consider the traditional activities of indigenous peoples.

Photography of nature's moods frequently contributes to conservation efforts. It also has a distinguished history. Ansel Adams's classic black-and-white wilderness studies of the mid-20th century still inspire today. The photographs on these pages are by spiritual heirs of Adams, who look at the natural beauty of America with the art photographer's eye. Yosemite's El Capitan, made famous by Ansel Adams, is given an upto-date treatment, as is Mount Rainier. Other images come from even more remote places, like Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

The name Togiak comes from the language of Northwestern American Indians. Many of the names of American national parks-and, indeed, names of Left: El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, California. "El Cap, " immortalized by Ansel Adams and others, towers above Yosemite Valley, once afavorite haunt of John Muir-and later hordes of tourists. It has been a test for the Park Service, which must allow access and protect the park at the same time. Paradoxically, severe floods that damaged the park in January 1997 also helped protect it by forcing closure of some areas. New park-friendly tourism policies are now in place. Right: Mount Rainier, Washington, is reflected with spring flowers at dawn. The peak rises at the northern end of the Pacific Crest, the boundary formed by adjoining Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges.

Verdant valleys between the mountains and the sea support birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway from Mexico to Canada.

Solitary elk in the snow, at the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, "yoming. Fences keep migrant elks off the roads and out of town.

During winter they roam nearby wilderness areas in the thousands.

American states, towns and geographical sites-derive from the Native American languages once spoken in the region. America's indigenous peoples lived in harmony with their environment until their lives were disrupted by the advent of European settlers after colonization. Harmony with nature is at the core of Native American spirituality Their chants, like the Yokut Indian song quoted, often reflect this oneness with nature. The Yokuts inhabited the area around California's Yosemite region and Central Valley, over which the flock of birds in the centerspread picture are caught in flight.

Native American Indian philosophy recaptures

beauty for those out of touch with the natural order. A 20th-century Miniconjou Sioux medicine man offers this counsel: "Let's sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence.

Let's have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. Let's have the grass for a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.

"Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. vVimrya wakan-the holy airwhich renews all by its breath. l%nrya, wonrya wakan-spirit, life, breath, renewal-it means all that."

Clyde Butcher: Profile of a Nature Photographer The dedicted nature photographer

efore it is all gone, Clyde and in 1978 sold everything to go is a special breed. Matt Schudel tracks one sailing for two years with his famButcher wants you to see in the Florida Everglades, and ily. They eventually settled in the natural state of illuminates the challenges of documenting Florida.

Florida. That is why he wades A completely self-taught photograchest-deep into the swamps, why the vanishing wilderness. pher, Butcher uses old-fashioned he waits days for the right combination of clouds and subtropical view cameras, practically unlight and why he has created, from the overtwo young children, he gave up his job for a changed since the American Civil War. For life behind the lens. For a year, he and his sharp focus and texture, he employs film looked wilderness of this state, a quiet and haunting art. family lived in a tent trailer, camping at from 8 x 10 up to 12 x 20 inches per frame.

Some photographers shake their heads and Sometimes Butcher encounters more ad- California state parks. say he uses the wrong chemicals, the wrong In those early days, he took color pictures venture than he wants. He has to contend paper, the wrong light readings, shutter with rattlesnakes and water moccasins, and of the usual subjects: mountains, rugged coastlines, birds, sunsets. He became a vir- speeds or lens. filters. But his photographs he has been stranded by storms and shallow speak with an eloquence no expert can refute. tides. One time, he recalls, he was standing tual photography factory in the 1970s, print"The whole point of what I do is seeing in a creek, up to his waist in water. "All of a ing and framing his pictures by the thousand. and composition," says Butcher, as if that sudden, a school of fish came through He eventually ran a wholesale business with my tripod. I said, oh-oh, there's trouble, be175 employees. Between 1972 and 1978 he explains the austere beauty of his work. sold 2.5 million copies of his photographs"You have to see beyond what's there." cause an alligator was after them. He actuIn the 1920s and '30s, when Ansel $30 million worth-through department ally hit my tripod."

Adams and Edwards Weston took their pioFlorida is now the fourth most populous stores and mail-order catalogs. neering pictures of the American West, they state in the United States. With more and But he grew tired of running a business created a sharp, unsentimental style called more untamed land being buried beneath "straight photography." Butcher follows buildings and roads, Butcher has made it his Clyde Butcher in a Florida Everglades personal crusade to record the last of the swamp, setting up his large-format camera that tradition.

"I never use a camera to compose," he wild places. He is a photographer of a van- for a photograph. explains. "I use my eye. Your eye is ishing world. connected to your heart and your brain, When we look at his stark images of swamps, sand dunes, skies and weathand that's where great photographs come from." ered trees, we see a Florida we have Clyde and his wife live on a specially never known before. There are no peozoned plot of land deep inside Everple here, just nature in the raw. There is glades National Park. The nearest gronothing sentimental about these sharpcery store is 80 kilometers away. Their focused black-and-white images, and only neighbors are the creatures of the perhaps that is why they move us so \ Everglades: water moccasins, leathermuch. back turtles, great blue herons and the "I photograph feelings and atmosrare Florida panther. phere," he says. "In everything I do, I want you to feel like you're walking He sells his works from a gallery he and his wife opened next to their home. through the woods."

Butcher says he continues his work Butcher taught himself photography mostly for the sake of the vanishing when he was an architecture student at land. "I try to show what Florida could California Polytechnic in San Luis be like," he says. "It's a very primeval Obispo. "I couldn't draw," he explains. place. There's no place like it in the "I couldn't present my ideas with a world."

0 paintbrush. " Butcher quickly grew disillusioned with the corporate compromises of arAbout the Author: Matt Schudel is a staff chitecture. In 1969, with a wife and writer for Sunshine magazine.

B

The most germ-infested area in one's home is not the bathroom; it is the kitchen. Your dishrag may be a homegrown biosphere reserve. Microbiologist Charles P. Gerba has examined dishrags, disposable diapers and unwashed underwear in his efforts to understand microbes, which have become the third leading cause of death in the United States.

T

he scientific papers I saw laid out neatly on a table in the office of the microbiologist Charles P. Gerba, all bearing his name as author or coauthor, are the very ones that, if it were up to me, would be widely copied and sent as a deterrent to prospective invaders from outer space. "Outbreaks Caused

by Pseudomonas aeruginosa Associated With Whirlpool Spas, Hot Tubs and Swimming Pools." "The Occurrence of Bacteria in Sponges and Dishrags."

"Microbial Efficacy of Toilet Bowl Cleaners in Situ and by Laboratory Evaluation."

"Efficacy of Iodine Water Purification Tablets Against Cryptosporidium Oocysts and Giardia Cysts."

I looked up when Gerba put down the phone. "So it's actually better to stand there when someone sneezes," he resumed, "than to shake someone's hand. Because you literally pick up infections all the time by just touching surfaces and bringing your fingers to your nose and mouth. There have been experiments where some people come in and play cards, and one of them has a cold and easily transmits it to the other players in the handling of cards, but if you have someone just sit there and watch, he doesn't get the cold. Children-this is one of the reasons why infections spread so rapidly: they're always putting their fingers in their noses and mouths. And they contaminate surfaces

very effectively this way. If you go into a Station in Antarctica and has evaluated the day-care center, 50 percent of the toys have water-recycling systems for the U.S. space rotavirus on them, which is a common cause program and the Russian Mir space station, where the limitations on volume, of diarrhea in children. A small child brings weight and time are severe. ("The issue is his fingers to his nose and mouth once every three minutes, and swallows in a day an how to treat wastewater and get it back amount of dirt that would cover six to eight quickly so you can drink it. Ideally, you floor tiles. You wonder how we figure that would be able to take a leak and have it right away in your Tang.") Usually, out? What we do is, we know the metal composition of household dust, and we study the though, Gerba's ventures into microbialkid's stool and figure out how much of that . risk assessment, as his field is known, take metal is in there." place closer to home. One might well find Charles Gerba looks something like a him on a given day taking swabs from hoyounger version of the actor Donald tel and motel bathrooms, from picnic taPleasence, and he speaks in a voice that can bles, from restaurant counters, from office run on for minutes in a knowledgeable coffee cups, from selected locations inside deadpan, with an occasional smart-alecky ordinary houses. He goes door to door coledge. He is one of America's chief authorilecting sponges and dishrags for analysis, ties on the microbial transmission of disoffering people four new ones to replace ease-especially transmission by means of each old one. water. Based at the University of Arizona in Gerba has written some 400 journal artiTucson, Gerba is among the handful of cles on infection and disinfection. His people who may get a call when publicshelves sag under bound volumes of papers, health authorities somewhere in America or the labels achieving a collective tone of aloof technicality and indeterminate menace. the rest of the world suddenly get a dozen Somewhere among these papers is one called cases of something that looks suspicious"The Effects of the Discharge of Secondarily Salmonella?

Cryptosporidium?

Campylobacter? Rotavirus? Cyclospora? EscheriTreated Sewage Effluent Into the Everglades chia coli?-and need to find out, fast, what Ecosystem"-his first published work, written at the University of Miami, which gave it is and where it is coming from.

He has investigated problems with the Gerba his doctorate 25 years ago. Gerba is wastewater-treatment system at the married and has two sons. His wife, Peggy, is an arachnologist. His oldest boy's middle National Science Foundation's McMurdo

name is Escherichia. Gerba told his fatherin-law that it was the name of an Old Testament King.

Gerba's work first came to my attention a few years ago, when I learned about his investigation of the potential pathogenic hazard posed by disposable diapers in municipal landfills (I was writing a book about garbage at the time), a hazard whose seriousness Gerba eventually discounted.

When I stopped by his office recently to say he]]o, the conversation meandered among a variety of issues. Gerba's observations included the following: • The most germ-infested area in one's home is not the bathroom; it is the kitchen.

"The kitchen sink is the arrival zone. You are continually bringing germ organisms in there on your food supply, and they colonize your sink and sponges and rags, and grow by the billions overnight. Ten percent of the dishrags we collect door to door contain Salmonella."

• The disinfection of public swimming pools is an issue whose time should come.

"The average bather puts in 50 milliliters of urine and about a liter of sweat per hour in active swimming." What about children's wading pools-are they cause for concern?

"The chlorine goes so fast with all the kids whizzing in there. We've found potentially disease-causing viruses in every public wading pool we've tested."

• Microbes in space vehicles pose unique challenges. "What do you do if there's a leak in the wastewater system? How do you disinfect it? You can't use chlorine in space-it's too toxic. And what about skin?

It flakes off like a powder and after a while becomes a cloud; you need filters to remove it. If we're going to go to Mars, we have to think about this kind of thing."

• Russian astronauts have a few other things to think about first. "They were having problems with microbes causing degradation of materials like leather and wood, which they had used in their space stationcan you believe it? Leather and wood? One thing you don't want is for your space station to degrade."

• Microbially, the best public restrooms are in hospitals. "If you want the cleanest, pull in to the emergency room. Next are your fast-food restaurants, and the worst are

airports and bus stations. The more stalls the better, by the way. And the first stall is the safest, because fewer people use it.

• Toilets have an aerosol effect that remains widely unrecognized. "Droplets are going all over the place-it's like the Fourth of July. One way to see this is to put a dye in the toilet, flush it, and then hold a piece of paper over it. You'll get what we call a commode-o-graph. Every toilet has a characteristic ...well, that's a whole other story."

We strolled for a while around Gerba's laboratories, in a nondescript building that was once used for studies on animal exposure to pathogens; its ventilation system still inhales protectively. One hallway was partly blocked by the equipment that Gerba keeps ready for field expeditionspumps, filters, sampling devices, sleeping bags. Refrigerators in the laboratories held hundreds of brightly colored translucent petri dishes in which cell cultures were growing. Some were from Gerba's own experiments. Others had been sent by water utilities that were wondering-perhaps after a heavy rain flooded some pasturage near the town well or a sleepy technician back-siphoned a sewer line into a water main-if maybe they had a problem they should be aware of. For the most part bacteria are easily identified by local officials, but many viruses and parasites can be both hard to detect and hard to eliminate.

(The parasite Cryptosporidium, to which Gerba devotes much effort, is found in a third of all public water systems and has been a particular scourge among AIDS patients.) One laboratory held a shiny washing machine and dryer, for a new study on the fate of fecal/oral organisms in "gray water"-the effluent from appliances and bathtubs. Gerba pointed to a plastic bag on top, containing underwear to be washed. "That's mine," he said. "I've asked all the graduate students to bring theirs in too." In another lab stood a trio of commercial water-purification devices, the freshly processed water percolating into clear blue plastic tubs.

Gerba's young technicians were testing the manufacturer's claim that the system wou Id remove dangerous pathogens. I asked one technician what she had put into the water to test the system. She replied,

"Cholera."

Another technician said, "Tomorrow we'll hit it with polio."

Back in his office Gerba explained that run-of-the-mill household transmission of ordinary disease is a problem that will come increasingly to the fore, and that microbialrisk assessment will increasingly become part of our lives. One reason is the food supply. More and more produce is imported, and the water used to grow it is often heavily contaminated. A second, more significant, reason is demographic. "If you look at the general population," Gerba said, "maybe only one in a thousand who are infected will die from an E. coli infection. If you look at the elderly, one in ten who are infected may die from it. Of course, the elderly population is increasing. We also have many more immunocompromised people-not just people with AIDS but also cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, a million of them. Hospital stays in general are getting shorter-they want to get you out before you get an infection, actually. And they put you back into an environment where there are a lot of organisms that can take advantage of you. Throw in pregnant women, neonates, people on heavy antibiotic therapy, diabetes patientsalready we're up to a fifth of the U.S. population. And we're discovering more and more pathogens all the time, and giving them more opportunities. Legionella becomes capable of causing disease only when it grows at high temperatures, above 20 degrees centigrade.

It was a non problem until we had hot tubs and cooling towers.

"Microbes have crept up the list. They are now the third leading cause of death in the United States. In 1980 they were the fifth. Sometime in the next century they will be on top."

Before I left his office, Gerba gave me some bags of bacteria-resistant sponges and some flasks of kitchen disinfectant-primitive yet effective talismans that can ward off much evil. They cannot quite ward off the memory of a verse from Chronicles: "For we are powerless against this great multitude that is coming against us." The words were spoken by Jehoshaphatanother of those Old Testament Kings.

0 About the Author: Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

Being green lsn't

always what it seems

Plastics are often cast as environmental enemyNo.l, buta recent study shows that the production of a plastic cup is easier on the environment than that of its paper counterpart.

Itisn't easy being green.

Everything from computer terminals to wood-working glue to tampons with cardboard applicators is being sold these days with claims that it is "environmentally friendly." But what consumers widely believe is good for the environment-and what companies have been offering them in an attempt to cater to growing ecological awareness-doesn't always help.

Economists studying the ripple effects of product manufacturing are finding that common sense is a poor guide to what actually benefits or hurts the environment. In a surprising number of cases, "green" choices like paper bags and recycling actually use more energy and generate more pollution than the alternatives. "If people go off on gut instinct on something as complicated as the environment," concludes Lester Lave, director of the Green Design Initiative at Carnegie-Mellon University, "they are as likely to do harm as good."

Take the choice of plastic versus paper.

Plastics are often cast as environmental enemy No.1. Environmental Action warns that buying plastic products adds to "the growing problems of toxic pollution" and countless checklists for responsible shopping put out by environmental groups urge consumers to ask for paper cups at fast-food restaurants and to pick cardboard packaging over plastics in the supermarket.

Energy. Yet when Lave and his coworkers traced the effects of paper manufacturing through the entire economy-an analysis that in effect captured everything from the fuel burned in chain saws as trees are cut to the air pollution generated by factories making tires for the trucks that deliver paper products to the supermarket-they found that a plastic cup takes half as much energy to make and results in 35 percent fewer pounds of toxic chemicals released into the environment than a paper cup does. Partly that's because a plastic cup uses a lot less plastic than a paper cup uses paper; plastic products typically weigh one-sixth as much as paper products that do the same job. But it's also because pulp and paperboard mills, though much cleaner than in the past, still generate substantial toxic emissions.

To halt outright deception, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has set guidelines

for claims about a product's recyclability and degradability. But the real problem goes deeper: Just because something is recyclable does not mean it will be recycled, or even that it's a good idea to recycle it. A crash in markets for recycled materials and spiraling expenses in the U.S. have recently led a number of cities and states to cut back their recycling programs. Recycled newspaper, which sold for as much as $200 a ton a year ago, is now at $15; plastics have gone from 70 cents to 33 cents a kilogram. Costs of collecting and sorting recyclables average between $150 and $175 a ton, far more than the value of any recovered materials except aluminum.

Costs. Recycling advocates often argue that the extra cost is worth it because of the environmental good that results-reducing the consumption of nonrenewable resources and preventing pollution from landfills. But often such additional costs reflect the expenditure of additional energy, which depletes resources and generates pollution.

The complexity of the problem has posed a quandary for companies that want to help the environment. What is green in the public eye may not be as green as it seems; what is actually greenest ma y prove a hard sell. The trade-offs can seem almost endless. Plastic bumpers in cars are less recyclable than steel; but they are substantially lighter and improve gas mileage, reducing energy consumption and pollution. Making aluminum components is an energy-intensive and environmentally messy business; but scrap aluminum is valuable, encouraging recycling of the product at the end of its life. A few years ago in the U.S., the owner of ajunk car had to pay to have it towed away; now scrap dealers pay $25 to $50 a car for the aluminum, brass and zinc in them.

The Carnegie-Mellon researchers argue that the real emphasis in recycling should be on designing products in the first place so that their high-value components can be easily recovered. And meanwhile, consumers ought to be more skeptical about paying extra for products that make green claims. [] About the Author: Stephen Budiansky is an assistant managing editor of U.S. News & World Report.

PRDT C IDN IN

THE

DIGITAL AGE

IS IT POSSIBLE? The ways and means of protecting intellectual property is a subject exercising legal minds worldwide.

Recently copyright expert Judith Saffer visited India, Bangladesh and Nepal to discuss copyright law and its impact in South Asia. Saffer is well-qualified to advise on the subject. As assistant general counsel for Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), one of the largest music publishers in the world, she handles hundreds of copyright infringement suits annually for composers and music publishers. Before joining BMI, Saffer held a number of senior legal positions with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers). She is currently president of the Copyright Society of the United States.

In this interview with SPAN Editor Lea Terhune, Saffer explores the problems of protecting intellectual property rights in the digital ageand the possible solutions.

SPAN: How can copyright and patent laws keep up with the growing global economy, with its diverse markets? More importantly, how can these laws be effective?

JUDITH SAFFER: The problem isn't so much in how the laws can be effective as how people who have intellectual property can see to it that the laws are enforced. In other words, drafting and adopting an effec-

tive intellectual property law, whether it be patent or trademark or copyright, is only the first step. And even if you have an adequ\lte law, if you don't have adequate enforcement, it's irrelevant.

There are a number of people, of which I am one, who believe that a very general statute which provides for broad-based protection is all that is actually needed. The judicial interpretation of such a broad law would provide sufficient protection. Other people feel that every time there is a change in technology the law has to be modified to insure it covers the new technology. The problem with that kind of approach is that the law can never keep up with technology.

Things change too quickly. Having broad principles is sufficient.

I think our experience in other forms of law has proven that broad statements are effective. For example, you only need a law that says "thou shalt not kill." You don't need anything more than that for a court to be able to find someone guilty of murder.

You don't have to spell out that you shouldn't kill somebody when they are crossing the street or in the middle of the night or under some particular circumstance. In fact, the more specific you become sometimes, the more dangerous it is.

"New technology has made it easy to disseminate intellectual property so To use the same example, if you give ten circumstances in which you shouldn't kill somebody and someone kills in the eleventh, one can argue that the eleventh is O.K. because it didn't fit into the ten circumstances that you mentioned.

So my feeling is that in order to have adequate protection for intellectual property in the new digital era, we don't really have to do very much to existing law-except we have to make sure that it is enforced.

How do you find attitudes in India toward protection of intellectual property?

I've actually been quite impressed and I give the Indian people a tremendous amount of credit that they had enough foresight to see that a strong intellectual property law would inure to their benefit.

Several years ago there was no software industry in India. Today, it's a billion-dollar industry. That is possible only because there's an intellectual property law structure which makes it possible to protect software.

Without that, nobody would develop an industry. Without that protection you would never get investments from places like the United States to help foster the growing industry. So this country is to be applauded.

When I talk to people and they say to me, "Well, Microsoft, Disney, etcetera are so rich, they don't need the royalties from India," I respond and say, you may very well be right. The reason for having a strong intellectual property law is not to protect U.S. industry, but to protect your own industry. The same law that says you can't copy Microsoft's products is the same law that says you can't copy Indian products. The same law that says you can't duplicate a video produced by Disney is the same one that says you can't duplicate a video of an Indian movie. So the reason to have strong intellectual property laws is to protect your own industries.

You are a copyright lawyer, but patents have gained a lot of notice in India. How do

patents and copyrights compare?

Copyright protection is not as strong as patent protection. Patent protection is a much stronger kind of monopolistic protection. In the copyright area if I write a song, for example, and you write the identical song, if T can't prove that you copied me, then you have not infringed my song. I have to prove you copied mine. I have to prove that you had access to my composition so therefore you were able to copy it. That's not true in the patent field. In the patent field, if you get a patent, you may stop anybody else from obtaining protection on the same product, even if they came upon it totally independently. Copyright protection lasts longer than patent protection. So the two fields are similar, but they are not the same, and the implications can be very different in patent and in copyright.

What are the chief problems in global enforcement of intellectual copyright laws, and what are the opportunities-along with the disadvantages-offered by the instant distribution that computer technology makes possible today?

You are absolutely right, there are two sides to the issue. The new digital environment presents very serious problems to intellectual property but equally provides many opportunities for valid exploitation of intellectual property. I hear people complain that the Internet will be the end of intellectual property becau'se everybody will copy everything freely and there will be no more intellectual propertyand that's true, if there isn't a system established that provides for the monitoring and the licensing of intellectual property on the Internet.

Will it be difficult to do? Yes. Will it be impossible to do? No. People made the same kinds of arguments when broadcasting grew up. First radio, then television, then cable broadcasting, and yet people have managed to work out licensing schemes. Broadcasters pay royalties, those

royalties go back to the people who created the material used on those kinds of media.

So the same thing can be true in the digital arena-and I believe that it should be true in the digital arena.

I hear people argue regularly that copyright proprietors are trying to restrict the flow of information. The truth of the matter is, they are not trying to restrict at all. They are just trying to get paid for the flow of information. What most people lose sight of is that if there is.no protection of intellectual property, we won't have it in the future. If you permit total freedom, for example, to copy textbooks on the rationale that it should be allowed because it benefits children, it educates people, then who is going to produce the new edition of the textbook when this one becomes outdated? Not the publisher who produced it originally, who is now out of business.

And if anybody doubts that is a real possibility, they have only to look at the journal industry in the United States where a great number of scientific journals have, in fact, gone out of business because of rampant xeroxing, which still wasn't as bad as the possibility of distributing things on the Internet. A company would subscribe to a technical journal, buy 25 copies because they had 25 scientists who needed this information. And then along came xeroxing, and they buy two copies, xerox it and distribute it to everybody. And then the following year they can't buy two copies, because the magazine has gone out of business. So it's shortsighted.

If we are really concerned with educating our children or just the world at large, then we've got to reach some kind of compromise. We've got to recognize that people who create need to be compensated, or they won't create. The other side of that, people regularly argue, is that Chopin did not have the benefit of a copyright law and yet he wrote music anyway. If we have another Chopin in our midst, he or she will create because they are compelled to create. And I

widely that it is critical the enforcement of the law keeps pace." have two answers to that. Number one, when Chopin was writing music he was a member of the royal court; he was supported by the king or the queen, and he therefore got "royalties" in a different form.

He was compensated for his creative contribution. They appreciated it and he didn't have to worry about a place to live or food for his family.

Today, we don't have a system of royal patronage anywhere in the world, and if someone is going to spend time creating intellectual property which will benefit the world, that person has to be provided for.

The system that has evolved in this era is royalty payments. If a person has to go out and dig ditches to make sure he has something to eat and clothes for his back, he is not going to have time to write scholarly works or time to invent the next penicillin.

So it realJy is not just for the benefit of the creator or the copyright industry that we have strong copyright laws, we need them for the benefit of the general public. Too many people don't go that far. They say, "I can't afford to pay for the book today, therefore it's justifiable for me to copy it."

How do you prevail over this attitude?

Can you make buying fairly-priced, non-pirated intellectual property more attractive?

It is only a question of education. I don't think, as a practical matter, it can be made to seem more advantageous to buy the legal article. What is it that keeps most of us from buying a television set for $20 that was stolen from the back of a truck? Instead, we go out and pay $200 for the identical television set. Somewhere within ourselves we know--even though we'd like to get the bargain and get it for $20-we're not comfoltable with it. We know it was stolen, know it's not right. We couldn't, most of us, enjoy watching that television set knowing that in fact it had been stolen from somebody and that's why, in fact, we got it for $20.

We need to get the awareness of people up sufficiently so they recognize that when

they are buying a pirated property they are buying stolen property, that the person who created it is not getting compensated because it was stolen. I think the person will think twice about buying stolen property.

Do I think the problem can ever be solved completely? o. Do I think that there will always be pirated material around? Absolutely. Do I believe, for that reason, we should give up the fight? No. Most people will agree that a slice of the pie is better than no pie at all. Copyright proprietors have historically been satisfied with a slice of the pie, and will continue to be satisfied with it, in the expectation and the hope that the slice can get a little bigger.

But it'll never be the whole pie.

What progress has been made to curb piracy, and what still needs to be done?

There is improvement on one front and not on the other. Around the world, people are beginning to understand that they need strong intellectual property laws if their own industries are going to grow. Just like India learned that lesson. And that is defi: nitely an improvement.

The problem, however, is that new technology has made it easy to disseminate intellectual property so widely that it is critical the enforcement side of the law keeps pace witb the introduction and passage of the laws. You can easily imagine taking one piece of intellectual property, putting it up on the Internet where it may be downloaded by millions of people, making that article totally valueless.

Safeguards have to be put in place so that kind of practice won't become rampant.

It's already very common, but it has to be stopped before it gets any worse. And I am not talking about technological solutions. I personally don't believe in them, because as smart as people may be to create a technology to protect intellectual property, somebody else will be just as smart to break the code. So you have to have the law, the enforcement process and the belief

that the act is an illegal one.

Big debates on how to handle this are going on right now. The big question is who is responsible for an illegal action? The college kid who does it for a joke? The online service provider?

Those of us in the copyright community agree that the online service operator has to be held responsible, in addition to the student who does this as a joke, for the very practical reason that you may never be able to find the student. The student has no money, anyway, but your property is destroyed regardless.

Just like broadcasters are held responsible when they broadcast a program, even when the program is produced by someone else, the online service provider will be liable, too. What happens on this issue, we feel, will be critical to the future of protecting intellectual property.

The greatest concern right now is with digital products because of the damage that can be caused by the huge, ready distribution. That is not to minimize the concerns that exist in the record industry, the movie industry and the software industry for the easy access to and sale of pirated materials.

What is the future, or, what would you like to see as the future of intellectual copyright protection?

The best thing that could happen is that there would be strong copyright laws that are recognized and enforced throughout the world. The only way this can come about is through international treaties, and I think it is imperative that all nations sign onto these treaties because intellectual property does not know any territorial bounds. Also, it is so easy, through the use of computer technology and satellite transmission, to get a product from one country into another. You don't have to actually smuggle the physical property. Therefore, if it's going to be meaningful protection, it has to be done on a global basis, through international treaties that all nations are prepared to recognize. 0

NOTHIN~LAn1 FOREVER Losing patent protection through expiration can devastate a company. But there are ways to avoid that fate, says the author.

tellectual property (patents, copyrights and the like) was once n esoteric and ancillary subject fit mainly for attorneys and academics. No longer. Management can't afford to ignore it.

Both low- and high-tech companies have learned the asset value of their patents the hard way. They've had to fend off inventors' expensive legal assaults over patents that lay dormant in company archives until technology was advanced enough to catch up on a practical scale with the ideas in the patent. High-profile inventors like Jerome Lemelson, Robert Kearns and Gilbert Hyatt have cashed in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on various products-from electronic toys and windshield wipers to the single-chip microcomputer-that they themselves didn't bring to the marketplace but on which they held valid patents.

Some companies have discovered hidden gold in long-forgotten patents. The Financial Times of London recently noted that one industry-semiconductors-has almost tripled its earnings from licensing fees in the last decade, spurting to $800 million last year from $300 million in 1986. "Texas Instruments has made more money in the past two years from collecting royalties on its semiconductor patents than it has from selling semiconductors," the newspaper observed.

Patents have begun to operate in ways not dreamed of before. In world trade and diplomacy, they have become negotiating instruments, as China recently found out when its patent and copyright piracy was exposed. On the home front, they are the latest management tools that, when properly used, can sharpen one company's competitive edge over another.

Several developments in today's fast-moving technological world have defined these new roles for patents. First, globalization, the shaper of the American economy during the' 80s, has made patents more valuable on a worldwide basis as companies scramble for market presence in scores of developed and developing countries.

Second, the booming expansion in deregulation at home has lifted competition to a way of life virtually everywhere, automatically giving an edge to a company that can milk the largesse of its

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patents at every stage in their life, from birth to expiration.

Third, patent law has shifted in favor o{ the inventor. For instance, the term of the patent, which since the time of Thomas Jefferson was limited to 17 years from the day of issue, has been raised to 20 years from the day of filing the application.

Thanks to passage of the last GATT round, signed into law in December 1994, U.S. patent law is now more in line with other countries' patent regulations. The U.S. Patent Act has also been amended to give an inventor a year's grace period to file a complete application and to allow the 20-year term to extend as much as an additional five (or more) years if it has been delayed unnecessarily in the application stage or elsewhere in the bureaucracy.

Viewing the effect of these historic changes from a millennial perspective, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Bruce Lehman observed recently that "intellectual property will be the main factor in America's competitive advantage in the 21st century."

~OPINCt WITH EXPIR4T10N The impact of these developments on America's patent picture and on corporate planning strategies varies from industry to industry. At one end of the spectrum, companies that make such items as computer software and hardware-where patents may be obsolete before they are granted-have to develop strategies for exploiting their intellectual-property rights early-in many cases even before the patent applications are filed.

Microsoft Corporation spurned patents at first but learned their monetary importance and strategic value when the company had to settle an infringement suit with a competitor for $120 million.

The company was also surprised when IBM Corporation, its godfather, confronted it with 1,000 software-related patents quietly accumulated over the years. To avoid a suit, Microsoft settled for a one-time multimillion-dollar fee for the patents. Today, Microsoft uses its own growing portfolio of patents as a competitive weapon to prevent poaching on its software preserves and, according to some critics-including the Justice Department-to gain strong marketing concessions from computer companies.

On the other end of the corporate spectrum, where investment in R&D is heavy (notably in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries), companies tend to carry their patents to term and even beyond to get the maximum return from their high-risk, multibillion-dollar investments. In these industries, loss of patent protection through expiration, even though expected, can be as traumatic to a company as the loss of a family member to an individual.

Consider the story of Syntex Corporation, the Palo Alto, California, company that became famous in the 1950s for introducing the Pill. In early 1992, Syntex's flagship anti-arthritis drug, Naprosyn, which had brought in hundreds of millions of dollars a year for more than a decade, was about to lose its market exclusivity to generic substitutes as its patent approached expiration.

Indeed, generics had been breathing down Syntex's neck for several years. What to do about it?

In the following months, the company increased its R&D efforts to push the rapid development of other potentially profitable drugs in the pipeline. Syntex set up a joint venture with Procter & Gamble Company to market an over-the-counter version of Naprosyn, dubbed Aleve. Claiming to be the most efficient producer of the Naprosyn formulation, Syntex even started an inhouse generic company. Management continued to talk up a bright, long-range future for the company.

But it was a case of too little, too late. In 1993, Syntex announced its first drop in earnings, just a few cents less than expected but enough to sink the stock. As the price of Naprosyn started to fall and profit margins tumbled, analysts in lemminglike formation rushed to downgrade Syntex and its pipeline and to berate its management for belated restructuring. A dozen class-action suits were filed by disillusioned stockholders who claimed that they had been misled.

Syntex was eventually swallowed up by Roche Holding Ltd., a big Swiss firm whose CEO, Fritz Gerber, said he was happy to annex Syntex's extraordinary research staff, its long track record of innovation and its sales and distribution network, not to mention some of its tax advantages as a Panama-incorporated company.

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Dealing properly with impending expiration can mean life or death for a company. "Patent expiration can be a terrifying specter if a company is unprepared to meet it," says a leading pharmaceutical consultant who helps provide the industry with coping strategies.

In other industries where initial investment is relatively small, the effect need not be as traumatic on the company's bottom line.

Nonetheless, the consequences of lack of preparation for the loss of exclusivity can be a major factor in corporate outlook. Xerox Corporation management once felt that its photocopiers were so well-protected by patents that they had nothing to fear from the competition. Then the Japanese entered the market with new copying machines. Fortunately for Xerox, it was able to produce improved state-of-the-art copiers and maintain its position in the high end of the field.

How can companies follow Xerox's example and make patents work more efficiently? I asked many businessmen, consultants and patent experts in a variety of industries this question. The general consensus was that patents need to be carefully managed today, and that a good manager should keep a wary eye on the patent from the time of filing to the time of expiration, since each stage has its own opportunities and pitfalls.

To start with, let's assume your company has come up with a patentable idea. You and your colleagues have absorbed all the advice you need from company attorneys and outside counsel. Your

claims are clear-and, of course, error-free-and you have followed the old adage about filing for the patent at least one day ahead of the competition.

While waiting for the patent examiner's approval, which may take as long as two years, don't get complacent. In today's intensely competitive atmosphere, time is your enemy, so it's important to examine the potential rewards of licensing even before the patent is obtained.

Once the application is in place, plan early for the day of expiration, at least five years ahead of time, according to some experts.

And where possible, use the time to find ways of extending the life of the patent. If that's impossible, the experts suggest, develop alternatives to the patented product that can take its place if post-expiration competition arises.

One common approach (at least in the chemical industry) to extend the life of the patent is to encourage the research staff to change the original composition's substances just enough to obtain a new formulation that improves the original functional activity. If you can't change the composition of the material, you might be able to find a way to modify the manufacturing process. But take care: Changing the size of a product or substituting one material for another, like plastic for wood, is not patentable.

Extension of patent life is clearly not very important when competitors can bypass a patent and make products that do the same job just as well with different materials or compositions. With patents in place, management tends to save on R&D in the covered area, but experts say that is the wrong way to go. Continuing R&D is essential, especially in commodities where a penny gained in the cost of production is enough to maintain the competitive edge even after a patent expires.

The story of Gore-Tex, a unique polymer material with extraordinary water-resistant properties used in packaging and covering, as well as in raincoats, is a striking example of successful patent management. The material was introduced in the ' 50s by William Gore, a Du Pont chemist who eventually set up his own company to manufacture it. Although the basic patent expired and competition emerged, the original company, W.L.. Gore and Associates Inc., never abandoned its faith in the product and continues to produce it profitably.

According to Gary Samuels, chief patent counsel, the company succeeded because it increased its R&D efforts as the patent approached expiration. New patents were taken out to cover new product areas, creating a protective umbrella of patents that deterred competition from entering the field. "We were fortunate in having a material that is hard to duplicate," Samuels says.

n4~INCt ONII! ITII!P 4HII!4D In some cases a marketing ploy known as co-marketing may be the primary tool, perhaps the only tool, a company management can use to stay ahead of the patent game. The principle is simple.

Company A grants exclusive rights under a patent to Company B to market a product in Europe, where it has a franchise. In return, Company B gives Company A an exclusive right to co-market another Company B product in the United States.

Both parties gain advantages: Typically, one company is given a quick entry into a new field, the other an opportunity to utilize its partner's established sales network and marketing forces to advance a new product. In the pharmaceutical industry, co-marketing has grown into a powerful strategy for major firms. Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, SmithKline Beecham, Merck &Co. Inc., and ICI are among the relatively recent co-marketing partners who have traded rights to different drugs for various advantages.

Co-marketing may not always work, of course, especially in an environment of high uncertainty. Take Tagamet, the well-publicized ulcer drug created by SmithKline that transformed the treatment of peptic ulcers by providing a pharmaceutical solution to a disease traditionally treated by surgery. In 1982, six years after Tagamet was launched, SmithKline Beecham was earning $800 million a year, with 12 years to go on the patent.

Unfortunately for the inventor, in 1983 Glaxo Wellcome PLC launched a similar class of anti-ulcer drug called Zantac. Within three years, Zantac had captured more .than 50 percent of anti-ulcer sales. In the next few years, Eli Lilly & Co. came out with yet another anti-ulcer drug called Axid, and Merck launched Pepcid. All four drugs use different chemicals to treat ulcers by blocking certain receptors in the digestive system. By 1989, despite various co-marketing ploys with Bristol-Myers, SmithKline Beecham's share of the gastric-disease market was down 30 percent. The irony of this picture is that today, all four companies face the discovery that ulcers can be treated with antibiotics. Undaunted, each has converted its product to a successful over-the-counter heartburn remedy.

The pharmaceutical industry has developed its own unique ploys when expiration threatens, which not only may affect a company's bottom line but also may have far-reaching consequences for the health of all consumers. One strategy to stall the competition is to alter a drug so as to give it a new dosage and then to market it as a superior product. Thus, one-a-day dosage is clearly better (and more salable, though perhaps no more effective) than two- or three-times-a-day dosage. Another winning patentable change is to create a new delivery system for the same drug.

Turning an injectable system into a pill-swallowing regimen will net a new patent and at the same time conceivably increase the drug's beneficial usage.

Because of favorable federal legislation toward generics beginning in the '80s, several small companies in the U.S. have seized the opportunity to make a profitable business out of developing new and smarter delivery systems for big-company major drugs that are on the way to losing their patent protection.

Carlos Samour, chairman and scientific director of Lexington, Massachusetts-based MacroChem Corporation, reports that his small company has developed a chemical that increases the absorption of certain drugs through the skin. Using this chemical with these drugs, he is creating gels and creams that enable topical application in lieu of injections or oral ingestion for a number of conditions as varied as muscle and joint pain and impotence.

"We can do this profitably," Samour says, "because we do not have to repeat the extensive drug testing required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when they approved the original

drug formulation as safe and effective. We use the same clinical statistics on which the original patent was based to get a new patent on the delivery system." Samour often works in association with the original patent holder to market the new delivery technology, thus continuing the profitability of the original discovery.

If strategies like these still fail to slow the barbarians waiting at the gate for a patent to expire, managers might take a look (if they haven't done so from the beginning) at trying to persuade the FDA to permit a switch to an over-the-counter nonprescription formulation. Many current over-the-counter preparations are rooted in prescription and branded-product backgrounds. Example: Head and Shoulders, the off-the-shelf dandruff remedy, was once a patented drug prescribed by dermatologists. Advil once enjoyed prescription and patent protection as ibuprofen.

This switch-and-fight technique doesn't always work, and, as Syntex found out in the case of Aleve, it often takes time and considerable advertising money to launch an over-the-counter drug.

But the rewards can be substantial.

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In the end, there may be no better recourse for a pharmaceutical patent holder than to establish an in-house generic subsidiary. A few years ago, this was unusual (companies didn't want to compete with themselves), but today most major U.S. drug companies own or license generic companies here or abroad. Merck, the world's largest drug company, opened its own generic subsidiary not only to market generic versions of its own drugs but also to sell products originated by other drug makers. For smaller companies, this may require agility in marketing, but the manufacturer with experience with the original branded product is likely to be able to fashion a trustworthy substitute more efficiently than the competition.

The introduction of a generic substitute need not be an immediate downer for the price and profits of the brand-name product, as is popularly believed.

A study by Arthur D. Little's Decision Resources Inc. of Waltham, Massachusetts, reveals that brand loyalty established during the life of a patent may persist as a kind of afterglow when the patent expires. This was so in the case of Hoffmann-LaRoche Inc.'s Valium, the popular anti-anxiety drug that went off-patent in 1985. The manufacturer decided to meet the burgeoning generic competition to Valium with an increase in price, taking a hit on market share but maintaining early profitability from the higher prices. As more companies enter the market, however, prices are eventually forced down.

Brand-name loyalty is especially important today in industries where competition is played out on the advertising front.

Toothpaste, soaps and cereals are items that once had patents behind them but are now largely sold by name recognition. Managers in those industries have to think early about developing a brand name likely to survive the patent.

For the really sophisticated manager, extending the life of a patent may ultimately have to be fought out on the political front.

When Procter & Gamble's infamous fat substitute Olestra won FDA approval after 12 years of "study," the company immediately

sought a patent extension to restore its lost time. In an unusual burst of sympathy, the U.S. Congress passed a special patent-term restoration bill for Olestra that proved to be so profitable for Procter & Gamble that the company continued to seek further extensions until the public objected and the company finally was persuaded to let the patent expire.

"UI!LlNCt THI! I!NCtINI! Today, as a patent proceeds toward expiration, managers need to assess and reassess their position. Timing is everything, because maintaining a patent is very costly, especially if the patent has to be enforced in developing countries, where the fees are often five to LO times greater than those in the United States.

On the other hand, managers looking to tie patents into the company's overall marketing strategy might find that it pays to temporarily relinquish the monopoly provided by a patent than to retain it. In Co-opetition, Adam Brandenburger of Harvard Business School and Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management offer a striking example of how Intel in the 1970s effectively used this approach to gain ascendancy in the microchip business at the expense of IBM and other PC manufacturers.

IBM, which was then runner-up to Apple Computer Inc., wanted to improve its position in the PC business. To do so required the help of Intel Corporation's then-newest high-speed microprocessor, the 8086, in combination with Microsoft's operating system. However, IBM wanted to assure itself that the microchips would be available when needed, so it struck a deal. Intel agreed to drop its monopoly with the 8086 and to provide IBM with secondsource licensing rights.

It also provided licenses to 11 other computer manufacturers, hoping that their ~ultiple success in the marketplace would drive up the demand for Intel chips.

The strategy worked, possibly better than envisioned but not entirely to the advantage of IBM. Intel took the opportunity to leap ahead in the '80s with the next generation of microprocessors, the 286 and 386, which it licensed to five companies and thereupon again improved its market share. It also left IBM in the dust. In subsequent developments with the 386 and beyond, Intel regained most of its monopoly, granted a single license to IBM, and saw its chips become the industry standard. IBM (with Apple and Motorola) made a valiant attempt to compete with Intel by developing the PowerPC but had to limit its use in the face of the increasing power of Intel's Pentium class of chips.

As managers continue to sharpen their patent prowess, experts agree, intellectual property will become an increasingly important part of corporate strategy at home and abroad. The patent rewards, in turn, will encourage new R&D, which will lead to innovations and further patents. Thus the 206-year-old patent system, which has helped make America an industrial giant, will continue to fuel the engine that drives U.S. progress in technology well into the 0 21 st century and beyond.

About the Author: Lee Edson is a freelance writer based in Stamford, Connecticut.

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e have been telling'storiesJo one ~another for a long time, perhaps for "as long as we have been using language,and we have been using language, I Sl!Sp~a, for as long as we have been human.

IIIall its guisl';s, from words spoken and writ., ten to pic1:ur~s'and musical notes and mathe.' matic.al symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a·species.

We delight in stories, first of all, because they are· a playground for langu'age, an arena .,. ~for exercisin.g...this extraordinary power, The... .~ .. ells and enchantments that figure in SO'h:n1 tales,remind us of the ambiguous poten- '. ' . .~ords, for creating or destroying, for .f\. ,

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binding or setting free. ltalo Calvi no, a wizard of storytelling, described literature as "a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Calvino's remark holds true, I believe, not just for the highfalutin modes we label as literature, but for every effort to make sense of our lives through narrative.

Second, stories create community. They link teller to listeners, and listeners to one another. This is obviously so when speaker and audience share the same space, as humans have done for all but the last few centuries of our million-year history; but it is equally if less obviously so in our literate age, when we encounter more of our stories in solitude, on page or screen. When two people discover they have both read Don Quixote, they immediately share a piece of history and become thereby less strange to one another.

The strongest bonds are formed by sacred stories, which unite entire peoples. Thus Jews rehearse the events of Passover; Christians tell of a miraculous birth and death and resurrection; Buddhists tell of Gautama meditating beneath a tree. As we know only too well, sacred stories may also divide the world between those who are inside the circle and those who are outside, a division that has inspired pogroms and inquisitions and wars. There is danger in story, as in any great force. If the tales that captivate us are silly or deceitful, like most of those offered by television and advertising, they waste our time and warp our desires. If they are cruel, they make us callous. If they are false and bullying, instead of drawing us into a thoughtful community they may lure us into an unthinking herd or, worst of all, into a crowd screaming for blood-in which case we need other, truer stories to renew our vision. So The Diary of Anne Frank is an antidote to Mein Kampf So Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an antidote to the paranoid yarns of the Ku Klux Klan.

Just as stories may rescue us from loneliness, so, by speaking to us in private, they may rescue us from mobs.

This brings me to the third item on my list: Stories help us to see through the eyes of other people. Here my list overlaps with one

compiled by Carol Bly, who argues in "Six Uses of Story" that the foremost gift from stories is "experience of other." For the duration of a story, children may sense how it is to be old, and the elderly may recall how it is to be young; men may tryon the experiences of women, and women those of men.

Through stories, we reach across the rifts not only of gender and age, but also of race and creed, geography and class, even the rifts between species or between enemies.

Folktales and fables and myths often show humans talking and working with other animals, with trees, with rivers and stones, as if recalling or envisioning a time of easy commerce among all beings. Helpful ducks and cats and frogs, wise dragons, stolid oaks, all have lessons for us in these old tales. Of course no storyteller can literally become hawk or pine, any more than a man can become a woman; we cross those boundaries only imperfectly, through leaps of imagination. "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?" Thoreau asks. We come nearer to achieving that miracle in stories than anywhere else.

A fourth power of stories is to show us the consequences of our actions. To act responsibly, we must be able to foresee where our actions might lead; and stories train our sight. They reveal the patterns of human conduct, from motive through action to result. Whether or not a story has a moral purpose, therefore, it cannot help but have a moral effect, for better or worse.

An Apache elder, quoted by the anthropologist Keith Basso, puts the case directly: "Stories go to work on you like arrows.

Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself." Stories do work on us, on our minds and hearts, showing us how we might act, who we might become and why.

So we arrive at a fifth power of stories, which is to educate our desires. Instead of playing on our selfishness and fear, stories can give us images for what is truly worth seeking, worth having, worth doing. T mean here something more than the way fairy tales repeat our familiar longings. T mean the way Huckleberry Finn makes us want to be faithful, the way Walden makes us yearn to confront the essential facts of life. What stories at their best can do is lead our

desires in new directions-away from greed, toward generosity; away from suspicion, toward sympathy; away from an obsession with material goods, toward a concern for spiritual goods.

One of the spiritual goods I cherish is the peace of being at home, in family and neighborhood and community and landscape.

Much of what I know about becoming intimate with one's home ground I have learned from reading the testaments of individuals who have decided to stay put. The short list of my teachers would include Lao-tzu and Thoreau and Faulkner, Thomas Merton, Black Elk, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder and Wendell Beny. Their work exemplifies the sixth power of stories, which is to help us dwell in place.

According to Eudora Welty, herself a deeply rooted storyteller, "the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood." So we return to the epic of Gilgamesh, with its brooding on the forests and rivers of Babylonia; we return to the ancient Hebrew accounts of a land flowing with milk and honey; we follow the Aboriginal songs of journeys over the continent of Australia-because they all convey a passionate knowledge of place.

Native American tribes ground their stories in nearby fields and rivers and mountains, and thus cany their places in mind. As the Pueblo travel in their homeland, according to Leslie Marmon Silko, they recall the stories that belong to each mesa and arroyo, and "thus the continuity and accuracy of the oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape-and the Pueblo interpretation of that landscape is maintained."

Stories of place help us recognize that we belong to the earth, blood and brain and bone, and that we are kin to other creatures. Life has never been easy, yet in every continent we find tales of a primordial garden, an era ofharmony and bounty. In A God Within, Rene Dubos suggests that these old tales might be recollections "of a very distant past when certain groups of people had achieved biological fitness to their environment." Whether or not our ancestors ever lived in ecological balance, if we aspire to do so in the future, we must nourish the affectionate, imaginative bond between person and place.

Mention of past and future brings us to the seventh power of stories, which is to help us dwell in time. I am thinking here not so much of the mechanical time parceled out by clocks as of historical and psychological time. History is public, a tale of influences and events that have shaped the present; the mind's time is private, a flow of memory and anticipation that continues, in eddies and rapids, for as long as we are conscious.

Narrative orients us in both kinds of time, private and public, by linking before and after within the lives of characters and communities, by showing action leading on to action, moment to moment, beginning to middle to end.

Once again we come upon the tacit morality of stories, for moral judgment relies, as

There is danger in story, as in any great force. If the tales are silly and deceitful, like most of those offered on television, they waste our time and warp our desires.

narrative does, on a belief in cause and effect. Stories teach us that every gesture, every act, every choice we make sends ripples of influence into the future. Thus we hear that the caribou will only keep giving themselves to the hunter if the hunter kills them humbly and respectfully. We hear that all our deeds are recorded in some heavenly book, in the grain of the universe, in the mind of God, and that everything we sow we shall reap.

Stories gather experience into shapes we can hold and pass on through time, much the way DNA molecules in our cells record genetic discoveries and pass them on. Until the invention of writing, the discoveries of the tribe were preserved and transmitted by storytellers, above all by elders. "Under hunter-gatherer conditions," Jared Diamond observes, "the knowledge possessed by even one person over the age of 70 could spell the difference between survival and starvation for a whole clan."

Aware of time passing, however, we

mourn things passing away, and we often fear the shape of things to come. Hence our need for the eighth power of stories, which is to help us deal with suffering, loss and death. From the Psalms to the Sunday comics, many tales comfort the fearful and grieving; they show the weak triumphing over the strong, love winning out over hatred, laughter defying misery. It is easy to dismiss this hopefulness as escapism, but as Italo Calvino reminds us, "For a prisoner, to escape has always been a good thing, and an individual escape can be a first necessary step toward a collective escape."

Those who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death tell stories as a way of fending off despair. Thus Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells of surviving the Soviet gulag; Toni Morrison recounts the anguish of plantation life; Black Elk tells about the slaughter of the buffalo, the loss of his Lakota homeland. Those of us who have not lived through horrors must still face losing all that we love, including our own lives.

Stories reek of our obsession with mortality.

As the most enchanting first line of a tale is "once upon a time," so the most comforting last line is "and they lived happily ever after." This fairy-tale formula expresses a deep longing not only for happiness, but also for ever-afterness, for an assurance that life as well as happiness will endure, that it will survive all challenges, perhaps even the grave. We feel the force of that longing, whether or not we believe that it can ever be fulfilled.

The ninth item on my list is really a summation of all that I have said thus far: Stories teach us how to be human. We are creatures of instinct, but not solely of instinct. More than any other animal, we must learn how to behave. In this perennial effort, as Ursula Le Guin says, "story is our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward." Skill is knowing how to do something; wisdom is knowing when and why to do it, or to refrain from doing it. While stories may display skill aplenty, in technique or character or plot, what the best of them offer is wisdom. They hold a living reservoir of human possibilities, telling us what has worked before, what has failed, where meaning and purpose and joy might be found. At the heart of many tales is a test, a riddle, a

problem to solve; and that, surely, is the condition of our lives, both in detail-as we decide how to act in the present momentand in general, as we seek to understand what it all means. Like so many characters, we are lost in a dark wood, a labyrinth, a swamp, and we need a trail of stories to show us the way back to our true home.

Our ultimate home is the Creation, and anyone who pretends to comprehend this vast and intricate abode is either a lunatic or a liar. In spite of all that we have learned through millennia of inquiry, we still dwell in mystery. Why there is a universe, why we are here, why there is life or consciousness at all, where if anywhere the whole show is headed-these are questions for which we have no final answers. Not even the wisest of tales can tell us:The wisest, in fact, acknowledge the wonder and mystery of Creationand that is the tenth power of stories.

In the beginning, we say, at the end of time, we say, but we are only guessing. "I think one should work into a story the idea of not being sure of all things," Borges advised, "because that's the way reality is."

The magic and romance, the devils and di vinities we imagine, are pale tokens of the forces at play around us. The elegant, infinite details of the world's unfolding, the sheer existence of hand or tree or star, are more marvelous than anything we can say about them.

A number of modern physicists have suggested that the more we learn about the universe, the more it seems like an immense, sustained, infinitely subtle flow of consciousness-the more it seems, in fact, like a grand story, lavishly imagined and set moving. In scriptures we speak of God's thoughts as if we could read them; but we read only by the dim light of a tricky brain on a young planet near a middling star.

Nonetheless, we need these cosmic narratives, however imperfect they may be, however filled with guesswork. So long as they remain open to new vision, so long as they are filled with awe, they give us hope of finding meaning within the great mystery.

D About the Author: Scott Russell Sanders teaches English at Indiana University, Bloomington. A collection of his essays titled Writing From the Center was published in 1995.

children were on vacation in India. We had a care unit was unexpected. I had simply I had been right about couple of beers. He seemed lonely, sinking arrived in the very situation I had visuone thing in America: deeper into his recliner as the evening wore alized for years. I loved the way the what you should do for a on, his every sentence tinged with nostalcharts were kept, with tabs separating patient, you could do. gia. It struck me that in the privacy of his order sheets, progress notes, laborahome he was more Indian than he might tory results, nurses' notes, radiological have been in India. If I was trying to intereports and consultants' notes. A call to the medical-record department would bring two or three vol- grate, and learn the rituals of Monday-night football and umes of the patient's old chart. By studying these, one could re- Moon Pies, cookouts and coon-hunting, squirrel stew and construct the waxing and waning of a disease over time. And possum pie, this doctor had abandoned that strategy. Or else after I discharged the patient I could follow him regularly in the he had worked his way through that phase and arrived at this.

On the walls of his den were pictures of his family. "That's outpatient clinic and add to the chronicle of his encounter with my oldest daughter," he said, pointing. "Guess what-she's illness. I had been right about one thing in America: what you been accepted by Harvard as an undergraduate. Pre-med, of should do for a patient, you could do.

I was intensely aware of myself at all times. I realized that I course." His face revealed more than just parental pride. He wanted her to succeed in a way that he, for all his financial was trying not to stand out, and would speak in a manner that success, never could. His daughter would soon penetrate the was understood, even if it meant pronouncing "gastroenterology" in one slurred ejaculation, rather than "gastroupper tier of medicine, which had been closed to him. She acenter-ology." I asked my senior resident, John Duncan, to would step right into it, as if it were her birthright-sans show me how to tie my necktie in a thinner knot than the cent and with an American medical degree. There was pride and vindication in his expression. broad 1970s knot I used. I studied sociological minutiae I wasn't ready to settle in the hinterland. I wanted to make carefully, even keeping notes in my diary on the etiquette of . the cafeteria line-how queue-jumping was permissible if it to Plymouth Rock. My mentor in Tennessee, an infectiousdisease specialist named Steven Berk, had sparked my interyou were heading for the salad bar, how having money ready when you got to the cashier was appreciated, how the sawest in that field and encouraged me to apply for a fellowship. dust-tasting entity appropriately called grits was to be Once again, in 1982, I sent out applications to the best programs in the country. Butthis time I actually received replies. avoided, how biscuits and gravy were tasty but sat in your belly like bricks, and, most important, where the Tabasco I asked myself what had changed. I had published a few sauce was kept. Tabasco provided the only way I could keep papers by then, but Berk's strong letter of recommendation had helped; it said, "Look beyond the foreign-medical-gradmy taste buds from atrophying completely. I wanted my foruate label." When Boston University made me a preemptive eignness to be forgotten. The highest compliment I recei ved offer of a fellowship, before the official "match" day, I acafter three months of this was paid me by a nurse: she said, "Doc, Idon't know where you're from, but you're agood ole cepted. I had finally penetrated the country club.

Tennessee boy in my book. Are you married?" oston was Mecca. It had three medical schools, each Each year in Tennessee, I encountered more second-generation Indians in the medical-school classes. I was fasciwith years of tradition, and each owning or linked to several famous hospitals. I sat in lecture halls listennated by the contrast between their looks and their manner. It ing to speakers whose papers and textbook chapters I had was like a trick of some sort-how, when they opened their mouths, the most fluent East Tennessee patois emerged. I read and who had been mythical figures to me. My fellowAmerican graduates-found my propensity thought (and perhaps I was wrong) that they were so trainees-all American, so assimilated, that they had a confidence, a for hero worship amusing. Real fame in Boston that year belonged to Ray Flynn, Yo-Yo Ma and Larry Bird. swagger, that we first-generation immigrants would never Half of my fellowship training was spent in laboratory rehave. The FMGs jokingly, and jealously, referred to them as ABCDs: American-Born Confused Deshis. search, learning basic techniques. I embarked on a study of pneumonia using an ani mal model. The laboratory ski lis and In the third year of my medical residency, I spent my free the imagination required to be a first-class researcher were weekends working in small emergency rooms in tiny towns quite distinct from the skills demanded of a clinician. Either tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains. The staff physiyou had them or you didn't. cians in these little mining communities were mostly I soon noticed that in Boston, as in Tennessee, there wasn't Indians, with a smattering of other foreign medical gradumuch interest in the bedside exam. Most case discussions took ates. The few American doctors there were usually hometown boys who had returned after their training. I studied the place in conference rooms or labs. As a student in India, I had imagined that the ready availability of CAT scans and anIndian doctors: they represented a later stage in the life cycle giograms, the routine ability to float Swan-Ganz catheters into of a foreign medical graduate. the heart and measure pressures and so on, would have resulted One of these doctors invited me to his house. His wife and

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in American doctors' becoming superb bedside sleuths. They had so many opportunities to confirm bedside findings with appropriate investigations. But instead their senses were rusty from lack of use, and there was little faith in the bedside exam.

I realized that the movers and shakers in medicine-the chairmen and the department heads with the magnificent titles-didn't get to their positions by seeing patients. Their fame and power had come from doing basic biological research, at which they were brilliant. American education, unlike didactic Indian education, encouraged innovative and original thinking, and this was where it paid off: if medicine was both art and science, no country in the world was better at the science than America. Typically, early in these doctors' careers they had explored and described an important phenomenon and written the seminal paper on it. They had then spent years refining that observation and assigning Younger Turks to pursue the spinoffs, all the while broadening their sphere of influence, writi ng textbook chapters on the subject, sitting on the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Administration committees that awarded funding. The necessary skills for such a rise were business acumen, Machiavellian cunning and skill in the thrust-and-parry action of committees. And all the while the research ship had to be kept afloat. If you were looking for an outstanding clinician, someone whom other doctors would seek if they were ill, it was unlikely that you would find one in a position of power.

One of the professors I admired the most was a superb cI inician and a gifted researcher. He let me run the clinical service without much interference. I presented the new consultations to him every afternoon, in his lab. Almost never did I present a patient with a condition that hehadn't seen before. On one occasion, I surprised him by something I' d said.

"That's just not possible, Abe," he said. "It can't be." He wanted to see the patient. Our entourage marched over to the hospital. The professor, wrapped up in his thoughts, extended his hand. The patient, thinking that this meant a handshake, extended hers. But the professor's fingers had already slipped past the outstretched hand to grab the bedsheet and expose the part of the body in question, to see for himself what it was that seemed to defy his knowledge of how this particular disease worked. He showed us what we had missed-a finding that we thought was trivial but that was, in fact, crucial. He marched out, satisfied, having proved what it was that he had come to prove: that the rules of how infections behaved had not been broken. He left us to explain to the astonished patient that she had just received the opinion of the top infectious-disease expert in America.

I began to understand that if I still aspired to one of the heady titles that I had fantasized about as a student my life would have to take a path I hadn't anticipated. After two years, my research had barely begun to yield results. It would take several more years of committed laboratory apprenticeship before I could start exploring the research questions that really interested me. I had gone into medicine

partly because middle-class Indian parents guided their children into either engineering or medicine, as if there were no other careers. But I had also chosen medicine because of Somerset Maugham's OjHumanBondage, abookthatwhen I was 13 made medicine seem the most romantic of professions: "humanity there in the rough, the materials the artist worked on," in Maugham's words. In medical school Professor K.VT. had embodied this approach to medicine for me. I was reluctant now to change paths. I had started to resent the time I was spending away from my patients. A new disease, AIDS, had emerged. While researchers chased after its cause, there was plenty of opportunity for a clinician to observe its manifestations at the bedside. I wanted to combine patient care and teaching with more modest research.

I had made the passage from India to Plymouth Rock. But there I discovered that one of the most important things America had to offer was the choice of how one could live and work. fterfinishing my fellowship, in 1985,lwentbackto India. It was a nostalgic visit to see friends and relatives; my return ticket was safely in my pocket.

Nevertheless, I wanted to find out whether India would feel different. I had a fleeting fantasy that I might discover a way of using my specialty in infectious diseases within India.

I carried with me an old but functioning gastroscope donated by a physician in Tennessee; I was to deliver it to a Methodist mission hospital in the state of Karnataka which was supported by an American congregation. But the customs officers in Bombay wouldn't release the gastroscope; they were convinced that I wanted to sell it. At the time, India had huge taxes on most imported items. I argued to no avail. The gastroscope never left customs and is probably still sitting there. I visited the isolated rural mission hospital anyway. The senior doctor, an ophthalmologist, had given his best years to the hospital. He was dedicated but poorly paid. His strong religious belief-something I lacked-was what kept him there.

In the same hospital, I met a young anesthetist and his obstetrician wife, both fresh out of training. I thought that they were wonderful, compassionate physicians. But as their child neared school age they worried about the lack of good schools in the village. Their pay was insufficient to buy even the simplest luxuries that India's huge middle class took for granted. I couldn't see them staying there for more than another year or so. I couldn't see myself working there, either.

On a subsequent visit, four years later, I noted a new phenomenon sweeping Madras and other cities in India: NRI hospitals. These were nonresident Indian hospitals, set up by Indian doctors living abroad who invested their foreign exchange in hospitals modeled on their counterparts in the West, right down to the modular fumiture in the foyers. These hospitals offered everything from renal transplants to coronary-bypass surgery. But they were expensive and catered to the rich. The very rich, however, still went to Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering or the Texas HeartInstitute.

A

I made rounds at one of these hospidifficult to get. A new twist had been I realized that the movers and tals for two weeks. I gave a formallecadded: to have a chance for a visa, you shakers in medicine didn't ture. And I tried to imagine myself had to have a contract with a residency get their positions by seeing living and working in this setting, but I program in America. patients, but from doing basic couldn't. I made excuses for myself on I had come to India to interview pobiological research, at which the plane returning to America. "No tential interns, pick the best, and hand one knows what to do with your spethey were brilliant. out five contracts. These five graducialty in India," I told myself. "Most ates, contract in hand, would have a dephysicians manage the infections they cent chance of getting their visas. encounter without outside assistance, and they're not about to Before I left El Paso, I had run a small ad in an Indian newspaper, specifying a very high score on the equivalency exam. I change to help you make a living. And, as for AIDS, Abe, they seem to think that it is and will remain an American problem. thought that I would get 10 or 20 applicants. Four hundred peoMoney is the missing ingredient in India, not you. You're just ple answered the advertisement, all of them meeting or exnot needed, Abe. If a new enlightened government ever ceeding the qualifications and overwhelming the fax machine comes along ..." I never completely convinced myself. in EIPaso. Ihad picked 70 people to interview in Bangalore.

My academic career, spent largely in smaller medical The lobby of the hotel the next morning looked like a varischools where patient care was valued more than research, ant of the Consulate scene. Even though I had given each brought me, eventually, to America's southernmost border-to person a specific time to appear over the next two days, it a professorship at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences looked as if they were all there.

Center in EI Paso, and to a consultancy at R.E. Thomason The hotel made its business suite available to me, and I beHospital, a county hospital. For the first time in America, I felt gan to work my way through the applicants. The secretary as if! had disappeared. I no longer stood out. The patients and assisting me told me that people I had finished interviewing their families walking the corridors of the county hospital were being mobbed outside. "What did he ask? What did looked likemy kin from South India. They shared my skin color you say?" My questions were designed simply to get to and tookme to be Hispanic. When I was stopped in the corridors know the candidates and to pick out the brightest, smartest and asked questions in Spanish, I learned to respond with an- ones. But now, as an experiment, I began deliberately throwswers such as "La cafeteria es en el basemenf'-border ing in specific questions, such as "How do you feel about Spanglish, allowing one the libetty of throwing in English Clinton?" and "What are your views on homosexuality?" By when nothing else could do the job. A sizable percentage of our the afternoon, I was getting polished but totally noncommitpatients were Mex ican nati onals. The hospi tal required only an El tal answers to these questions, since nobody had any idea Paso billing address to provide service. As the sole not-forwhat my views were. profit hospital serving a population of almost 700,000, well I asked one young man why he wanted to leave. over a third of whom were uninsured, we were overburdened "I want to specialize in hematology oncology and then reand understaffed. But you'd have known this only if you read it turn to serve-" somewhere. The wards were airy, and sunlight from big picture "Save that for the Consulate. Really, why do you want to leave?" windows flooded the corridors, reflecting off the waxed floors and pale-blue walls ofthe internal-medicine ward. The security He was startled. guards directed you to the choice caldo de res and barbacoa "You know, sir," he said. I did, but I wanted to hear anyway. joints on Alameda Avenue; the nurses smiled, and if they felt Reluctantly, almost ashamed, he went on, "It's just hopeembattled they didn't show it. As a doctor interested in infecless-that's all I can tell you, sir. No jobs. And to get into spetious diseases, I had found a perfect niche in EI Paso: treating cialty training here requires influence. And there are so many Third World diseases-typhoid, amoebic liver abscesses, brumedical schools now that having a specialty degree here cellosis-inaFirst World setting. means less and less."

By the even ing of the second day, I had my fi ve candidates. I was exhausted. The grueling process of talking to so many n 1993, I found myself in the South of India again, this time at the Oberoi Hotel in Bangalore, and I was having a young doctors, and hearing why they wanted to leave, had given me a sense of being immensely fortunate-fortunate strange conversation with the bellman. The annual struggle to fill our internship slots at Texas Tech had become desperate. that my parents had emigrated, fortunate that I had got the resDespite the fact that our medical students loved the experience idency in Tennessee, fortunate in my choice of specialty. at the county hospital, they had no intention of staying with us My journey to America had brought me full circle, back to as interns. We had always been dependent on foreign medical India, and to a situation where I could pick others to make the graduates, and it appeared that we always would be. But visas voyage. The best I could do for the five doctors I had picked for foreign medical graduates, which seemed to have been easwas to bring them to a county hospital like mine: Ellis Island. ier to obtain at the peak ofthe AIDS epidemic, were once again Therestwasuptothem.

D

I

___ T

he reality today is that the CEO is the dominant force determining the health or sickness of a corporation.

However, even in the sophisticated era of the '90s, we are confronted with underperforming companies where profits and market potential are draining away-corporations that cannot identify the real symptoms of the failing CEO and therefore take no action before crisis strikes. Why? In order to understand the behavioral process of a failing CEO, we must first accept that what made the CEO a successful executive in the past did not necessarily prepare him to handle setbacks, slowdowns and failures that are not easily reversed. It is difficult for board members to diagnose the stages of the failing CEO because he will neither acknowledge nor accept failure. The following analysis should assist both CEOs and boards of directors in identifying the behavioral stages of the failing chief executive.

The failing CEO's behavior is equivalent to the behavior of a person with a terminal illness, as popularized by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. A terminally ill person and the failing CEO go through five stages of human behavior: the Denial Stage; the Anger Stage; the Bargaining Stage; the Depression Stage; and the Acceptance Stage.

DENIAL When confronted with the bad news about his or her health, the terminally ill person enters the denial stage. He or she does not accept the diagnosis and refuses to acknowledge the existence of the terminal illness.

The terminally ill person usually reacts with statements such as: "I feel great," "I am strong and I look good," "It could never happen to me" and "Doctors are known to make mistakes."

The failing CEO experiences and undergoes the same denial process, only more pronounced since there is no real doctor to

.DEATH'-----__ The Corporate Version give the diagnosis. Only the board of directors can make the diagnosis, and they must learn how to be the company's physician.

A few examples of statements a failing CEO would make in the denial stage include: • "It's the economy. Things will improve once it turns around."

• "It's the competition. They cut prices and ruined the whole industry."

• "It's the government's fault. They're letting all these Far Eastern countries import everything and ruin our industry."

Notice that each of the above factors is outside the CEO's control and therefore furthers the ability to deny responsibility. In reality, corporate performance rarely improves simply by changes in the economic cycle, the competition or a lowering of the prime rate. The most typical defensive oratory of the failing CEO is in describing his or her best attributes.

A CEO would say, "I know my business better than anybody. I built this company and made it successful. I've known my industry, my clients and my suppliers for 15 years. No one knows better than I how to

run this company."

A variation of this sentiment was expressed by William J. Agee. When he was named Morrison Knudsen Corporation CEO, one of his first remarks was, "You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years. Now I'm going to show you how the financial guys do it."

Six years later, in 1994, after the company reported fourth-quarter losses of more than $150 million on revenues of approximately $700 million, the board of directors (almost all hand-picked by Agee) finally pushed him out. Insiders and outsiders close to the company's operations were quoted as saying, "[Agee] single-handedly destroyed this company, and the board did nothing." The board of directors did nothing because the members themselves were ensnared in the CEO's denial process and may have experienced the same denial process themselves.

ANGER Once a terminally ill person enters the Anger Stage, his denial is easily seen and felt by family, friends and co-workers. The terminally ill person now acknowledges a problem but still is unrealistic about it. He will blame the doctor for not diagnosing the illness earlier or blame work for taking pri0rity in his or her life. Terminally ill people are angry at everyone. The majority of their pain is aimed at themselves as they say, "Why me? Why now?"

The failing CEO shows the same symptoms of blind anger when making statements such as: • "Who are you to question me and suggest that it's my fault?"

• "In the past, I let people have too much authority. Now I'll make all the decisions."

• "No more Mr. Nice Guy ....T'll show them how to perform. No more tolerance. I'll fire anyone who doesn't meet budget."

The Anger Stage exposes the embattled

The behavior of a failing corporate executive IS equivalent to the behavior of a person with a terminal illness, except most failing CEOs never reach the true stage of Acceptance, CEO's most negative behavior patterns. At this stage it is almost impossible to reason with the CEO or even discuss the company's failings. He is past the stage of simple denials and begins pointing fingers and blaming colleagues for the company's misfortunes.

I will never forget the case of the founder and CEO of a $90 million apparel-manufacturing company. In desperation, the CEO fired his most talented executive, his VP of marketing and sales, accusing him offailing to book enough orders for the coming season. The angry CEO refused to accept reality. His biggest retail clients cut their orders by 45 percent because the company's products were consistently delivered late.

Although the VP had consistently complained about the manufacturing shortcomings, the angry CEO took it as an excuse.

BARGAINING A terminally ill person reaches thjs stage when family and friends finally convince him that he is really sick and should take steps to fight the disease. However, at this stage, he has not yet accepted or acknowledged the seriousness of the condition. He begins a period in which he agrees to undergo only partial treatment. He visits various other doctors and selects the treatment offered by the most malleable physician.

The same behavior pattern will be exhibited by the failing CEO. This behavior is the beginning of a partial acknowledgment of the truth, manifested by a spirit of cooperation and compromise. I've heard CEOs make statements such as: â&#x20AC;˘ "I have attempted to cut costs." â&#x20AC;˘ "I have already cut expenses to the bone.

No one could cut more without seriously damaging the company." â&#x20AC;˘ "I have just completed a new strategic plan of action. It will work; just wait and see."

I once asked the CEO of a $130 million distribution company if he had a backup

plan if his reorganization plan failed. He tried to bargain with me by saying, "Let's try my plan first and see what will happen."

He did not accept the fact that his company had no time to experiment.

During the Bargaining Stage, embattled CEOs show spurts of energy and new ideas.

They understand that the company is in poor shape and action is needed. They begin showing signs of acknowledging responsibility, yet they are far away from acceptance. At this stage, few CEOs make the tough decisions and seek help from outside, unbiased professionals. Instead, they remain isolated, depressed and desperate.

DEPRESSION A terminally ill person reaches this stage when he loses self-esteem, dodges family and social functions, refuses to answer the phone and avoids confronting the illness. Similarly, when CEOs reach this stage, they escape from their offices, avoid key meetings, and thus avoid confrontation and decision making. Sometimes CEOs even leave town and give more authority to subordinates.

This is the most dangerous stage for theircompanies, which are then left without functioning CEOs while all other employees are left in limbo. All key decisions are postponed with no active leader present.

I remember the charismatic founder and CEO of a $180 million retailer who appointed his 25-year-old son (a Yale MBA) as president. It took the son 30 months to bring a consistently profitable company to the brink of bankruptcy. At the most critical stages of the company's decline, the father left town, escaping to Palm Beach and avoiding the painful decision to take back the company's management from his inexperienced son.

I have seen strong leaders find all sorts of excuses to avoid meetings they normally would have never missed. Some executives

show immediate signs of excessive drinking and lack of sleep, resulting in limited capabilities, a short temper and uncharacteristic behavior.

ACCEPTANCE Most terminally ill persons finally reach the stage of Acceptance. They accept the inevitable end when they reach a state of physical exhaustion, weakness, pain and helplessness. They finally realize that they must seek and accept help from any source available.

However, in my 25 years of experience as a turnaround specialist, most failing CEOs never reach the true stage of Acceptance.

Most of them never admit responsibility for the company's demise and continue blaming others for their own mistakes. Most failing CEOs are unable to disengage themselves emotionally from the Denial Stage. Further, boards of directors go through the very same process-they accept the CEO and his view of the company and often exillbit the same progression of behaviors.

It is precisely because most of the people involved in a troubled company are emotionally involved that it makes sense to hire an outside firm to conduct an unbiased review of its health and to offer solutions to its problems.

With so much at stake in today's corporate world, it is essential that CEOs, boards of directors and other corporate executives are able to recognize the five behavioral stages of the failing CEO. When recognized, these stages playa vital role in determining what the company must accomplish in order to restore the company's performance and health.

0 About the Author: Eiton Zur is a principal of the GDL Group, afinn oftumaround experts. He has served as president and CEO of several diversified companies in North America and elsewhere.

"We've decided to build a little cubicle around you and your desk, Harris. "

"Concentrate on the low-rise, wooden structuresthere's a higher fiber content. " Drawing by Eric & Bill; Š 1997 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SI'DE \-1

"I

-'-"-"'-"-'-"'-'-"-""-:.~:o-:.~.-:~

"No, I don't want to play chess. I just want you to reheat the lasagna. "

hile jazz may be a soloist's music, big band jazz has always been a symbiotic, ensemble partnership of individual interpretation and written text.

While the interpreters may be mortal and their improvisations ephemeral, the text is down in black-and-white, as permanent as an ancient treasure map. It survives in perpetuity to tell the living where the dead buried their gold.

Today, many musicians, maps in hand, are busy panning for that old gold. For the men of the Count Basie Orchestra, now led by trombonist Grover Mitchell, the maps are clear and the music direct. Basie intended it that way, whether he realized it or not. For those who have presided over the Charles Mingus Big Band for the past five years, however, the excavation is more cryptic. Mingus's music was an experiment in progress when he was alive. And those who play it today are caught up in its ambiguities, its openness and its challenges.

Mingus's maps lead you only so far-then you proceed on your wits.

We still refer to this breed rather conde-

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scendingly as "ghost" bands, as if to imply a sense of unreality or sterility to anything that seems to serve the suspect cause of nostalgia. So, first a dash of that distasteful antidote to distortion: perspective. The Basie band, in a sense, began as a ghost of the Bennie Moten orchestra in 1935, just as Woody Herman was born out of Isham Jones, Tommy Dorsey out of Joe Haymes and Jimmy Dorsey out of the Dorsey Brothers band. But in those distant days when new management came in, the name on the shingle was promptly changed. Only

And you thought Charles Mingus and Count Basie were dead? "Ghost" bands will carry the tradition of these jazz greats into the next millennium, doin' 'em proud and eclipsing other bands in popularity.

because some of those names over the next decade rose to such mythic dimension did they become too valuable to change. Thus, the "ghost" band as we know it.

Today, though, the existence of orchestras playing under the names Basie and Mingus clearly are forcing us to expand our notions of ghosts. They scored first and second place, respectively, in the Big Band category of Down Beat's 1996 Readers Poll, not only leaving other big-name legacy bands in the dust, but beating out jazz orchestras named after (and led by) the living.

Andy McKee, one of several musical directors of the Charles Mingus Band, flat out rejects the "ghost" label for a very simple reason. "The band didn't exist when Mingus was alive," the 43-year-old bassist points out. "You can't recreate something that never existed."

"And I am passionate about this," complains Aaron Woodward, 49, who is passionate about all things Basie. The "adopted" son of the Basie family and chief executive of Count Basie Enterprises says that his band "is a living, breathing thing that has continued to grow and evolve

didn't depend on one soloist. Basie along basic principles which Basie would emphasize over and over that this nailed down during his life." is an ensemble band."

No argument there. But bands bearThis doesn't mean new material isn't ing brand names like Basie, Shaw, being added. The band's next album Miller, Ellington, Dorsey, James and will be an Ellington and Strayhorn proeven Mingus work under a constitutional mandate---even if it's more spirgram arranged by Alan Ferguson. And wouldn't it be a kick to hear the band itual than real-that provides identity.

Count Basie (left), pianist, band leader and composel; was doing a CD of Buck Clayton charts?

It is nostalgic only to the extent that famousfor the big band sound. He died in 1984. Charles But one day the personal link with there are audiences still out there who Mingus (right), innovative bassist who died in 1979, never had a regular big band. The Charles Mingus Band began remember the original. The ultimate Basie will snap. And this worries Woodward. "But I think it's possible," resting place of all popular art lies in accidentally, with a tribute peiformance after his death. he says, "for a musical spirit, if you the realm of history, where the sentimental subsidies of nostalgia yield to an un- the end." Today, Dee Askew, an Alexander will, to be passed on, nurtured and renewed generation after generation without distortsympathetic objectivity, where all that counts alum, serves as the band manager and is reing or destroying the original vision." is the music itself. That's when we learn sponsible for keeping the Basie band work"This band didn't happen by accident," whether it's destined for history's dustbins or ing. She fumes, along with Woodward and Mitchell adds. ~'You have to have a group of Mitchell, when some brain stem says, its pedes tals. people to pass this on to, not just one perWoodward and Mitchell have no doubts "Basie? Never heard of him. Can you send son. It's like a council. New members have where Basie is headed. There may be irony an audition tape?" to come in and learn from the older ones. I in the fact that although his music never Constant work has given the Basie name dominated American music with the concontinuity, and continuity is important to think Basie knew it would go on. He just hoped it would fall into the right hands." . centrated saturation of Miller's or Dorsey's, Woodward. The Basie orchestra has played under three batons since the founder's death today it may be the healthiest of the old nother man who knew that his name bands still on the road. in April 1984: Thad Jones, Frank Foster music would go on was Charles and, for the last two years, Grover Mitchell.

"This band is touring 44 weeks a year," Mingus. The only difference was, says Woodward, as if there's something re- All played under Basie himself and learned virtually nobody else did, permarkable about that. And these days there his principles firsthand. Mitchell, 66, joined haps not even his widow, Sue Mingus. The is. "We don't use pick-up musicians, we in 1962 (the prime of the Roulette years), don't pay union scale, we don't double up left in 1970, then returned in 1980 and re- Mingus Dynasty began more as an accident than a vision. The year the bassist died, 1979, in hotel rooms and we don't layoff 10 mained until Basie's death. "When he months of the year or play once a week in a died," he recalls, "I knew there would be she organized the group to play a two-day tribute program at Carnegie Hall and used something of a leadership clamor. I just lower Manhattan cellar. Every man is a seaonly four horns and a rhythm. "It sounded so wanted to sidestep the politics then and wait soned professional and a full-time member authentic and full of spirit," she recalls, "we until they seemed to need me." of this band. Seven of the current members just kept it going." played under Count Basie. There is a dediBoth Jones and Foster were top writers Only when Epitaph was premiered 10 cation among these players that this music with their own agendas. And when a writer years later by Gunther Schuller did Sue will continue and evolve." is obliged to speak in another's voice, a natMingus first hear his music in the context of But survival has not come to the Basie ural, creative tension accumulates over a large, 31-piece ensemble. "It was such an band as a birthright of quality. We live in a time. Some feel that in recent years the experience," she adds. "I realized that his crowded culture where even the best gets band's commitment to evolve along "modem" lines was displacing its established as- music deserved to be heard this way with its buried if it doesn't fight to get heard. Even dense harmonies and complex structures. It sets. Mitchell has pulled back on evolution when Basie was there to lend his celebrity was the kind of band that Charles would to the concerts, public indifference would and dug into the wealth of material that has have died to have had on a regular basis." lain dormant for decades. "Philosophically, have spelled doom if it hadn't been for "A couple of the pieces we do were never those who spent 10 hours a day on the I went back to the old concept and a lot of the music that I thought should be part of performed," says McKee. "Certainly never phone wringing work from reluctant bookrecorded or even orchestrated.

So the ers. "Willard Alexander [the legendary our standard repertoire," he says. "I'm not agent who got behind Basie in 1936] is one talking about the 1930s stuff like 'Taxi War arrangements are done by guys in the band.

This may mean adding introductions and of the most underappreciated heroes in big Dance' or 'John's Idea.'

"There's tons of music written after 1952 embellishments. But it's no slight to the inband history," Woodward says. "His salestegrity of Mingus, because he expected muby Ernie Wilkins, Neal Hefti and Quincy manship and enthusiasm drove the booking sicians to find their own paths through his strength that kept Basie, Woody, Duke, Jones. They kind of institutionalized those work. That spirit of improvisation and freeHarry James and all the others working to early principles, but in ensemble form that

A

dom is entirely characteristic of Mingus's method. This often will determine who will work out well in the band and who won't.

A player may be a tremendous musician but needs more structure to frame his work. This band needs musicians who know how to frame themselves. That's my understanding of how Mingus's original groups worked."

Tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield, 51, is one of the current band's few players who knows firsthand how Mingus worked. "I was associated with Mingus in 1973," he says, "and it was always a workshop. That's when I found out how difficult it was to play his music. I've played in many big bands, but Mingus was different-the time changes, the rhythmic changes, the fact that we approached it as a workshop. If he heard something in you he liked, he expected you to bring that to the table every night. When I was playing alto with him, he once told me that he had played with Charlie Parker and that he didn't want me to be another Parker.

He wanted me to play like me. He was the most honest bandleader I ever worked with in that respect. He expected you to be yourself and exemplify your best at all times. If you didn't or you tried to fake with him, that's when there'd be an explosion. We try to keep that individuality alive today."

And this perhaps obscured Mingus the composer in his own time. "The interesting thing was," says Sue Mingus, "Charles always knew that he was primarily a composer. But the world did not perceive that because he was such a powerful figure on stage and his music was so identified with his personality. No one wanted to trespass into his territory. His music wasn't like Duke Ellington's, which everybody played. But Charles left the largest legacy in jazz after Ellington, and the Library of Congress has acquired all his compositions and papers.

Charles is coming into his own gradually in a way that he was not understood in his Iifetinle. In the beginning, people thought it was impossible to have a Mingus band without Mingus. But I simply took my cue from Charles, because he always considered himself first and foremost a composer."

Could Mingus imagine his music without him? You bet he could. "He believed in reincarnation," says Sue Mingus. "Before

he died, he sat in his wheelchair and told a friend that he would probably be reincarnated as an unknown cello player playing Bach, Beethoven and Mingus."

For the past five years, on the basis of an initial one-month contract, a full Mingus band of 14 pieces has played his music every Thursday night in the basement of New York's Time Cafe at 380 Lafayette Street, around the corner from a muchfrequented Tower Records store on Broadway. It did not become a road band until the summer of 1994, when it did the European festival circuit. Similar tours followed in 1995 and '96, plus more recent dates. To expand touring opportunities, Mingus has turned to the classically oriented Herbert Barrett Agency, a first in the band's short history. More tours are ahead, including one to mark the 75th year of Mingus's birth.

None of this activity, however, will deprive New Yorkers of the chance to hear the band in the East Village. "We have a pool of at least 100 musicians," Sue Mingus says.

"So the music continues in the Time Cafe, and it is by no means second-string. When we were in Europe, Bobby Watson, Craig Handy, George Cables, Ryan Kisor and Frank Lacy played the Thursday night dates here." Most members of the Mingus stock company also have their own bands. .

When the original Mingus Dynasty was formed, Sue Mingus says it was essential for the sake of authenticity that every player had to come from some fonner Mingus ensemble. Today, that's not true. McKee, for instance, who came to Mingus early but indirectly through Paul Chambers, never saw him perform. But it makes no difference.

"We've moved beyond that point," she says. "We~re outside the orbit of the cult personality. It's authentic because it's his music, and that's enough. The young players now are exactly the kind of musicians Charles would be using were he alive."

There's not even a consistent conductor or musical director fronti ng the band.

Trumpeter Jack Walrath, long an anchor of the Mingus Dynasty, is not regularly involved with the full band. "We have a number of musical directors," says Sue Mingus, "and I think Jack didn't like that idea. The reason we have it that way is be-

cause musicians are in and out of the band, and we would be out of luck if someone had to tour on his own for three weeks.

None of this has happened according to any long-range design. It's been very organic." The pool of directors includes McKee, Lacy and Steve Slagle.

But then maybe the real music director is Sue Mingus herself, who came from a musical family, played piano in her teens and studied composition. Although she knew little about jazz until she met her husband, her credentials have enabled her to fashion a creative role for herself in the band that goes beyond the CEO model Aaron Woodward has become to the Basie organization. "I have a loud mouth," she admits with a smile in a soft voice. "I choose the directors, commission the arrangements and watch over everyone's shoulder. We're trying to keep it as full of risk as we can."

T

he distance separating the Count Basie and Charles Mingus bands is less than one might first thinkcertainly less than Aaron Woodward (who wondered how he could be sharing an article with Sue Mingus) assumes. Both reject the label "ghost" band.

Yet, both are guided by a legendary spirit.

Both insist that they playa living repertoire.

And both are right because neither is locked down to a point in time or a litany of hits in the way more traditional ghost bands have been. The Basie and Mingus bands were never expected to answer to fads and trends, and therefore never became trapped in a matrix of detail that must be interpreted literally night after night the way a fundamentalist reads the Bible. Today, that gives them an unprecedented freedom to program and even experiment that is denied to, say, the Glenn Miller Band, which continues to face a tyranny of expectations surpassed only by Elvis impersonators.

And this freedom is redefining the nature of the ghost band. To paraphrase a Louis Armstrong song from the 1936 movie Pennies From Heaven, the skeletons in the closet are starting to dance.

D About the Author: John McDonough writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune.

Text by ARUN BHANOT Photographs by HEMANT BHATNAGAR

In India for the past three years, Ericka Smith-Thomas has charmed music lovers with sublime renditions of old jazz standards by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, among others.

inging is about beautiful sound; but popular singing is also about passion, wit, meaning. Jazz aficionados in Delhi have come to expect just that from Ericka Srrllth-Thomas, the American singer who performs Wednesday evenings at Someplace Else, the jazz bar of the Park hotel. Over the familiar clinking of glasses and soft murmur of conversation her clear, warm voice soars and dips over the driving rhythms of the jazz combo, scattering notes of a familiar jazz tune. All heady stuff for nostalgia buffs, no doubt, but there is more to Ericka's singing than paying lip service to her-and everybody else's-favorite jazz vocalists.

This balmy evening is no different as she glides across the room to take her place at the mike. A few exploratory notes and then the band kicks in. Ericka appears to carry her music not just in her head and heart, but in her whole body. After finishing the first set, she settles down at a corner table with a beer to recount her life as a jazz singer.

"The wonderful thing about jazz is that once the musician creates a composition, he loses all claims to that song. It becomes everybody's property," she says. This, she points out, "does not give the singer a license to vandalize somebody else's song, but in a way you make it your own song as well. It's a very peculiar thing but a beautiful thing."

For Ericka, who came into jazz without the benefit of formal training-"l didn't go to music school or study with someone vaunted"-the distinction is important. "I don't worry too much about not being original," she says. "I worry about being authentic. Each time I take a song and do it, I am able in some way to make that song my own."

Born in New York City, Ericka grew up listening to rhythm & blues and "lots of African music." Since her family hailed from the Caribbean, she also heard a great deal of calypso music-Johnny Mathis and others. But it wasn't until her late teens that she discovered jazz. "It's a strange story,"

S

Erickas musical companions. Clockwise from top left: Pianist and bandleader Mosin Menezes, drummer Santiago d'Costa, guitarist Gussie Rikh (left) and bassist Carlton Madeira.

she says. "I went to boarding school and there was a guy who used to roam about pretty much on his own. Everyone thought he was weird because he walked about talking to himself. But he wasn't talking to himself. He was scatting; only none of us knew what that was. We just thought he was kind of off." She laughs at the memory.

"Since I was pretty weird myself, after a while we developed a friendship and he began to introduce me to his music-Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan-and trying to teach me to scat. That was probably the beginning of my interest in jazz."

As a vocalist, Ericka tended over the years to listen more to singers than to anything else. "It took someone with great sense to show me that I really need to be listening to horn players and to percussionists in order to get a sense of the rhythm," she says, describing her efforts to develop a distinctive vocal style, to be truly improvisatory rather than merely add decorative flourishes to a melody line. "My all-time favorite singer probably would be Sarah Vaughan but I wouldn't say that I have modeled myself on anybody," Ericka says.

"I just listened and learned. And I sang. In the shower, on the subway, in the street, while cooking. It's wonderful that today people can actually go to school and learn jazz the way they learn other things." .

In India for the past three years, accompanying her husband Harry Thomas, who is political counselor at the American Embassy, Ericka is aware of the limited scope for a jazz pelformer. The audience for jazz is rrllxed, she feels. "Sometimes there are people who really come to listen to the music. But sometimes you get listeners who simply want to be seen enjoying the music!

"It's hard to be a jazz musician here," she continues. "There is no support for it, the music isn't readily available. You can't just go into any record shop and pick up whatever you want." However, she is pleased to have found the band she currently fronts, comprising guitarist Gussie Rikh, bassist Carlton Madeira, pianist Mosin Menezes and drummer Santiago d'Costa. In her opinion, these players compare favorbly with jazz musicians anywhere. "Playing with them, I find myself scatting more," she notes. "Gussie's play-

ing, in particular, has had a very liberating effect on my singing. And Mosin-he is a monster. It's a shame that nobody really recognizes what a treasure they have in him. He is the band, really."

Of late Ericka has started composing her own tunes. The process is arduous but ultimately rewarding. There is a piano at home that, she admits ruefully, she plays "very, very poorly," running the tune in her mind while working out the exact notes on the instrument. She has not performed many of her compositions in public, preferring to hone her writing skills to perfection.

Ericka is equally careful about choosing material that she does bring to the stage. She says, "Obviously, over years of listening, certain tunes h?ve stood out for me. Maybe they remind me of a certain experience or certain place. Sometimes they are just tunes that were so incredibly beautiful when I heard them, that I want to be a part of them."

One particular favorite is the Wayne Shorter composition, "Infant Eyes," as recorded by Doug and Jean Carne. She explains: "It's a song that talks about the singer's love for his little daughter. And I have a little girl. So when I hear this song, naturally I think of how much I love my child. I also think of the incredible beauty of Jean Carne's voice. So I feel like trying that, putting my spin on it and expressing myself through it."

The beer finished, Ericka returns to the stage for a rousing rendition of "Love For Sale." By this time the bar has filled and heads and feet are moving sympathetically with the beat. All eyes are upon the singer.

There is a grace and very physical quality to her music. Later Ericka explains: "It's one of the things that I enjoy about jazz. For me to enjoy music, it has to do something to me physically. And there is a lot of music that will do that to you, from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Jirrll Hendrix. The only music that I don't like is music that doesn't make me shiver."

There is a restless quality about Ericka that suggests she will continue to evolve as a musician, in the best traditions of jazz. Singer, composer, lyricist, Ericka's music is destined to grow. As she states, "When you love something, growth is implied. I love this stuff. I want this to be part of my life."

0

MANUFACTURING

for

REUSE

continued from page 21

have moved well beyond the what-if stage, though each took a different path.

Kodak learned the hard way. In the late 1980s a group of engineers came up with a disposable 35-mm camera called Fling. The project got lukewarm support from top management because the idea ran counter to Kodak philosophy. Alan Vandemoere, who participated in the project, says Kodak's belief was "that God intended people to buy a roll of film and a camera and use the film to load the camera."

Indeed, Fling went bung. It sold poorly, and its name enraged environmentalists.

Vandemoere's group didn't give up. One

Recycling has brought another interesting fact to light: used or refurbished parts sometimes work better than new ones.

engineer devised adouble lens that enabled the camera to take wide-angle shots.

Creating a panoramic view with a $10 camera was novel. They also developed an underwater version and renamed the camera FunSaver 35. The new model soared-but it still ticked off environmentalists. And for good reason: Hundreds of thousands of returned cameras ended up in landfills.

Eager to recycle the camera, the engineers proposed DFD and component reuse. Kodak management yawned. It woke up when a U.S. Congressman gave the company his Wastemaker of the Year Award for the disposables.

Recalls Vandemoere: "My phone rang and one of our senior managers asked, 'Remember that stupid idea you guys had? How long would it take you to implement it?' " Not long, Vandemoere said.

By the end of 1990, Kodak had converted the disposable cameras to recyclable ones.

The previously ultrasonically welded camera case was redesigned to snap apart easily.

The customer would deliver it to a photofinisher, which would return it to Kodak for a small fee. Kodak hired OutSource, a New York State-sponsored organization that employs handicapped people, to break down the cameras.

In the recycling center, the covers and the lenses are removed. Plastic parts are ground into pellets and molded into new camera parts. The camera's interior-its moving parts and electronics-are tested and reused up to ten times. By weight, 87 percent of a camera is reused or recycled. Kodak sold about 30 million disposable cameras worldwide in 1993. The flash version of the FunSaver is the company's fastest-growing and most profitable product.

Xerox launched its green manufacturing program four years ago under the banner of cost savings. Says Jack C. Azar, corporate manager for environmental design and resources conservation: "We demonstrated to our senior management that we could probably do it very cost effectively and increase our productivity in the process."

Xerox had already been saving $200 million a year through reuse of parts; the focus on green design upped that by $50 million.

Selling senior management on the benefits of wholesale green manufacturing, from DFD to remanufacturing and recycling of parts, is paying off at the rate of about $500 million a year.

As Kodak, Xerox and other companies have learned, the topsy-turvy world of design for disassembly suddenly turns the gang in the lab into corporate strategists. It challenges them to take a much wider view of design than they've been taught. The most important lesson learned, says Donald Bloyer, an HP senior product design engineer, is not to be rigid. Coping with sometimes contradictory notions and demands, a designer must juggle quality and reliability with green engineering. In building its popular DeskJet printers for disassembly, HP found, for instance, that a snap-fit-one of the icons of DFD-just doesn't always work best, so it uses standardized screws in-

stead. It's pointless and wasteful to make a green product that's no good.

Recycling has brought anotQer interesting fact to light: used or refurbished parts sometimes work better than new ones. This is particularly true in digital electronics. A memory chip or a microprocessor, unless it has suffered repeated thermal insults or physical damage, is virtually immortal, since the only moving parts are electrons.

So Fox Electronics, a fast-growing San Jose reclaimer and reseller of chips, doesn't even bother to test old chips it resells. The reason: What the trade calls "infant mortality" of new chips during initial tests is 5 percent, but Fox discoyered that old chips are more reliable-only 2 percent die.

But old beliefs die even harder. Cheap cameras notwithstanding, getting Americans to buy retread products as new will be a tough sell. Xerox is meeting some resistance to selling or leasing refurbished photocopiers as new, even though they carry the same warranty as machines with all new parts. Car buyers will likely balk at a new car with a refurbished alternator. It's one thing to buy a new Ford with 50 reground plastic soda bottles making up its gri:le liner. But it's another to accept a used part-refurbished or not-that moves or rotates and wears down with use.

"We still have some educating to do," concedes Xerox's Azar. 'There are pockets in the consumer base-and that includes government agencies-that keep saying, 'We only want 100 percent new products.' " Azar is pleased that late in 1993 the Clinton Administration issued an executive order that urges (but doesn't require) federal agencies to buy green products like refurbished photocopiers.

No one knows how many of today's products are green. Maybe 5 percent, maybe 10 percent. But in 10 years, predicts IBM's Kirby, all products will be made for disassembly and refurbishing-turning both the earth and some companies a greener shade.

0 About the Author: Gene ByLinsky is on the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine.