"He was an analyzer de luxe. And all I ever got out of all his analyses was a distinct feeling that something was wrong with every gadget we made, that our markets were saturated, that our competitors had us backed off the map, and that our salesmen were a bunch of ribbon clerks.
"So," he continues, "I did a little analyzing all my own. And analyzed him out of his job. Today he's managing a filling station where they drive in for the most part and take it away from him. But in his place I got a man who found out what was wrong with gadgets, markets, salesmen—and right away he built a plan which sold goods."
Thus the futility of ANALYSIS without PLANNING.
There's the danger, too, of getting away from the SIMPLICITY OF TRUE ANALYSIS.
A job undertaken by an advertising agency for a rubber manufacturer supplies a case in point. Stripped of all the details, the task was to find out whether or not the manufacturer might profitably engage in the making of hard rubber tires for industrial trucks and trailers. If names are changed and products substituted, think nothing of it. The principle's the thing.
The agency began by analyzing the business to a fare-you-well. Everyone and everything got cross-examined.
It took three months. And when the analysis was done it told the manufacturer everything from where the rubber grew to where the money went to and came from. The trouble was, he knew all that before—or as much of it as he wanted to know. The report, in the words of a Chicago columnist, was just "64 dam pages." It didn't tell him one blessed thing he wanted to know. Or rather it was so full of plunder that he couldn't make head nor tail of it.
It wasn't SIMPLE. And because it wasn't SIMPLE, it was a far, far cry from TRUE ANALYSIS.
Well, well, the rubber manufacturer went out in the byways and got him a young man who was told to find out, if he could, whether or not there was any market for hard rubber tires on gas and electric industrial trucks, tractors and trailers, and allied equipment.
He found, for example, that there were 40,000 trucks and tractors in service; that annual sales were about 3,200 units. He discovered that, of trailers and hand lift trucks, 125,000 each were in service; annual sales were 12,000 and 10,000 units respectively. But when he came to floor and hand trucks, conservative estimates showed 8,000,000 in use, while annual sales were in the neighborhood of 250,000!