While many analysts and investors focus on the dazzling promise of technology, two long-time observers of the business world say the traditional values of intellect and integration are driving the American economy.
The observers are Armand V. Feigenbaum '42 and Donald S. Feigenbaum '46, who have provided advice and counsel to business leaders for decades. The company they founded, General Systems Company, Inc., designs and implements integrated management systems for major corporations throughout the world.
The Feigenbaum brothers were on campus last fall for the fourth Feigenbaum Forum, a continuing event designed to stimulate conversation about the integration of corporate management principles to the administration of institutions of higher education.
Armand Feigenbaum began by noting that some media analysts have taken the approach that it is the new forces of technology that have been having the overwhelming impact on America's growth. In fact, he said, few senior managers who have had long-term success think of themselves and their leadership in such single-dimensioned terms.
Technology has become more an element of business rather than the single most basic company strength, he said. The fact is, he continued, no company or nation can, in effect, own technology anymore, since the same technology development is likely to spread globally in a matter of months — or even weeks.
“Today's valuation of many companies has been driven by recognition of their unique intellectual 'intangible assets' — human, information, and technological resources; customer and market relationships; brand recognition; patent rights; and similar capacities that as a practical matter you can, in effect, own,” he said.
Successful organizations, he observed, place increasing emphasis on intellect and integration, and it is those qualities that have become the drivers of American economic growth.
To Donald Feigenbaum, the institutions that become and remain great and successful are those that “recognize and explicitly place emphasis upon assessing and extending their relevance.”
This relevance is sensed by an organization's various audiences, and it increases the willingness of those audiences to respond to what the institution is bringing them. And this relevance is created and maintained by an understanding and commitment to the overarching themes that define an organization.
Referring to Sony, a company with which General Systems has worked, Donald Feigenbaum said the company's growth had only something to do with technical areas and everything to do with how Sony's men and women thought and understood and believed. It was Sony's intent, he said, to integrate its full resources — human strengths, technology capacities, supplier relationships, quality focus, customer and brand relationships, and physical and financial assets.
One of the reasons for the decline of Japanese industry in the 1990s, he said, was the “impervious” character of Japanese higher education. “It chose not to understand or even be very interested in the fundamental developments for integrating economic and social and technical considerations that had been evolving throughout the Japanese economy and were a basis for its strength.”