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Show Men Who Plan Now From The June Kotarian H is strange. But it happens so often that it must be a response to something basic in human nature. In so-called so-called hard times, when many businessmen forlornly complain com-plain that "there is no business," other businessmen contrive con-trive to find business; and, what is perhaps still more astonishing, new enterprises put down roots, get a healthy start, make sturdy beginnings of vigorous growth. Is it that these business "downs" have special purposes which many of us, blinded by easy success in more prosperous pros-perous periods, fail to see and use? c The late Edward A. Filene, a merchant of Boston, a Massachusetts, whose thinking was never bounded by nation- al borders, once said: "I have noticed that business success trends to breed business failure. Success often makes J men contented; lessons incentive. It is when people are h not doing very well with what they already have, that they are most willing, to listen to and try out new ideas -that may save them." A certain chewing-gum manufacturer, a great believer in advertising, undertook one of his most impressive advertising ad-vertising campaigns during a time of severe business stringency. His competitors were cutting down, or cutting out, their advertising. He doubled his appropriation. He reasoned that with fewer advertisements seeking reader attention, his own aggressive copy would attract all the more notice; and it worked out exactly that way. Great industrial improvements have been made, or initiated, in-itiated, in periods far from prosperous. Charles E. Dur-yea, Dur-yea, first to build a successful gasoline automobile in the United States, began his first car in 1891, was building his fifth in 1894; and between those two years the country was passing through one of the worst panics ever known. The basic work on the first successful telephone was done by Alexander Graham Bell in the early '70s, when the United States was rocked by the post-Civil War panic. Instances of this kind, great or small, could be multiplied almost endlessly, but more to the point would be the personal per-sonal parallcd many a reader may draw as he recalls times when he was so hard put to it that, to survive, he had to Tlo strenuous now thinking and make drastic revisions of unprofitable habits which revealed hitherto untapped potentialities that proved his salvation . . . and more. Men who plan constructively now, may find that Ihcw so-called troubled times, viewed in the light, of what they can do for us instead of what Ihey appear 1o be doing to us, will yield magic returns. |