ABSTRACT
The notion of “effectiveness” in a market-oriented society such as ours is, in great part, a rhetorical one used to justify rather than to describe or analyze something. When the economic marketplace is the measure if not of all things, then certainly of most things, the concept of effectiveness, or how well something is done, pales next to its companion idea of efficiency, or how inexpensively it is done. Even in the current business climate of the “pursuit of excellence” and “quality is job one,” it would be the naive consumer who thought it safe to abandon the age-old caution of caveat emptor. Alfred P. Sloan's dictum that the goal of General Motors is “not to make cars, but to make money” is still, with some important exceptions, the creed of most American enterprises.
