How the Utah software empire of WordPerfect was built from scratch by three graduates of Brigham Young University. Peterson, the company's original marketing director, was booted out in 1992, just as the firm topped $500 million in sales. WordPerfect—the 80's most wildly successful word-processing product—began in 1977 as an idle summer project by an underemployed Brigham Young computer-science instructor named Alan Ashton. When the program miraculously worked on the mainframe computers that were then the norm, he hired Bruce Bastion (the author's brother-in-law and a college band leader) to help sell it, and the author (then part-owner of a failing drapery store) to be business manager and marketing guru at $5.00 an hour. A few years later, Ashton and Bastion appeared on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people and—in spite of predictable but fascinating fumbles and glitches—sales were soaring and the company couldn't hire programmers and support personnel quickly enough. But in addition to a fast-flowing stream of new PC- compatible WordPerfect products, the company launched a series of secondary products with names like P-Edit, MathPlan, SSI*Data, SSI*Forth, and InForms—all of which failed. Meanwhile, Peterson- -desperately trying to promote all the new software while maintaining a semblance of order in a corporation now 600-strong and full of turf wars and chaos—became something of a tyrant. In the final battle—fought over distribution strategy for WordPerfect 5.0—he lost and was abruptly out: ``There was dancing in the aisles of some departments.'' Nevertheless, he shares his painfully acquired management philosophy in an afterword. A well-written and often hair-raising tale of serendipitous software success, given a special timeliness by the comparable corporate shake-out at Apple, including the firing of longtime chief John Sculley. (First printing of 25,000)
Pub Date: Dec. 20, 1993
ISBN: 1-55958-477-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.
Gorman, who runs a boutique creative-brand agency, offers a refreshing return to business basics, when competition was a novel concept and businesses actually put the customer first.
Not that Gorman is trotting out old business saws in a fuddy-duddy way; his style is energetic, and his delivery is keen and clean. He is not about to forsake branding, but he will tell you to forget the fancy dancing, the retro music and the airy cleverness. His emphasis is on delivering satisfaction to the customers—consistently–-with the ultimate goal of making them friends for the long term. Granted, it's not a revolutionary concept, but in the Age of Hype, it's certainly salubrious. Profits cannot be a guiding principle; business owners must understand the values, tastes and preferences of their audience, and then create a brand that becomes "the story that people will tell when asked to recommend your product or service to someone else"–-and one that exceeds expectations. In other words, create an identity and be all you say you are. Tag lines, logos, websites–-these are all brand articulations, and though Gorman acknowledges their importance, they are not value articulations and they can't carry the product if the consumer's experience isn't pleasurable and enthusiastic. Gorman even goes a step further: The product must be a delight. (He includes many amusing anecdotes, but the best involves him tipping a saxophone-playing spaceman in the subway.) Gorman also offers intelligent advice about making oneself attractive to prospects, about clarity of message, about elegance and about the importance of word-of-mouth for verifying quality (with a nod to George Silverman)–-though it would have been helpful to get a few examples of controlling and sequencing word-of-mouth marketing.
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9749169-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accessible audit of Russia's efforts to gain a place at global capitalism's table after more than seven decades of Communist misrule and mismanagement. As Goldman (Economics/Wellesley; What Went Wrong with Perestroika, 1991, etc.) makes abundantly clear, switching from a centrally planned economy to a market economy is easier said than done. Goldman draws on in-country contacts, official records, and contemporary news reports to document how Moscow has gone wrong at critical junctures since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev first set the Soviet Union on a restructuring course whose implications he did not fully grasp. After a lucid account of the sociopolitical events that allowed Boris Yeltsin to oust Gorbachev (in effect, by undermining the USSR), the author offers an unsparing critique of the current incumbent's stewardship. Like his unfortunate predecessor, Goldman points out, Yeltsin failed to facilitate the formation of new businesses. Nor did he and his chief adviser (Yegor Gaidar) do enough to encourage land ownership. They also neglected to institute currency reforms that could have dampened inflationary pressures and enhanced the ruble's convertibility. Banking, price control, and tax policies were botched as well; the regime has dithered disastrously on privatizing state-owned enterprises; and the government has yet to sponsor commercial codes that might restore much-needed order to a chaotic, crime-ridden consumer marketplace. The author goes on to weigh Russia's makeover prospects in the context of the bootstrap recoveries achieved by former Kremlin satellites (Hungary, Poland), mainland China, and WW II's losers (Japan, West Germany). Even without much foreign aid or investment in the short run, concludes Goldman, the Russians could eventually win their latest revolution, albeit at no small cost. An informed and informative analysis of the toil and trouble attendant upon a great nation's attempts to gain world-class status as an economic rather than military power. Helpful tabular material and graphs throughout.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03700-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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