to buy a house Whether it is a question of inventiveness or innovation, the implication is clear: every branch of a business activity must be for ever on the alert to discover ways and means of improving, changing, enriching the total operation, hese words all underline the implicit dynamism in the business of business. Like marketing, this need to think ahead is not confined to any one of the aspects of the business. What a product offers to the customer needs frequent reassessment, from design to engineering to distribution to price. And a service just as much as a product can never be said to be totally adequate under any conditions, because conditions themselves are constantly changing. Thus, for example, the insurance business must be ready to introduce new forms of cover or a bank new forms of loan to meet or, better, to anticipate customer demands. Business, in a word, exists to see the whole of a market and to bend its organization, its inventiveness, and its powers of innovation to meeting it. Did not Gibbon write 'all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance' ? ft The foregoing has looked at business in a straightforward, commercial context. 'Value satisfaction' puts the onus on the customer. If the customer does not think he is getting value for his atomic reactor, his bridge, his breakfast cereal, or his cigarette, he probably won't buy it or he certainly won't buy again. But something else a new philosophy of business, as it were has emerged, especially since the last war. 'Value satisfaction' has extended back from the customer to the worker, and here the emphasis is on the word 'satisfaction'. It is not enough today for a business to direct its energies solely to creating and satisfying customers, though that is the priority. The crude lessons of the Industrial Revolution are now being learnt, and today, whether business likes it or not, there is a secondary consideration, every bit as real and every bit as potent. It is to ensure a degree of satisfaction to the worker, whatever his grade, who is employed in the business enterprise. The aggregate achievement of the Trade Union movement (which will be considered in a later chapter) and the national commitment to a policy of full employment mean that the bysiness of business is no longer only a question of looking outwards. The definition set down at the start of this chapter needs, then, a second look. Business, it is true, exists for a main purpose to create and deliver value satisfaction at a profit. But it is clear that those value satisfactions can only be created and delivered if the business itself is an enlightened employer. This is not to say that there are many instances of business enterprises which, in a fever of anxiety to catch the consumer's penny or pound, supply a market requirement with complete disregard of conditions of employment. Such enterprises are, today, shortlived. The new business 'philosophy' has also to battle with another question. to buy a house