I have touched Style already, but under the Rolex Wannabe point of view.
I will try to figure out Nicolas Hayek point of view. First let’s take a look on him.
In an interview to Harvard Business Review perhaps he summarized himself, his philosophy which is behind his strategy: (He was explaining the Swatch watch, but all products under his Swatch group follows the same idea with particular strategies):
“We are not just offering people a style. We are offering them a message. This is an absolutely critical point. Fashion is about image. Emotional products are about message— a strong, exciting, distinct, authentic message that tells people who you are and why you do what you do. There are many elements that make up the Swatch message. High quality. Low cost. Provocative. Joy of life. But the most important element of the Swatch message is the hardest for others to copy. Ultimately, we not just offering watches. We are offering our personal culture.”
Obviously he is pushing a little bit too far, because the message is the Style, even if Swiss.
When it comes to Style what comes to mind is the famous quote of the French naturalist Buffon (1707–88) which said: ‘Style is the man himself.’ Although he was concerned with writing, if fits like a glove for anything which reflects one’s style.
To what I should add it is even more the woman, which statistics shows spends several times more than men enhancing their style and, to many, the expenditure with expensive watches by man is cheap in terms of personal “accoutrements” when compared to the extension women goes when the subject is fashion to show off her style.
Accoutrement is not properly defined and explored at the Wikipedia entry above. It was borrowed from the French long ago, in the middle ages, it has also an anglicized version of accouterment, and has different meanings in each language. Putting it simply, in English, it means:
- an article of equipment or dress especially when used as an accessory
- Soldier’s equipment and trappings, excluding clothes and weapons (wristwatches for soldiers started to be part of the accoutrements in WW I)
- an identifying and often superficial characteristic
The accent when speaking is important, because in French it means also a garment that is considered strange or grotesque, almost considered an involuntary disguise, like for instance wearing yourself like a clown.
There is an extremely fine, subtle, complicated, elusive and eventually impossible to grasp intellectually about the relation of appearance and what goes inside. I do not feel capable of elaborate on such matters, but comes to my mind a genius which is one of the more competent artists in terms of exploring this characteristic of human beings: Oscar Wilde .
He explores all that in his plays but he excels in perhaps his most famous one: The picture of Dorian Grey. I understand that reading and exploring everything that Wilde laid down in this masterpiece is impractical and I suggest to hear the presentation about Oscar Wilde which Prof Pascal Aquien did at the Sorbonne, France, centered on the Picture of Dorian Grey, where he also does the connection of external appearance of gold and interior of nothing.
On a more mundane and straightforward manner, Internet tells me that in a covering letter of 2 February 1891 to the Daily Telegraph, Oscar Wilde wrote of a letter on ‘Fashion in Dress’ which he enclosed, “I don’t wish to sign my name, though I am afraid everybody will know who the writer is: one’s style is one’s signature always.”
Narrowing it down to wrist watches, it couldn’t have a better definition than ‘one’s signature always’. The article is about women and what they dress but you dress a watch too and, most important, it inaugurates Wilde’s desire to announce himself as a commercial writer: it was the first work by him prepared as a composition for specific and separate publication, and it is the only piece of his journalism (out of over 150 examples) that was copyrighted. (cf Wikipedia). Today it is practically impossible to see anything printed or at any media under that context which has not been done under that intention.
Wilde is famous for his irony being difficult to know when he was serious and when he was pulling someone’s legs… If a counterpoint for Wilde was the importance of being superficial, then the apparent triviality of clothes may well have been a serious business. France is supposed to turn 20 billion dollars out o fashion in 2020. If you think of Watches as fashion, then Switzerland will turn in 2020 over 20 billion dollars out of watches.
Thinking about dressing a watch brings to mind another quotation from Wilde: ‘A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.’ No matter how frivolous this statement is, it reflects a rite of passage in changing clothes to move on and enter new social circles. It comes to my mind about the obligation imposed on my grandson Tiago by his sorority to wear a formal suit as a rite of passage.
Bringing it nowadays, take a look at the Rolex watch affair,, involving Sarkozy’s then president of France:
Flashback: February 13, 2009. On national television, French advertising mogul Jacques Séguéla defends his friend and then President Sarkozy, heavily criticized for: dining in expensive restaurants, cruising around the Mediterranean on his friend’s yacht, flaunting Ray Ban mirror sunglasses and… wearing a Rolex watch. To put this into context:
- 1. in 2009 France experienced its worst recession since the end of World War II, and
- 2. the French are reputed to be envious people.
So, when Séguéla replied “How can you reprimand a President for having a Rolex? “Everyone has a Rolex! If by the age of 50 you don’t own a Rolex, you’re a total failure!” it created an uproar. Rolex, obviously, thanks him to this day…
Obviously, you could never say, having in mind an Omega Moon Watch, that “if you didn’t become an astronaut by the age of 50, you’re a total failure!”
But you could say that you do not belong to the Rolex Wannabe herd and could say that you lean more to what Lincoln said centuries ago: “Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve”
And the watch you are wearing says it all…
Case studies of Style
Omega Style
Analysis in more detail: The story and the definition of Omega positioning
Rolex Style
I have created a separate entry for Rolex
Tissot Style
Analysis in more detail: The story and the definition of Tissot positioning
Tag Heuer
See this separate entry for Tag Heuer
Seiko
See Seiko at Wikipedia
Timex
Fortis
Casio
Fyita
See the Chinese Watch Industry
IBM Style
Spending most of my adult life working at IBM I feel comfortable to bring up to our discussion the IBM Style, which I lived from and under.
Time is a premium commodity and I do not expect anybody to read in detail, with all the pointers embedded, but at least to take a look in the article (GOOD DESIGN IS GOOD BUSINESS) I posted on my site blog about main frame computers from which I will quote a few notes to figure out the IBM Style.
IBM has a very humble origins, starting as we know today from IBM’s precursor, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), created by the merger of The International Time Recording Company, (ITR)Computing Scale Company,(CSC) and the Tabulating Recording Company (founded by Herman Hollerith, inventor of the punched card tabulating system) in 1911. By 1924 CTR becomes International Business Machines (IBM). In 1911 CTR had roughly 1000 employes and in 1924 IBM had roughly 3000.
Meat Cutter Scale 
vertical classifier 
Thomas Edison punching his timecard
At the beginning of the depression (1930) it had some 8000 employes and at the end 1940) some 10000 and you can see in more detail here.
Expansion to Europe, Asia and Latin America
Austria 1937 
Paris, France, 1923 
Germany 1934 
Paris 1937
Australia 1937 
Chile 1937 
Japan 1926
At home the Social Security Act created an immense workload for IBM which expanded
IBM 080 IBM 405 IBM 077 
IBM 405 Tabulator 
IBM Intercalator 077 
T J Watson (first on the left) and the Social Security Act
The Data Management of the Social Security Act was done by three IBM Machines above
In the war, basically it was all punched cards, but there were incursions in Computers and the like and this equipment and the parts they used created the opportunity to open the doors to build machines dedicated to scientific computing.
IBM help to the US W W II effort:
At the end of WW II IBM had some 30000 employes, by 1955 it doubled and by 1960 it doubled again reaching more than 100000 and that’s when IBM shoot the moon and reached for greatness.
Thanks to the New Deal and the War, the US Government became IBM’s biggest customer.
Sabre was one of those things. Take a look
With the move IBM took when creating System 360 it would reach 270000 employes in 1970, from 170000 in 1965, when it was introduced and at the peak of this era it would reach some 35000 in the 80’s and by the time it changed to Services it would it all time high of some 450000 in the 90’s. A compact view of that can be seen at the following article.
IBM became heavily involved with NASA and spaceflights
The image all that was presented to here generate an image which can be perdceived at the following article, from which I quote a summary.
IBM at the peak of its might
Defining American Greatness: IBM from Watson to Trump
By Thomas Haigh
Communications of the ACM, January 2018, Vol. 61 No. 1, Pages 32-37
10.1145/3163909
Greatness meant taking risks and making massive long-term investments in new technologies and platforms. During the 1960s IBM, home of the dark suit and starched collar, made a gamble on a scale that would appall today’s hoodie-clad, thrill seeking, Silicon Valley executives. While today’s tech companies like to boast about their “moon-shot” projects, firms such as Alphabet, Facebook, and Oracle derive the vast majority of their revenues from a handful of products and services that dominate their respective niches. Backward compatibility is more important than innovation, as Microsoft showed when turning Windows and Office products into lucrative monopolies. Most tech firms develop a platform as startups and grow it steadily over many years, defending it against threats from upstart competitors.
By the 1970s IBM held a similarly dominant position in the business-oriented mainframe market, but only because it launched a massive research and development effort during the early 1960s. In April 1964 when IBM introduced its System/360 range it rendered its entire installed product base obsolete. Two years earlier IBM had reportedly budgeted $5 billion to develop the new range, twice its entire annual revenue. According to Watson Jr. the actual costs were so high that in 1965 the firm unexpectedly found itself just “a few weeks” from needing “emergency loans to meet the payroll.” (See “Father, Son & Co” in the Further Reading section.)
I have and read the book above and Thomas J.Watson Jr. is, to my account and I believe of anybody, at the same stature of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, with a lot more class and contextually and effectively with more punch within the stablishment than any other company has ever had, being threatened to be split by an anty thrust action by the US Congress for representing a serious threat. In 1982, the antitrust division abandoned its case against IBM. The firm remained the “800 pound gorilla” of the computer industry; as late as 1986, a bitter critic characterized it as “the single most powerful firm in the world today.”
This story and other interesting one’s can be read at IBM and American Politics, 1970-1999, in an article by David M.Hart.
His father, T.J.Watson, was more like John D. Rockefeller or William C.Durant, although Durant wasn’t that sucessfull. They all share the same style.
The end of an era
IBM had a US$8.10 billion loss for the 1992 financial year. Biggest ever loss in the history of capitalism. IBM’s core mainframe business had been disrupted by the advent of the personal computer and the client server. IBM couldn’t compete with smaller nimbler less diversified competitors. It was a near death experience. An outsider, Lou Gerstner, with no experience or even background in computing, acting with good sense and listening to clients, found out that biggest problem that all the big companies were facing in 1993 was in integrating all the separate computing technologies that were emerging at the time. Obviously he cut to the bone the high costs that the traditional way IBM did business. This and the fact that IBM’s greatest strengths was its ability to provide integrated solutions for customers originated an entirely new company which the only resemblance with the old one is the logo mark. And the style we are talking about went down the drain and the new stile should be analysed separately, what I do not feel competent to do because I left IBM in 1993.
Since this exercise is not meant for amusement, although I confess I had a lot to realize that I was part of a fantastic experience that brought me things far beyond than my wildest dreams, let’s extract some eventually wise lessons from it:
- Reality is unpredictable, you can’t model it satisfactorily and no matter how confident or competent you feel about your plannings, this warning should come up front. As Woody Allen once said: You want to see God laughing, show Him your plans…
- Experience is a beacon that shines backwards, but if you leave aside what really happened, the fact of life is that he average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company in 2010, according to the article of Forbes, has declined from around 75 years half a century ago to less than 15 years today, and heading towards 5 years and I have serious doubts that something can be done, contradicting the Forbes columnist from whom I took the quote, who thinks this can be fixed.
- I checked at Interne in 2020, the average lifespan of a company on Standard and Poor’s 500 Index was just over 21 years, compared with 32 years in 1965
- The difference from the 2010 Forbes information is not due with something done on purpose, but to the fat that people are learning to live with the information revolution technology and bringing it down to more human specifics on how to survive and live.
- According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Business Employment Dynamics, about two-thirds of businesses with employees survive at least 2 years and about half survive at least 5 years. That is overall and not some special group.
- Better yet, average to whom? I would like to see the statistics for the Dow Jones 30 group, and the 3300 NASDAQ group and the 500 Standard and Poors group spread for decades, from the 90’s, specially for the 21rst century and see if it can be extracted some tendency for sure.
- Deloitte created it’s Deloitte’s Shift Index, which apparently was replaced to their consultancy on the subject, which, honestly, seems to me bull shit because fear to them is the main issue.
- At the end of the day, either you trust or you don’t and this is perhaps the strongest effect of style
Man & Time J B Priestley 