Think Big By Thinking Small

Once we all thought biggest was best. Now we're beginning to know better.

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Ever since this country was founded, bigness has been a virtue. We've had the raw materials, the land, the manpower, and the wealth to build -- and consume -- on a grand scale. Waste became a measure of economic productivity, while smallness and efficiency were signs of a timid soul. Even our supermarkets stocked their shelves with large, extra large, and jumbo eggs; and big, huge, and colossal olives.

This era of bigness ended when rising oil prices suddenly forced Americans to think twice about the cost of operating oversized autos and heating roomy houses. Still other shortages are in the wings: wood, aluminum, copper, chromium, managnese, cobalt, tin, nickel. One by one, the materials we once exported or wasted are running out.

It's time, I think, for us to find a new way to look at the world. Our new goal must be to think small. Instead of making bigness a virtue, we must learn to respect the value of miniaturization.

Signs of shrinkage are already all around us. Small cars are unquestionably in. Co-ops, condos, and town-houses are in great demand, while the enormous homes of the 1920s and 1930s are a glut on the real estate market. Computers that once filled up half a building are now half the size of a breadbox. Radios, adding machines, cameras -- they're all getting smaller.

No question about it. The next major growth field will be reduction. The direction of technology will be to make more and more products pocketsized. Only the GNP will grow larger as we evolve a new array of everyday goods to produce.

And the trend toward smallness will begin to appear in every aspect of our cultural and social lives. The size of the morning newspaper will shrink, because paper, like oil, has become extravagantly expensive. Book publishers are already looking for skinnier books to promote. Journalists will be encouraged to use fewer words, and the 30-second TV commercial will become a literary model.

The miniaturization of the family itself will continue to grow in popularity. True, it doesn't take raw materials to produce a family. But once you've got one, it takes a lot of raw materials to keep a family going -- everything from living quarters to cars to quarts of milk. Smaller families use less.

Not yet on the horizon -- but who knows? -- are ways to redesign the human body. Perhaps the next challenge for science will be to develop reduced-sized people. In an era of abundance, after all, people grew taller and heavier. Maybe the trend will reverse itself. A smaller individual consumes less food, needs less living space, uses a smaller vehicle. Hollywood once set the standards of beauty with long legs, long hair, long torsos. Why not sell the petite woman and the short, squared-off male as the focus of our sexual fantasies?

If smallness becomes the watchword of the future, there's no telling where the trend will take us. The Japanese, not being blessed with much space on their cramped islands, learned to miniaturize even their trees. We may soon discover the joys of intensively cultivated, tiny gardens instead of two-acre "ranchettes."

Preparing the American mind for the coming "Age of Littleness" will challenge technology to its fullest and tax the wisdom of business managers to the utmost. But one thing is certain. Smallness is going to be big. And small businesss that foresee this trend, and devise products and strategies to accomodate it, are bound to prosper.