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104 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

salesman said in effect, “your child has to have the Encyclopedia
Britannica to do well in school.” Within three years Benton had
turned the almost-dying company around. And ten years later the
company began to apply exactly the same strategy in Japan for the
same reasons and with the same success.
6. Unexpected success or unexpected failure is often an indication
of a change in perception and meaning. Chapter 3 told how the
phoenix of the Thunderbird rose from the ashes of the Edsel. What
the Ford Motor Company found when it searched for an explanation
of the failure of the Edsel was a change in perception. The automo-
bile market, which only a few short years earlier had been segmented
by income groups, was now seen by the customers as segmented by
“lifestyles.”

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change.
Their meaning does. The meaning changes from “The glass is half full”
to “The glass is half empty.” The meaning changes from seeing oneself
as “working-class” and therefore born into one’s “station in life,” to
seeing oneself as “middle-class” and therefore very much in command
of one’s social position and economic opportunities. This change can
come very fast. It probably did not take much longer than a decade for
the majority of the American population to change from considering
themselves “working-class” to considering themselves “middle-class.”
Economics do not necessarily dictate such changes; in fact, they
may be irrelevant. In terms of income distribution, Great Britain is a
more egalitarian country than the United States. And yet almost 70
percent of the British population still consider themselves “working-
class,” even though at least two-thirds of the British population are
above “working-class” income by economic criteria alone, and close
to half are above the “lower middle class” as well. What determines
whether the glass is “half full” or “half empty” is mood rather than
facts. It results from experiences that might be called “existential.”
That the American blacks feel “The glass is half empty” has as much
to do with unhealed wounds of past centuries as with anything in
present American society. That a majority of the English feel them-
selves to be “working-class” is still largely a legacy of the nineteenth-
century chasm between “church” and “chapel.” And the American
health hypochondria expresses far more American values, such as the
worship of youth, than anything in the health statistics.
Whether sociologists or economists can explain the perceptional