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Recently the pinnacle executives of a major manufacturing plant in the Chicago surface area were asked to survey the function that listening plays in their work. Later, an executive seminar on listening was held. Hither are three typical comments made past participants:

  • "Bluntly, I had never idea of listening as an important bailiwick by itself. Merely now that I am aware of information technology, I retrieve that perhaps 80% of my work depends on my listening to someone, or on someone else listening to me."
  • "I've been thinking back about things that have gone incorrect over the past couple of years, and I suddenly realized that many of the troubles have resulted from someone not hearing something, or getting it in a distorted way."
  • "It'due south interesting to me that we take considered and so many facets of advice in the visitor, but have inadvertently overlooked listening. I've nigh decided that it'southward the nearly of import link in the company's communications, and information technology's obviously also the weakest one."

These comments reflect part of an enkindling that is taking place in a number of management circles. Business concern is tied together past its systems of communication. This communication, businessmen are discovering, depends more on the spoken word than it does on the written discussion; and the effectiveness of the spoken discussion hinges not so much on how people talk as on how they listen.

The Unused Potential

It tin be stated, with practically no qualification, that people in full general do not know how to mind. They accept ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used finer for what is called listening.

For several years nosotros have been testing the ability of people to understand and call back what they hear. At the University of Minnesota we examined the listening ability of several thousand students and of hundreds of business organisation and professional person people. In each case the person tested listened to short talks by faculty members and was examined for his grasp of the content.

These extensive tests led u.s.a. to this general conclusion: immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard—no matter how carefully he thought he was listening.

What happens as time passes? Our own testing shows—and information technology has been substantiated by reports of research at Florida State University and Michigan State Academyane—that ii months afterwards listening to a talk, the average listener will call back only about 25% of what was said. In fact, later we accept barely learned something, nosotros tend to forget from one-half to one-tertiary of it inside 8 hours; it is startling to realize that frequently nosotros forget more than in this first short interval than we practice in the next six months.

Gap in Training

Behind this widespread disability to listen lies, in our opinion, a major oversight in our system of classroom instruction. We have focused attending on reading, considering it the principal medium past which nosotros learn, and we have practically forgotten the art of listening. About 6 years are devoted to formal reading instruction in our school systems. Little emphasis is placed on speaking, and almost no attention has been given to the skill of listening, strange as this may be in view of the fact that then much lecturing is washed in higher. Listening training—if it could be called training—has often consisted merely of a series of admonitions extending from the first form through higher: "Pay attention!" "Now get this!" "Open up your ears!" "Heed!"

Certainly our teachers feel the need for good listening. Why then take so many years passed without educators developing formal methods of pedagogy students to listen? We have been faced with several fake assumptions which have blocked the didactics of listening. For case:

(1) We accept assumed that listening ability depends largely on intelligence, that "bright" people listen well, and "dull" ones poorly. In that location is no denying that depression intelligence has something to do with inability to listen, only nosotros have greatly exaggerated its importance. A poor listener is not necessarily an unintelligent person. To be good listeners nosotros must utilise sure skills that are acquired through either feel or grooming. If a person has not caused these listening skills, his ability to sympathize and retain what he hears will be depression. This tin happen to people with both high and low levels of intelligence.

(2) We take assumed that learning to read volition automatically teach ane to listen. While some of the skills attained through reading apply to listening, the assumption is far from completely valid. Listening is a unlike activity from reading and requires dissimilar skills. Research has shown that reading and listening skills do not improve at the same rate when just reading is taught.

This means that in our schools, where little attention is paid to the audible element of communication, reading ability is continually upgraded while listening ability, left to falter along on its own, actually degenerates. Every bit a fair reader and a bad listener, the typical student is graduated into a social club where the chances are high that he will have to listen about 3 times as much as he reads.

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The barriers to listening grooming that accept been built up past such faux assumptions are coming downward. Educators are realizing that listening is a skill that can exist taught. In Nashville, for example, the public schoolhouse arrangement has started training in listening from elementary grades through high school. Listening is also taught in the Phoenix school system, in Cincinnati, and throughout the land of Due north Dakota. About two dozen major universities and colleges in the country now provide courses in listening.

At the University of Minnesota we have been presenting a form in listening to a large segment of the freshman class. Each group of students that has taken listening preparation has improved at to the lowest degree 25% in ability to understand the spoken word. Some of the groups have improved every bit much as 40%. We take also given a course in listening for developed education classes made upward mostly of business and professional people. These people have fabricated some of the highest gains in listening power of any that we have seen. During one period, 60 men and women nigh doubled their listening test scores afterwards working together on this skill one dark a calendar week for 17 weeks.

Ways to Improvement

Whatever course or any effort that will lead to listening improvement should do two things:

1. Build awareness to factors that impact listening ability.

2. Build the kind of audible experience that can produce good listening habits.

At to the lowest degree a start on the showtime of these 2 educational elements tin be made by readers of this commodity; a certain degree of awareness is adult by merely discussing factors that impact listening ability. Afterwards we shall discuss some steps that might be taken in social club to work at the 2d element.

Tracks & Sidetracks

In full general, people experience that concentration while listening is a greater problem than concentration during any other class of personal advice. Really, listening concentration is more difficult. When we mind, concentration must be achieved despite a factor that is peculiar to aural communication, one of which few people are aware.

Basically, the problem is acquired past the fact that nosotros think much faster than we talk. The average rate of speech communication for most Americans is around 125 words per minute. This rate is slow going for the homo brain, which is made upwards of more than 13 billion cells and operates in such a complicated merely efficient way that information technology makes the corking, modern digital computers seem wearisome-witted. People who study the brain are not in consummate agreement on how it functions when we call back, but most psychologists believe that the basic medium of thought is linguistic communication. Certainly words play a large part in our thinking processes, and the words race through our brains at speeds much higher than 125 words per infinitesimal. This ways that, when we listen, nosotros ask our encephalon to receive words at an extremely slow stride compared with its capabilities.

Information technology might seem logical to irksome downwards our thinking when we listen and then as to coincide with the 125-discussion-per-minute spoken language rate, merely slowing downwards thought processes seems to be a very difficult matter to do. When we listen, therefore, we continue thinking at high speed while the spoken words arrive at low speed. In the deed of listening, the differential between thinking and speaking rates means that our brain works with hundreds of words in improver to those that we hear, assembling thoughts other than those spoken to usa. To phrase it another way, we can listen and still take some spare time for thinking.

The use, or misuse, of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person tin can concentrate on the spoken word.

Case of the disenchanted listener. In our studies at the University of Minnesota, we find most people do non employ their spare thinking fourth dimension wisely as they heed. Permit us illustrate how this happens by describing a familiar feel:

A, the boss, is talking to B, the subordinate, near a new programme that the house is planning to launch. B is a poor listener. In this example, he tries to listen well, simply he has difficulty concentrating on what A has to say.

A starts talking and B launches into the listening process, grasping every word and phrase that comes into his ears. But correct away B finds that, because of A's slow rate of oral communication, he has time to think of things other than the spoken line of thought. Subconsciously, B decides to sandwich a few thoughts of his own into the aural ones that are arriving so slowly. And then B rapidly dashes out onto a mental sidetrack and thinks something similar this: "Oh, yes, before I exit I desire to tell A about the big success of the meeting I called yesterday." Then B comes back to A'southward spoken line of idea and listens for a few more words.

In that location is enough of fourth dimension for B to do just what he has done, dash away from what he hears and then return quickly, and he continues taking sidetracks to his own private thoughts. Indeed, he can hardly avert doing this because over the years the process has go a strong aural habit of his.

But, sooner or later, on i of the mental sidetracks, B is near sure to stay abroad too long. When he returns, A is moving forth alee of him. At this point it becomes harder for B to empathize A, simply because B has missed part of the oral bulletin. The private mental sidetracks become more than inviting than ever, and B slides off onto several of them. Slowly he misses more and more than of what A has to say.

When A is through talking, it is safe to say that B will have received and understood less than one-half of what was spoken to him.

Rules for Skilful Reception

A major task in helping people to listen better is teaching them to use their spare thinking fourth dimension efficiently as they listen. What does "efficiently" mean? To answer this question, we made an extensive study of people'southward listening habits, especially trying to find what happens when people listen well.

Nosotros establish that good listeners regularly engage in four mental activities, each geared to the oral discourse and taking place concurrently with that oral discourse. All four of these mental activities are neatly coordinated when listening works at its best. They tend to directly a maximum amount of thought to the message being received, leaving a minimum amount of time for mental excursions on sidetracks leading away from the talker's thought. Here are the 4 processes:

(1) The listener thinks ahead of the talker, trying to anticipate what the oral discourse is leading to and what conclusions will be drawn from the words spoken at the moment.

(2) The listener weighs the evidence used by the talker to support the points that he makes. "Is this evidence valid?" the listener asks himself. "Is it the complete prove?"

(3) Periodically the listener reviews and mentally summarizes the points of the talk completed thus far.

(4) Throughout the talk, the listener "listens betwixt the lines" in search of pregnant that is non necessarily put into spoken words. He pays attending to nonverbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice) to see if it adds meaning to the spoken words. He asks himself, "Is the talker purposely skirting some area of the subject? Why is he doing then?"

The speed at which we recollect compared to that at which people talk allows enough of time to accomplish these four mental tasks when we mind; all the same, they practise crave practice earlier they can become part of the mental agility that makes for good listening. In our training courses we have devised audible exercises designed to give people this do and thereby build upwards adept habits of aural concentration.

Listening for Ideas

Another factor that affects listening ability concerns the reconstruction of orally communicated thoughts once they take been received by the listener. To illustrate:

The newspapers reported not too long ago that a church was torn down in Europe and shipped stone by stone to America, where it was reassembled in its original form. The moving of the church is analogous to what happens when a person speaks and is understood by a listener. The talker has a thought. To transmit his thought, he takes it apart by putting it into words. The words, sent through the air to the listener, must and then be mentally reassembled into the original idea if they are to be thoroughly understood. But about people exercise non know what to listen for, and so cannot reconstruct the thought.

For some reason many people accept bully pride in beingness able to say that to a higher place all they endeavor to "go the facts" when they listen. It seems logical enough to do so. If a person gets all the facts, he should certainly empathize what is said to him. Therefore, many people try to memorize every single fact that is spoken. With such practice at "getting the facts," the listener, we can safely presume, will develop a serious bad listening habit.

Memorizing facts is, to begin with, a virtual impossibility for nigh people in the listening situation. Equally one fact is beingness memorized, the whole, or part, of the next fact is almost sure to be missed. When he is doing his very best, the listener is likely to grab simply a few facts, garble many others, and completely miss the remainder. Even in the instance of people who can aurally assimilate all the facts that they hear, one at a time as they hear them, listening is still likely to exist at a low level; they are concerned with the pieces of what they hear and tend to miss the wide areas of the oral communication.

When people talk, they desire listeners to understand their ideas. The facts are useful importantly for constructing the ideas. Grasping ideas, we have plant, is the skill on which the good listener concentrates. He remembers facts only long enough to empathize the ideas that are built from them. Simply then, almost miraculously, grasping an idea will assist the listener to call back the supporting facts more effectively than does the person who goes after facts alone. This listening skill is i which definitely tin exist taught, 1 in which people can build experience leading toward improved aural communication.

Emotional Filters

In different degrees and in many different ways, listening ability is afflicted past our emotions.two Figuratively we reach up and mentally plow off what we do not want to hear. Or, on the other paw, when someone says what we specially want to hear, we open up our ears broad, accepting everything—truths, half-truths, or fiction. Nosotros might say, and so, that our emotions deed as aural filters. At times they in outcome cause deafness, and at other times they make listening altogether as well easy.

If we hear something that opposes our virtually deeply rooted prejudices, notions, convictions, mores, or complexes, our brains may go over-stimulated, and not in a direction that leads to good listening. We mentally plan a rebuttal to what we hear, codify a question designed to embarrass the talker, or peradventure simply turn to thoughts that support our ain feelings on the discipline at hand. For example:

The house'southward accountant goes to the general managing director and says: "I have only heard from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and…" The general manager all of a sudden breathes harder every bit he thinks, "That blasted bureau! Can't they leave me alone? Every year the government milks my profits to a point where…" Ruby in the face, he whirls and stares out the window. The characterization "Bureau of Internal Acquirement" cuts loose emotions that stop the general director'due south listening.

In the meantime, the accountant may go on to say that here is a take a chance to save $iii,000 this twelvemonth if the general manager will take a few simple steps. The fuming general manager may hear this—if the accountant presses hard enough—simply the chances are he volition fail to comprehend it.

When emotions make listening too easy, information technology usually results from hearing something which supports the securely rooted inner feelings that we hold. When we hear such support, our mental barriers are dropped and everything is welcomed. We inquire few questions about what nosotros hear; our critical faculties are put out of committee by our emotions. Thinking drops to a minimum because we are hearing thoughts that we have harbored for years in support of our inner feelings. It is skilful to hear someone else think those thoughts, and then we lazily enjoy the whole experience.

What tin we do about these emotional filters? The solution is non easy in practice, although information technology tin be summed up in this simple admonition: hear the human being out. Following are two pointers that oft assistance in preparation people to practice this:

(1) Withhold evaluation—This is one of the most important principles of learning, especially learning through the ear. It requires self-control, sometimes more than many of us tin can muster, only with persistent practise it tin be turned into a valuable habit. While listening, the main object is to embrace each point made by the talker. Judgments and decisions should exist reserved until after the talker has finished. At that time, and simply and then, review his main ideas and assess them.

(2) Chase for negative prove—When we listen, it is man to proceed a militant search for evidence which proves u.s. correct in what we believe. Seldom do we brand a search for evidence to testify ourselves incorrect. The latter type of endeavour is not easy, for behind its application must prevarication a generous spirit and real breadth of outlook. However, an important part of listening comprehension is found in the search for negative evidence in what we hear. If we brand up our minds to seek out the ideas that might evidence us wrong, besides equally those that might testify u.s. correct, we are less in danger of missing what people have to say.

Benefits in Concern

The comeback of listening, or simply an effort to make people aware of how important their listening power is, can exist of great value in today's business organization. When people in business organization neglect to hear and empathise each other, the results can be costly. Such things equally numbers, dates, places, and names are especially easy to confuse, merely the most straightforward agreements are often subjects of listening errors, likewise. When these mistakes are compounded, the resulting cost and inefficiency in business organization advice become serious. Building awareness of the importance of listening amidst employees can eliminate a large percentage of this blazon of aural fault.

What are some of the specific problems which better listening can help solve?

Less Paper Work

For one matter, it leads to economic system of communication. Incidents created by poor listening frequently requite businessmen a real fear of spoken communication. Equally a result, they insist that more and more communication should be put into writing. A groovy deal of advice needs to be on the record, simply the pressure to write is often carried too far. The smallest particular becomes "memoed." Paper work piles higher and higher and causes part of the tangle we call blood-red tape. Many times less writing and more than speaking would be advisable—if we could program on skilful listening.

Writing and reading are much slower communication elements than speaking and listening. They require more than personnel, more than equipment, and more space than practise speaking and listening. Oftentimes a stenographer and a messenger are needed, to say naught of dictating machines, typewriters, and other writing materials. Few people ever feel it is safe to throw away a written communication; and so filing equipment is needed, forth with someone to do the filing.

In oral advice in that location are more human senses at work than in the visual; and if there is good listening, more can oft exist communicated in 1 message. And, possibly virtually important of all, at that place is the give-and-take feature of oral advice. If the listener does not understand a bulletin, he has the opportunity to straighten matters out and so and there.

Upwardly Communication

The skill of listening becomes extremely of import when we talk about "upward communication." At that place are many avenues through which management can send messages downward through a concern arrangement, only there are few avenues for movement of information in the upward management. Perhaps the most obvious of the upward avenues is the human chain of people talking to people: the human being working at the demote talks to his foreman, the foreman to his superintendent, the superintendent to his dominate; and, relayed from person to person, the information eventually reaches the top.

This communication chain has potential, just it seldom works well because it is total of bad listeners. There can be failure for at to the lowest degree 3 reasons:

  • Without good listeners, people practice not talk freely and the menstruation of communication is seldom set in motion.
  • If the flow should start, only one bad listener is needed to stop its motility toward the peak.
  • Even if the menstruation should continue to the top, the messages are probable to be badly distorted along the way.

It would be absurd to assume that these upward communication lines could be made to operate without hitches, simply there is no reason to remember that they cannot be improved by better listening. Simply the beginning steps must be taken by height management people. More and amend listening on their part can prime number the pumps that start the upward flow of information.

Human Relations

People in all phases of business concern need to experience free to talk to their superiors and to know they volition exist met with sympathetic understanding. But as well many superiors—although they announce that their doors are always open—fail to listen; and their subordinates, in the face of this failure, do not feel free to say what they want to say. Equally a result, subordinates withdraw from their superiors more and more. They fail to talk about important problems that should be aired for both parties' benefit. When such issues remain unaired, they often plough into unrealistic monsters that come dorsum to plague the superior who failed to listen.

The remedy for this sort of aural failure—and it should be practical when subordinates feel the demand to talk—is what we have chosen "nondirective listening." The listener hears, really tries to sympathise, and later shows agreement by taking action if it is required. Above all, during an oral soapbox, the listener refrains from firing his own thoughts back at the person talking or from indicating his displeasure or disapproval by his mannerisms or gestures; he speaks upward just to ask for clarification of a point.

Since the listener stands the take a chance of hearing that his well-nigh dearly held notions and ideas may be wrong, this is not an easy thing to do. To listen nondirectively without fighting back requires more courage than most of usa tin muster. Simply when nondirective listening can exist practical, the results are commonly worth the effort. The persons talking have a chance to unburden themselves. Equally of import, the odds are better that the listener can counsel or act effectively when the time comes to brand a move.

Listening is merely one stage of homo relations, simply one attribute of the administrator's job; past itself information technology volition solve no major problems. Nonetheless the past experience of many executives and organizations leaves no dubiousness, in our opinion, that better listening can lead to a reduction of the human frictions which beset many businesses today.

Listening to Sell

Loftier-pressure level salesmanship is rapidly giving way to low-pressure methods in the marketing of industrial and consumer goods. Today'southward successful salesman is probable to center his attention on the client-trouble approach of selling.

To put this approach to piece of work, the skill of listening becomes an essential tool for the salesman, while his vocal agility becomes less important. How a salesman talks turns out to exist relatively unimportant because what he says, when it is guided by his listening, gives power to the spoken word. In other words, the salesman'due south listening becomes an on-the-spot form of client research that can immediately be put to work in formulating any sales talk.

Regardless of the values that listening may hold for people who live past selling, a great many sales organizations seem to agree to the conviction that glibness has magic. Their efforts at comeback are aimed mainly at the talking side of salesmanship. It is our conviction, however, that with the typical salesman the power to talk will near accept care of itself, just the ability to mind is something in real need of improvement.

In Conference

The near important affairs in business are conducted around briefing tables. A great deal has been said and written about how to talk at a conference, how to compromise, how to get trouble-centered, and how to cope with sure types of individuals. All these things tin be very important, but too often the experts forget to say, "Showtime and foremost you must acquire to listen at a briefing."

The reason for this is simple when we remember of the basic purpose for holding nearly any conference. People get together to contribute their different viewpoints, cognition, and feel to members of the grouping, which and then seeks the best of all the conferees' thinking to solve a common problem. If at that place is far more talking than listening at a conference, nevertheless, the oral contributions made to the grouping are hardly worth the jiff required to produce them.

More and better listening at any conference is certain to facilitate the exchange of ideas then important to the success of a meeting. It also offers many other advantages; for instance, when participants exercise a practiced chore of listening, their conference is more likely to remain centered on the trouble at hand and less likely to become off on irrelevant tangents.

The outset steps toward improved conference listening can exist taken by the grouping leader. If he will simply make an opening argument calling attention to the importance of listening, he is very probable to increment the participants' aural response. And if the leader himself does a practiced job of listening, he stands the chance of existence imitated past the others in his group.

Determination

Some businessmen may desire to take steps to develop a listening comeback program in their companies. Here are 14 suggestions designed to deport on what nosotros hope this commodity has already started to exercise—build awareness of listening.

(1) Devote an executive seminar, or seminars, to a discussion of the roles and functions of listening equally a business tool.

(2) Apply the filmed cases at present becoming bachelor for management training programs.3 Since these cases present the trouble every bit it would appear in reality, viewers are forced to practice good listening habits in order to be sure of what is going on—and this includes not only hearing the sound track just also watching the facial mannerisms, gestures, and motions of the actors.

(3) If possible, bring in qualified speakers and ask them to discuss listening with special reference to how information technology might apply to business organization. Such speakers are available at a number of universities where listening is being taught equally a part of communication training.

(4) Conduct a self-inventory past the employees regarding their listening on the chore. Provide everyone with a elementary form divided into spaces for each hour of the day. Each space should be farther divided to allow the user to keep track of the corporeality of time spent in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Discuss the results of these forms afterward the communication times have been totaled. What percent of the time do people spend listening? What might improved listening hateful in terms of job effectiveness?

(5) Give a exam in listening power to people and bear witness them the scores that they make. There is at least 1 standardized examination for this purpose.4 Hash out the pregnant of the scores with the individuals tested.

(half-dozen) Build up a library of spoken-word records of literature, speeches, and so along (many tin can be purchased through record stores), and make them available in a room that has a record thespian. Also, lend the records to employees who might wish to accept them home to savor them at their leisure. For such a library, material pertinent to the employees' jobs might be recorded so that those who are interested can listen for educational purposes.

(7) Record a number of bodily conference sessions that may be held past plant superintendents or others. When new people get to work for the visitor, ask them to mind to these sessions equally office of their initial training. Check their comprehension of what they hear by ways of cursory objective tests. Emphasize that this is being done because listening is of import on the new jobs.

(viii) Set up role-playing situations wherein executives are asked to cope with complaints comparable to those that they might hear from subordinates. Ask observers to comment on how well an executive seems to mind. Do his remarks reflect a skilful job of listening? Does he continue himself from condign emotionally involved in what the subordinate says? Does the executive heed in a way which would encourage the subordinate to talk freely?

(9) Enquire salesmen to divide a notebook into sections, one for each customer. Later on making a telephone call, a salesman should write down all useful information received aurally from the customer. As the information grows, he should refer to information technology earlier each render visit to a client.

(x) Where a sales organization has a number of friendly customers, invite some of the more clear ones to join salesmen in a group discussion of sales techniques. How practise the customers feel about talking and listening on the part of salesmen? Try to get the customers to make listening critiques of salesmen they see.

(11) In a training session, plan and hold a conference on a selected problem and tape-record information technology. Afterwards, play back the recording. Discuss information technology in terms of listening. Do the oral contributions of different participants reflect good listening? If the briefing should go off the track, endeavour to clarify the causes in terms of listening.

(12) If at that place is fourth dimension after a regularly scheduled conference, hold a listening critique. Inquire each member to evaluate the listening attending that he received while talking and to report his analysis of his own listening performance.

(thirteen) In important management meetings on controversial bug endeavour Irving J. Lee's "Procedure for 'Coercing' Agreement."v Nether the ground rules for this procedure, which Lee outlined in item in his article, the chairman calls for a period during which proponents of a hotly debated view can state their position without suspension; the opposition is limited to (a) the asking of questions for clarification, (b) requests for information concerning the peculiar characteristics of the proposal being considered; and (c) requests for data as to whether information technology is possible to check the speaker's assumptions or predictions.

(14) Sponsor a serial of lectures for employees, their families, and their friends. The lectures might be on any number of interesting topics that take educational value as well every bit entertainment features. Point out that these lectures are available equally function of a listening improvement programme.

Non all of these suggestions are applicable to every state of affairs, of course. Each firm will have to adapt them to its own detail needs. The nearly important thing, however, may not be what happens when a specific suggestion is followed, but rather only what happens when people become enlightened of the problem of listening and of what improved aural skills can do for their jobs and their businesses.

one. See Due east. J. J. Kramar and Thomas B. Lewis, "Comparison of Visual and Nonvisual Listening," Journal of Advice, November 1951, p. 16; and Arthur W. Heilman, "An Investigation in Measuring and Improving Listening Ability of Higher Freshmen," Voice communication Monographs, November 1951, p. 308.

two. Come across Wendell Johnson, "The Fateful Procedure of Mr. A Talking to Mr. B," HBR January–February 1953, p. 49.

3. See George W. Gibson, "The Filmed Example in Management Grooming," HBR May–June 1957, p. 123.

4. Brown-Carlsen Listening Comprehension Examination (Yonkers-on-Hudson, World Book Company).

5. HBR January–Feb 1954, p. 39.

A version of this article appeared in the September 1957 outcome of Harvard Business concern Review.