Perhaps it is best characterized by the Southwestern Company, a direct home sales operation whose motto is "serving Mrs. Jones." To generalize, the customer is king in businessland. And providing his needs will be your foremost goal there, as well as, perhaps, your most important motivation.
The Harvard students who work with Southwestern are dedicated--to the practical goals of learning self-discipline and self-control in a difficult, real-life situation, and to the goal of developing a professional's concern for people.
Southwestern does not require that a student sell a minimum quota of books, nor does it require that he purchase a minimum quantity of books from the company. He is expected to deliver the books he sells, and if he quits, to arrange for their delivery by someone else, which usually involves paying the deliverer for his extra work. Every dealer knows in advance that he is running his own business all summer, and that he consequently pays his own expenses, come what may. The lack of a guaranteed salary tends to turn off many of those who analyze Southwestern's opportunity, for it means developing more self-reliance than they might otherwise choose to develop.
Third, we'd like to correct the allegation that Southwestern's recruiting practices are unethical and illegal. We think it significant that no one really knows what the specific nature of the charge is. For example, the Rules and Regulations of Harvard College state that "no firm, agency, or individual shall solicit in a university dormitory, at any time or for any purpose," and that no student may run a business from his room. This--the "letter of the ban" by Dean Epps--is no different from the "ban" placed on any other firm, agency or individual. A lot of noise has arisen concerning the "banning" of Southwestern from the Harvard dorms, when, according to the Rules and Regulations, every group is banned from the dorms. All recruiting (announcements, signs, interviews and contracting) is done off the campus, and has been for more than a year. Dean Epps charged in The Crimson that we are "violating the spirit, if not the letter," of the ban. If the spirit of the ban is to conform to the Rules and Regulations, then we have conformed to the spirit as well as to the letter, and the charge lacks substance.
If, on the other hand, the "spirit" of the ban is that no Harvard student should be allowed to work with Southwestern, then we believe it to be completely unfair and unjustified. It seems reasonable to assume that Harvard students are capable of deciding for themselves whether or not they would like to invest a summer in working with Southwestern, or any other company for that matter. We have done everything we can to comply with the regulations of the college, and still allow students the chance to make such a decision.
As an earlier Crimson article amply showed, only those students who want to apply for a job selling books stay in the interview room. Another dismissal is held even earlier, allowing those not interested to leave. The various charges that recruits are pressured into signing simply aren't based on the facts. Even if it were possible for a Harvard student to force or pressure another Harvard student into doing something he or she didn't want to do, it would be pointless for him to do so--the student could simply back out of the contract the next day. What is important is that students make their own decisions as to whether or not they want to do the job, and not have someone else make those decisions for them. If a student doesn't want to decide on the spot, he certainly doesn't have to. Half of us waited a week or two before making our final decisions. Again, it is definitely not a job everyone would want to do, nor is it a job that everyone should do. But to decide by fiat that Harvard students should not be allowed even the opportunity to hear about the job, and to decide for themselves whether they'd like to do it, seems narrow-minded and unfair.
Southwestern recruits at over 600 colleges and universities across the United States. Perhaps 100,000 students are interviewed each year. Any time such huge numbers of people are exposed to anything, regardless of how good or bad it is, someone is inevitably going to be upset and want to complain. Mention "selling books door to door" and some people will be entirely turned off, regardless of how it is presented. At Harvard, mention "Southwestern," and negative reactions arise in the minds of many people who have never been exposed to more than the treatment given the program in the pages of The Crimson. We do not care what people think about Southwestern after they have heard the facts. The important thing is that they be allowed to decide for themselves based on the facts, and not on the basis of articles so slanted that they should slide off the front page and onto the editorial page of the paper. Responsible journalism would seem to indicate that objective news stories should be just that--not presentations that imply what is not true.
The basic fact about selling books with Southwestern is that it is no more than an opportunity to succeed, and an equal opportunity to fail. As articles in The New York Times (June 10, 1973) and Time magazine (June 25, 1973) emphasize, every single Southwestern salesman has the same training, the same products, the same supervision, and the same opportunity. What a student does with that opportunity is entirely up to him. Not everyone finds that he likes the job, and that's his prerogative. But to claim that he was misled or made to do things he wasn't expecting, is to transfer responsibility for not liking it from where it belongs--squarely on him--to the job itself, which is exactly the same for all 8000 students who give it a try. Each student says in Nashville, "I and I alone am responsible for my books and my money"--and for the summer.
Martin Fridson '74, Jeffrey A. Danziger '78, John M. Tavares '77, Daniel Waugh '77, Ramon Morant '78, Tim Gorski '77-2, Benjamin G. Davis '77, Daniel W. Moore '76, Chris Savage '77, George Varughese '77, and Jarius L. DeWalt '76 work for Southwestern.