Word: edsels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...entry in the strategic debate is already generating a lot of debate itself. Author Harold Willens, a Los Angeles executive who has long financed liberal causes and most recently led the drive for the nuclear freeze initiative that California voters passed in 1982, argues that nuclear weapons are the Edsel of the 1980s...
...will spend whatever it takes to keep up with the other. "We can no longer consider the nuclear arms race to be an unfortunate fact of life," he writes. "We must be as objective, pragmatic, flexible and unafraid of change as the decision makers who simply stopped making the Edsel." It is still to be seen, however, whether business executives will become the trim tab Willens wants...
...avoid backfires like 1958's lame Edsel, named after Henry Ford II's father, or the Studebaker Dictator, a model introduced in 1927 but discontinued in 1936 as jackboots began marching across Europe, car manufacturers today are careful and scientific in their selections. Ford polled 600 consumers in shopping malls to help choose Tempo and Topaz to evoke the right image for its new compact models. The company rejected nominees like Coventry, Serval and Majestic. NameLab, a San Francisco firm, employed a computer to help christen Nissan's new Sentra. The coined word derives from sentry, which...
That represents quite a turnaround from the late 1970s, when Ford earned a reputation for manufacturing stodgy-looking cars. Concedes Edsel Ford, 34, a product planner and great-grandson of Company Founder Henry Ford: "People thought we built boring cars." Buyers were turned off by the slab sides and flat roofs on models like the Ford Fairmont and the Mercury Marquis...
...fact" about his subject in capital letters: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Films that cannot fail do so, disastrously. "We're home," Richard Zanuck once cabled his father Darryl after a movie preview. "Better than Sound of Music." The object of this enthusiasm was Star!, which Goldman describes as "the Edsel of 20th Century-Fox." Success is equally impossible to foresee; the author rehearses the litany of studios that said no to Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost...