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And twenty-five years later, the strategy of being “Fustest with the
Mostest” was used by the March of Dimes to organize research into
infantile paralysis (polio). Instead of aiming at gathering new knowl-
edge step by step, as all earlier medical research had done, the March
of Dimes aimed from the beginning at total victory over a complete-
ly mysterious disease. No one before had ever organized a “research
lab without walls,” in which a large number of scientists in a multi-
tude of research institutions were commissioned to work on specific
stages of a planned and managed research program. The March of
Dimes established the pattern on which the United States, a little
later, organized the first great research projects of World War II: the
atom bomb, the radar lab, the proximity fuse, and then another fifteen
years later, “Putting a Man on the Moon”—all innovative efforts
using the “Fustest with the Mostest” strategy.
These examples show, first, that being “Fustest with the Mostest”
requires an ambitious aim; otherwise it is bound to fail. It always
aims at creating a new industry or a new market. At the least, as in
the case of the Mayo Clinic or the March of Dimes, being “Fustest
with the Mostest” aims at creating a quite different and highly
unconventional process. The DuPonts surely did not say to them-
selves in the mid-twenties when they brought in Carothers: “We will
establish the plastics industry” (indeed, the term was rarely used
until the 1950s). But enough of the internal DuPont documents of
the time have been published to show that the top management peo-
ple did aim at creating a new industry. They were far from convinced
that Carothers and his research would succeed. But they knew that
they would have founded something big and brand new in the event
of success, and something that would go far beyond a single product
or even beyond a single major product line. Dr. Wang did not coin
the term “the Office of the Future,” as far as I know. But in his first
advertisements, he announced a new office environment and new
concepts of office work. Both the DuPonts and Wang from the begin-
ning clearly aimed at dominating the industry they hoped they would
succeed in creating.
The best example of what is implied in the strategy of being “Fustest
with the Mostest” is not a business case but Humboldt’s University of
Berlin. Humboldt was actually not a bit interested in a university, as
such. It was for him the means to create a new and different political
order, which would be neither the absolute monarchy of the eighteenth
century nor the democracy of the French Revolution in which the