Word: formulaic
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...should be easy enough for Cho to recognize the secret of Hyundai's success. The South Korean company is following much the same formula that Toyota used decades ago to overcome its "cheap Asian import" stigma and become one of the world's most respected brands. When Hyundai first entered the U.S. market in 1986, its Excel sedan?an econobox with a $4,995 price tag?was an instant hit with frugal buyers. But customers soon discovered they were getting what they paid for: Excels were prone to quality-control problems and frequently needed parts replaced. Sales tanked, and Hyundai...
...refused to budge from the status quo. The other sticking point came over pensions. Traditionally the owners have given one-third of national television and radio revenue to the players' pension fund. With a new TV contract worth $1.1 billion over six years, the players' share under the old formula would have risen from $15 million a year to $60 million. The owners instead offered $25 million; the players demanded at least $40 million...
...selling author, and three years later she was named editor of Cosmopolitan, then a publication for staid ladies. Helen Gurley Brown whomped up some flashy first-person ads about the Cosmopolitan Girl, who could be sexy, savvy, successful, and yet loving and interested in raising a traditional family. The formula clicked: the magazine's circulation went from fewer than 800,000 to nearly 3 million. Like the girl in the ads, Cosmo loves to burble about female athletes and politicians, addicts and feminism, but still ruminates on how to get a man in three dates. On the 20th anniversary...
Keillor always starts out his radio monologue by apologizing: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He always ends on a diminuendo, with the formula "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." In between, for 20 minutes or so, he discourses wonderingly, without notes, on a place where a dog lying asleep in the middle of Main Street will live out his days. In eleven years of talking about Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home...
...third time in six weeks, the stalemate over Gramm-Rudman nearly paralyzed the Government. The amendment, a rigid formula for budget cutting that has aroused concern even within the President's Cabinet, is attached to a bill to raise the national-debt ceiling to more than $2 trillion. Congress was faced with the threat of the Government going bankrupt in a matter of days unless the debt limit was increased. Failing once again to reach a compromise on Gramm-Rudman, the legislators granted the Government a one-month extension on its borrowing power. Upshot: by Dec. 12, Congress...