The Bose Phenomenon

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: Entrepreneurship is the midwife to innovation. Yet, how many businessmen have the courage of conviction to build enterprises that are based on principled ideas of what companies should be? Last fortnight, on a raw autumn day, I met an exception to the rule: 72-year-old Amar C Bose. The story of how a young MIT grad’s quest for the perfect stereo system led to the creation of Bose Corporation in 1964 is business lore. The privately-held company went on to become a sound (sic!) transnational, with a turnover in excess of $1.2 billion in 2002 and a reputation of building the world’s best audio systems.

What is less well known, I discovered, is that the Bose Corporation is not the brainchild of a canny business strategist, but an ongoing experiment by a brilliant scientist who knows how to use logic to move from assumption to conclusion. I had wanted to meet Dr Bose from the time I first stepped into a Bose showroom many years ago. Each retail outlet comes with its own demonstration room. Walk-in customers are urged to take in what can only be called a Bose son-et-lumiere. You sit in front of a bank of impressive-looking stereo equipment including awesome speakers that thrum life-like sound at you. At the end of the show, the salesperson removes the large speakers to reveal that actually, all this while, the hi-fi sound was coming from the tiny Bose speakers. At this point, the audience gasps.

As I drove towards The Mountain, the Bose Corporation’s headquarters in Framingham, MA, I was very curious as to what kind of a mind had come up with a marketing strategy that changed the customer’s mindset and convinced the customer about its own product attributes. Turned out it’s a teacher’s mind. As a electrical engineering professor at MIT, writing textbooks forced Dr Bose to think like a student. “It caused me to project myself into the mind of someone I am addressing”.