{"id":1601,"date":"2013-10-07T03:58:52","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T03:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2014-02-09T00:19:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T00:19:39","slug":"this-isnt-the-way-to-do-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2013\/10\/this-isnt-the-way-to-do-business\/","title":{"rendered":"This Isn’t the Way To Do Business: Review of John O’Hara’s “From the Terrace” – Article by Sarah Skwire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Sarah Skwire
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
October 6, 2013<\/big><\/span><\/div>\n
Recommend this page<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
John O\u2019Hara.\u00a0From the Terrace<\/a><\/em>.<\/em>\u00a0New York: Carroll and Graff, [1959] 1999. 897 pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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John O\u2019Hara\u2019s From the Terrace<\/em>, a sprawling novel of business and politics, traces the career of Alfred Eaton from his boyhood in small-town Pennsylvania to his work in business, banking, D.C. politics, and, finally, to his retirement in California. As Howard Thompson observed in his New York Times<\/em> review of the 1960 film adaptation, its director \u201clogically . . . settled for about fifteen years\u201d of the story. And I\u2019d like to focus in even more closely\u2014on a single conversation.<\/p>\n

After college and World War I, Alfred and his friend Lex Porter decide to start an aviation company. Lex and his family will contribute the funding, Alfred will serve as the business manager, and they will hire an outside designer. Their goal is to do for airplanes what Ford, Dodge, and others have done for cars. As Alfred explains in a conversation with his father:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not deceiving ourselves. All we know is that aviation is the coming industry in this country. In ten years everybody\u2019s going to want aeroplanes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonally, I\u2019d rather have some Dodge Brothers, common or preferred.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho wouldn\u2019t? That\u2019s a sure thing, for those who like sure things, and I like sure things, too. But we\u2019re hoping to be Dodges.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the perfect hindsight the 21st century offers, we know the enterprise is doomed from the moment we hear about it. Personal planes still haven\u2019t replaced the car and aren\u2019t likely to. But from the standpoint of an entrepreneur in 1920, it\u2019s a pretty good idea.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a pretty good idea, that is, until Alfred, Lex, and their designer Von Elm try to get down to business. While they begin with a fairly clear plan to \u201cbuild a small aeroplane of up-to-the-minute design and highest quality workmanship, built to sell to men who could afford Rolls-Royce automobiles,\u201d they rapidly move away from this plan into a deadlock between the demands of practicality and the desire for perfect design. Lex, who wants to experiment and constantly change designs, argues, \u201cIf we sell an aeroplane in, say, November 1921, and another one in December 1921, the December one may be so different that you wouldn\u2019t recognize it as coming from the same maker.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alfred quite rightly protests that this is no way to do business:<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not think we\u2019re going to build custom-made aeroplanes. I don\u2019t care how much we charge for the aeroplane, we\u2019re not going to start making money until we can produce it in some quantity. We ought to build next November\u2019s aeroplane and manufacture it, produce it, till we have, say, fifty sold. And a year later we manufacture the new model, with all those refinements you speak of. We don\u2019t sit around waiting for some guy to come and ask us to build a special ship for him. We make fifty and sell them.<\/p>\n

As he later points out, all this chopping and changing requires only one thing\u2014and that isn\u2019t entrepreneurship or business acumen. It\u2019s an \u201cinexhaustible bank account.\u201d Lex\u2019s response to such critiques is telling: \u201cJesus H. Christ! Are we going to build Dodges? I thought we were going to build a fine aeroplane.\u201d<\/p>\n

This criticism of the very company that Alfred calls a \u201csure thing\u201d and that he takes as his model, along with the conflict the criticism suggests, are at the very center of their business. It leads to Lex and Von Elm buying expensive engines without Alfred\u2019s approval. It leads to a rift in their perceptions of the business and their plans for its future, and it leads to the company\u2019s eventual collapse.<\/p>\n

In my last column I praised the entrepreneurial spirit<\/a>. And I am an enormous fan of the guts and drive, the expertise and steadfastness necessary in order to start and run one\u2019s own company. But not everyone should do it. Lex shouldn\u2019t do it. He wants to build planes. He wants to design planes. He doesn\u2019t care if he sells them.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard a lot lately in the media about how everyone doesn\u2019t need to go to college, and how the ever-growing burden of student loan debt sometimes turns out to have been a bad risk for students, particularly in our sluggish economy. But while I am deeply concerned about that, I am equally concerned about glossing over the rigors of starting, running, and maintaining a business. It would be irresponsible, no matter how much we love entrepreneurship, to let students think that it is somehow a sure road to success, or a straight line to the top, or easier and more certain than a college education. And not only is it irresponsible, it\u2019s insulting to the entrepreneurs who know exactly how much work it takes to get to the top\u2014or even the middle\u2014of an industry.<\/p>\n

Expertise in entrepreneurship, like expertise in metaphysical poetry or string theory, is hard to come by. You have to study it, work at it, fail at it, and then do it some more until you get it right. It is a great road for those who are drawn to it. But like metaphysical poetry or string theory, it\u2019s not a road for everyone.<\/p>\n

Sarah Skwire<\/a> is a fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis<\/em>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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***<\/span><\/div>\n
This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Skwire October 6, 2013 Recommend this page. ****************************** John O\u2019Hara.\u00a0From the Terrace.\u00a0New York: Carroll and Graff, [1959] 1999. 897 pages. John O\u2019Hara\u2019s From the Terrace, a sprawling novel of business and politics, traces the career of Alfred Eaton from his boyhood in small-town Pennsylvania to his work in business, banking, D.C. politics, and, finally, to his retirement in California. As Howard Thompson observed in his New York Times review of the 1960 film adaptation, its director \u201clogically . ….<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[419,7,1634,8],"tags":[2499,972,2500,2498,625,953,18,1262,1087,1638,2497,2496,2207,437],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-2","category-economics","category-education-2","category-fiction","tag-airplane","tag-automobile","tag-aviation","tag-book-review","tag-books","tag-college","tag-economy","tag-entrepreneur","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-failure","tag-from-the-terrace","tag-john-ohara","tag-sarah-skwire","tag-success"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}