Monthly Archives: February 2010

In this article, Amit Agarwal narrates King C. Gillette's journey toward success. Gillette, a traveling salesman, revolutionalized the men's shaving industry. Although technical experts discouraged his idea in the beginning, Gillette never lost hope. The salesman eventually became a successful inventor! He replaced the dangerous 'cut-throat razors' with the 'double-edged safety razors.' In fact, Gillette's business concepts find great relevance in today's marketing techniques.

The careers of human resources professionals are hardly happy-go-lucky. For one thing, non-HR employees often view human resources professionals as little more than gatekeepers, the people you meet only during entry to and exit from an organization. Human resources professionals are thus often viewed as people who make contributions that cannot be measured and are therefore of highly questionable utility. Managers hailing from non-HR backgrounds can also carry this negative perception about human resources functions, and will often take it with them to strategy tables. People impressed by numbers find it hard to favor the human resources department because most contributions of the human resources department cannot be quantified.

In 1979, when McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal, I, along with every other kid, was excited to go to McDonald’s all of a sudden. I was nine years old back then and the McDonald's on Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, which had formerly been an ''ok'' place to go for French fries suddenly became the place–somewhere I wanted to go. It had very little to do with the food. I was most interested in the prize that would be in the Happy Meal, specifically.