By Joe Berk
Disrupting Time, by Aaron Stark, is a great read. My daughter bought it for me for Father’s Day (it was one of several books she selected), and when I got to it, I read Disrupting Time in just a few days. You see, I’m a watch nut and sort of a management consultant, and this book checked all the boxes for me. Industrial espionage. Waltham (I have one). Rolex (I have one of those, too). Management set in its ways (wow, I’ve lived through a lot of that). And a great American company and its employees paying the price for lazy, intellectually sloppy, arrogant, and incompetent leaders (yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that in my day, too).
It’s the story of Waltham, the world’s premier watch company in 1876. The Waltham managers knew they were the best in the world, and the company (or rather, its management) couldn’t resist rubbing the world’s nose in Waltham’s preeminence at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Although it’s counterintuitive today, the Swiss in those days were the world’s worst watchmakers, but the 1876 Philadelphia event made them sit up and take notice. One Swiss agent in particular, Jacques David, recognized Waltham’s supremacy and took every bit of info he could back to Europe. His industrial espionage remained a secret for the next century.
The Swiss were slow to pick up on the message David brought back, but they eventually did. Waltham chased low cost reliability; the Swiss had a better strategy and pursued exclusivity (doing do allowed significantly higher profit margins). Within a generation, the Swiss were in the driver’s seat with their superiority marketing strategy and by copying some of the concepts they stole from Waltham, and the Swiss dominance has continued to this day. Think Rolex, Patek, and more. Waltham? They are but a distant memory, but a memory I have no problem remembering, as you can see from my earlier blog on Poppy’s watch.
Disrupting Time is a fascinating story, and Stark tells it well. You should pick up a copy. You can thank me later.
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