394 THE P R INC I P L E S 0 F PER SON ALP 0 W E R
are not the only ones who can make profitable use of Imagination.
This great power is as available to the beginner in business as it is to
the person who has "arrived:'
One morning Charles M. Schwab's private car was backed onto the
side track at his Bethlehem Steel plant. As he alighted from the car
he was met by a young male stenographer who announced that he had
come to make sure that any letters or telegrams Mr. Schwab might
wish to write would be taken care of promptly. No one told this young
man to be on hand, but he had enough Imagination to see that his
being there would not hurt his chances of advancement. From that day
on, this young man was "marked" for promotion. Mr. Schwab singled
him out for promotion because he had done what any of the dozen or
so other stenographers in the employ of the Bethlehem Steel Company
might have done, but didn't. Today this same man is the president of one
of the largest drug concerns in the world and has all of this world's
goods and wares that he wants and much more than he needs.
COMMENTARY
The Sony Corporation once tried to make a very small stereo tape recorder that would
work with standard-size cassettes. They could make a small playback machine, but
at the time the electronics needed to also make it a recording machine just couldn't
be made small enough. They concluded that the design was a failure.
Then one day Sony's honorary chairman, Masaru Ibuka, walked into the labo-
ratory and saw that a few of the engineers were using the prototypes of the failed
tape recorder to listen to music tapes. They didn't seem to care that it couldn't record,
they just liked to be able to walk around listening to their favorite music.
Then Ibuka remembered that another division was working on lightweight head-
phones, and his imagination made the connection that the rest of the engineers' had
not. In Ibuka's view they hadn't made a failed "recorder," they'd created a success-
ful ''private stereo listener. " They added the headphones, named it the Walkman,
and it revolutionized both the music business and the electronics industry.