Word: widgets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That is only one of the surprises and difficulties facing U.S. companies trying to push through a new Open Door to China trade. Some other challenges: preparing reams of technical material for Chinese bureaucrats who will want to debate every minute specification of a widget; staying reasonably sober through Peking banquets that may include as many as ten bottoms-up toasts drunk in 110-proof mao tais; determining just how big the China market really is in the first place...
Already in place is another new and mighty technological widget: the Tuned Mass Damper (TMD), an 800,000-lb. concrete block capable of moving three feet in four directions, which greatly reduces the lightweight building's sway in a gale. Determined to make the building as energy efficient as any in existence, Citicorp consulted Robert Bell, director of research and development for Consolidated Edison, who also happened to be president of Saint Peter's and chairman of the church building committee. Says Bell today: "Citicorp, in terms of energy conservation, is one of the most...
...then Santa sold out. More specifically, he sold the rights to his name and his holiday to a multinational business seeking to diversify. Amalgamated Widget Corporation got Santa's franchise for a song, because old Claus had no idea that his hobby was of any value, and besides, his doctors had been urging him for years to retire for his health. His job gave him ulcers. So Santa left Christmas behind to spend his last years breeding mutant strains of reindeer for high-speed sleigh competition, and Amalgamated Widget became The Santa Corporation...
Then the hype was on. One day a year of Christmas was not enough for the growth-minded executives in the upper echelons of The Santa Corporation. As Amalgamated Widget, they had used the company's formidable promotional muscle to expand July Fourth Weekend into July Fourth Week in order to boost the firm's Patriotism and Pyrotechnics Division. As The Santa Corporation, they now began taking out five-minute television spots and full-age ads in major daily newspapers to, as their ad men put it, "make that Christmas spirit last and last and last...
...monotony surrounding production-line work have been of considerable concern in U.S. industry. One alternative often cited by various work reformers is the team-assembly concept pioneered by the Swedish automakers Saab and Volvo, according to which workers in small groups perform rotating tasks rather than installing the same widget on a fast-moving, impersonal line. American sociologists and union and management officials regularly return from tours of such plants favorably impressed. But recently a group of six Detroit engine-plant employees tried the Swedish way by working at a Swedish auto company. Their conclusion: even Scandinavian-style factory work...