 Harper Audio presents Focus, written and read by Alries. After spending most of my adult life working in marketing and studying the practice of marketing, I've learned that the real objective of the marketing process is not just selling a product or service, it's finding the future. Focus is the future, in the sense that it makes a prediction about where the future lies and then takes specific steps to make that future happen. That's where the subject of marketing comes in. Any business enterprise has two and only two basic functions, writes Peter Drucker, marketing and innovation. Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business, continues Mr. Drucker. A business is set apart from all other human organizations by the fact that it markets a product or a service, neither church nor army nor school nor state does that. Any organization that fulfills itself through marketing a product or a service is a business. Any organization in which marketing is either absent or incidental is not a business and should never be run as if it were one. Now Peter Drucker wrote these words in The Practice of Management, a book first published in 1954. It's taken quite a while for Mr. Drucker's concept to reach the boardrooms of corporate America. After World War I, the emphasis was on manufacturing. The art of management was embodied in the time and motion studies of Frederick Taylor. Business success went to those companies that could get their products out the door faster and cheaper than the competition. After World War II, the emphasis gradually shifted to finance. The art of management was embodied in the portfolio concept. Business success went to those corporations who did the best job of buying and selling companies in order to put together a high yielding portfolio. Where are we today? Both the manufacturing and the financial aspects of management seem to have run their course. Today, the emphasis is on marketing. What about Bill Gates, Microsoft, Bert Roberts, MCI, Ross Perot, Perot Systems, Sam Walton, Walmart, Mike Harper, Canagra, Fred Turner, McDonald's, Michael Eisner, Walt Disney, John Smalley, Procter & Gamble, Robert Gozetta, Coca-Cola, and Roger Smith, General Motors, have in common. You might recognize these men as some of the most celebrated chief executives of the past decade. Actually, they are that. And also, according to Advertising Age magazine, marketers of the year from 1984 to 1994. What is marketing? Marketing is about focusing a company. Consider the laser. A laser is a weak source of energy. A laser takes a few kilowatts of energy and focuses them in a coherent stream of light. But with a laser, you can drill a hole in a diamond or wipe out a cancer. When you focus a company, you create the same effect. You create a powerful laser-like ability to dominate a market. That's what focusing is all about. When a company becomes unfocused, it loses its power. It becomes a sun which dissipates its energy over too many products and too many markets. Wither corporate America. Are companies focusing themselves to develop the power of a laser? Or are they trying to outshine the sun? The sun seems to be winning. In the past few decades, an explosion of new goods and services have hit the marketplace. Computers, copiers, color television, radio cameras and recorders sell their phones, facsimile equipment. The list is endless. Existing companies responded by expanding their product lines. General Electric, a manufacturer of electrical equipment, got into television sets, jet engines, computers, plastics, financial services, and a host of other products and services unrelated to their core electrical lines. And so did virtually every company in the world from American Express to Zenith. Today the bloom is off the rose. It should have been obvious that a company cannot keep expanding its product line forever. Sample complete. Ready to continue?