Prologue, 1916 The First World's Salesmanship Congress Introduction The Science of Selling 1. Hawkers and Walkers The Independent Peddler 2. Selling Ulysses S. Grant The Art of the Canvasser 3. Forging a National Marketplace The Traveling Salesman 4. Fifty-Seven Varieties Sales Managers and Branded Goods 5. The Pyramid Plan John H. Patterson and the Pursuit of Efficiency 6. Salesology Psychologists, Economists, and Other Sales Experts 7. Instincts and Emotions Walter Dill Scott and the Bureau of Salesmanship Research 8. A Car for Her Selling Consumer Goods in the 1920s 9. Selling Salesmanship Public Relations and the Great Depression 10. Beyond Willy Loman American Salesmanship Today Appendix Illustration Credits Notes Index Acknowledgments
I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, well argued, and thoroughly researched. Salesmen, Friedman argues, helped distribute the products of America's increasingly bountiful manufacturing industries, invented new forms of managerial hierarchies, investigated the psychology of desire, and were in the vanguard of America's transformation from a producer to a consumer society. He powerfully shows that the rise of modern business practices and the emergence of a particularly American culture of consumption can only be fully understood if we examine the history of selling. -- Sven Beckert, author of The Monied Metropolis Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America is an important book. The modern industrial economy, created in the United States and Europe between the 1880s and the 1930s, required the integration of large-scale production and marketing. The evolution of mass production is a well-known story, but Friedman is the first to fill in the crucial marketing side of that industrial revolution. -- Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., author of The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope With wit and verve, Walter Friedman gives us a cast of memorable characters who turned salesmanship from ballyhoo to behaviorism, from silliness to science. Informed by prodigious research, Birth of a Salesman also clarifies the birth of modern marketing--from an angle that humanizes its subject through wry, ironic, but serious analysis. This is a pioneering work on a subject crucial to American social, cultural, and business history. -- Thomas K. McCraw, author of Creating Modern Capitalism
Walter A. Friedman is a historian at Harvard Business School and coeditor of Business History Review.
Friedman (history, Harvard Business Sch.; coeditor, Business Review History) narrates how salesmanship became integral to American capitalism. Friedman argues that salesmanship, which in 2000 involved 16 million Americans in various sales positions, has contributed to the systematization and standardization of production, distribution, and consumption of goods. He focuses on those most responsible for "devis[ing] innovative and effective sales strategies," including academics such as Walter Dill Scott and corporate managers such as John Patterson at National Cash Register. Friedman shows how sellers evolved in the 19th and early 20th centuries from peddlers, hawkers, and drummers to modern salesmen with their emphasis on order, control, efficiency, professionalism, improved customer relations, industrial psychology, mass consumerism, and scientific salesmanship. He also considers gender issues, e.g., how men dominated sales, shunting women to less prestigious positions such as door-to-door sales agents. Accessible, anecdotal, and entertaining, this well-documented work offers a lively narrative history of an underexplored area in business history. A worthy purchase for academic and public libraries with business collections.-Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
I very much enjoyed reading this book. It is well written, well
argued, and thoroughly researched. Salesmen, Friedman argues,
helped distribute the products of America's increasingly bountiful
manufacturing industries, invented new forms of managerial
hierarchies, investigated the psychology of desire, and were in the
vanguard of America's transformation from a producer to a consumer
society. He powerfully shows that the rise of modern business
practices and the emergence of a particularly American culture of
consumption can only be fully understood if we examine the history
of selling. -- Sven Beckert, author of The Monied
Metropolis
Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of
Selling in America is an important book. The modern industrial
economy, created in the United States and Europe between the 1880s
and the 1930s, required the integration of large-scale production
and marketing. The evolution of mass production is a well-known
story, but Friedman is the first to fill in the crucial marketing
side of that industrial revolution. -- Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,
author of The Visible Hand and Scale and Scope
With wit and verve, Walter Friedman gives us a cast of memorable
characters who turned salesmanship from ballyhoo to behaviorism,
from silliness to science. Informed by prodigious research,
Birth of a Salesman also clarifies the birth of modern
marketing--from an angle that humanizes its subject through wry,
ironic, but serious analysis. This is a pioneering work on a
subject crucial to American social, cultural, and business history.
-- Thomas K. McCraw, author of Creating Modern
Capitalism
The history Friedman weaves is engrossing and the book hits stride
with entertaining chapters on Mark Twain's marketing of the memoirs
of Ulysses S. Grant (apparently Twain was as talented a businessman
as a writer) and on the shift from the drummer--the middleman
between wholesalers and regional shopkeepers--to the department
store...In Birth of a Salesman, Friedman has crafted a
history of an 'inherently unlikable process' with depth, affection
and intelligent analysis. -- Carlo Wolff * Boston Globe *
Walter A. Friedman's Birth of a Salesman...should be
required reading for anyone who watched The Apprentice for
more than Omarosa's spat of the week. It's a much needed history of
salesmanship in America, and a portrait of capitalism in
transition. -- Jori Finkel * Village Voice *
Here is an account of how the hawker, the street peddler, the lowly
bagman, then the exhausted and ridiculed Willie Loman figure
evolved into the mighty selling and marketing gurus of today,
surrounded and supported by a battery of psychologists, economists,
colour consultants, social scientists, statisticians, advertising
experts and--yes!--philosophers. * Financial Times *
In Birth of a Salesman, Walter A. Friedman traces the
evolution of the modern salesman from peddlers, hawkers and
canvassers of pre-industrial America. -- Harold Perkin * Times
Literary Supplement *
[Friedman] perceptively chronicles significant inventions,
products, events, and people that have shaped the philosophy of
selling. A historian at the Harvard Business School, Friedman
focuses on the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of
World War II, a time when the concept of salesmanship came to the
fore in business. Modern principles for selling were developed
during those decades, he argues, and, except for some tweakings to
meet the times, little has changed since. -- Peter Krass * Across
the Board *
In Birth of a Salesman, business historian Walter A.
Friedman traces the history of salesmanship from its roots in
peddling and the door-to-door marketing of Ulysses S. Grant's
memoirs and Fuller brushes through the development of scientific
selling and marketing by National Cash Register, Ford, Coca-Cola,
and IBM. Friedman is a breezy writer with a good eye for cultural
and social artifact, like the list of 10 things wives could do to
help their NCR-salesmen husbands succeed. But he also has an
important point to make: that it wasn't just the genius for making
products that propelled the U.S. economy but the knack for creating
a demand for things people never knew they wanted. * Washington
Post *
As Birth of a Salesman makes clear, salesmen--and
women--have long been a vital force in driving the economic engine
of the United States. Friedman conveys his thesis in a winning book
that begins with descriptions of itinerant peddlers and canvassers
in the early part of the 19th century...With Birth of a
Salesman, he has certainly gone a long way toward fostering a
greater awareness and appreciation of this often-maligned
profession. -- Thomas J. Brady * Philadelphia Inquirer *
This is a carefully researched and closely contextualized study of
a relatively neglected, though central, character in American
capitalist society during a period when the economy underwent a
transformation. An archive-based study of the role of salesmen in
business and the evolution of the system of selling which
determined their activities contributes much to an understanding of
the history of business...A lively narrative describes the
development of the selling function in America, beginning with the
activities of peregrinating "hawkers and walkers" to the burdensome
role imposed by the aggressive marketing regimes introduced by the
large, bureaucratically managed companies. -- Roy Church * Business
History *
[A] systematic, yet lively and energetic history...Friedman has
written a fine book and it deserves a wide reading. -- Burton
Folsom * Indiana Magazine of History *
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