Is Advertising Stuck in the Middle? A Commentary

Abstract

The first sign of decline of an industry is loss of appeal to qualified, able and ambitious people. The American railroads, for instance, did not begin their decline after World War II—it only became obvious and irreversible then. The decline actually set in around the time of World War I. Before World War I, able graduates of American Engineering Schools looked for a railroad career. From the end of World War I on— for whatever reason—the railroads no longer appealed to young engineering graduates, or to any educated young people. As a result there was nobody in management capable and competent to cope with new problems when the railroads ran into heavy weather twenty years later . . . Peter F. Drucker (1973, p. 109)