Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 87

Chicago Tribune. Sunday. June 20. 1993 Section 7 Al.fcJ John I s'iC- McCarron A. 1U Our characters would get attention one way or another, but it doesn't hurt that everybody comes in now with dinosaurs in mind.

Harry Capers, Dino Buddies backer VV 4 Try as he might, MGM's "Grimmy" seems unable to grab the attention of two businessmen at the licensing exposition. AP Ussrpholo 'Jurassic Park fever infects image vendors By Kenneth R. Clark Chicago Tribune NEW YORK Sixty billion dollars worth of imagination went on sale last week at the Hilton hotel as hundreds of manufacturers sought to buy images designed to sell their products. More than 1,000 properties, ranging from the still-powerful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Socks, the White House cat, were on the block at the 13th Annual International Licensing and Merchandising Conference and Exposition. And for an industry that has been flat in the face of recession for the last three years, things were looking up.

The conference attracted buyers from thousands of firms eager to adorn everything from clothing to paper cups with presold symbols of success. The industry ended 1992 with a wholesale gross of $62.2 billion, and while that was down fractionally from the previous year, Murray Altschuler, executive director of the Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association, said it still "beat the marketplace." Altschuler said licensing, which allows McDonald's to mount Big Macs on the backs of dinosaurs from "Jurassic Park," is almost immune to economic hard times because it is the most cost-effective way to advertise. A manufacturer "doesn't have to sell the consumer and he doesn't have to sell his retailer; he has that brand. 'Jurassic Park' can help him pull his entire line through, and since he pays a set royalty, he knows exactly how much it's going to cost him." Stephen Spielberg's Jurassic blockbuster opened just three days before the licensing show, firing interest in other dinosaur properties, from Barney and Baby Bop to such new entries as Dino Buddies and the comic book T-Rex brothers, but few new merchandisers were being allowed on the Spielberg bandwagon. "We did our licensing last year," said Brad Globe, vice president of marketing for Amblin Entertainment, which, with MCA, has licensing rights to the Jurassic gold mine.

"We'll consider additional licenses on a case-by-case basis, but most major categories have been filled." That includes more than 1,000 products offered by more than 100 merchandisers worldwide, and Globe said that is enough. "You've got to be very careful not to overexpose it," he said. Still, "Jurassic Park" was driving the show. "Our characters would get attention one way or another, but it doesn't hurt that everybody comes in now with dinosaurs in mind," said Harry Capers, whose Houston-based family firm was introducing the children's book characters Dino Buddies to licensing for the first time. Even the man who shepherded the Ninja Turtles from underground comic-book obscurity to fame and fortune was feeling a boost.

'Jurassic Park' is making so much noise these days that movie licensing is very in vogue," said Mark Freedman, president of Surge Licensing, which turned the Turtles into a bonanza seven years ago. Accordingly, he was hoping to spin another comic book, "Judge Dredd," Britain's most popular superhero, into licensing pay dirt on the basis of a movie that will star Sylvester Stallone late next year. $4 billion Top merchandising properties Total sales for all licensed products; figures are through 1992 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Star Wars Trilogy Batman No. 1 The Simpsons Strawberry Shortcake Care Bears The Little Mermaid Source: The Licensing Letter $2.6 billion tiL. billion $1.1 billion 3 $1 billion $1 billion $1 billion Photo by Norman LonoAP Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still hold power over image licensees.

Chicago Tribune out with "Wishaphants," gentle little elephant characters who eat only peanuts; and former balloon manufacturer Anthony Diloia, of Animagic, offered "Bal-loonatiks" living balloons from Venus who come to Earth as superheroes. "This is a family property," said Diloia, who has four prime-time television shows lined up for his inflatable characters. "They teach kids teamwork, cooperation and communications skills." Then there is Socks, barely out of his first 100 days as First Cat and already starring in two video games one from Sego and another from Nintendo as well as appearing as a plush toy and a logo for coffee mugs and key chains. How does anybody go about securing licensing rights to Chelsea Clinton's personal cat? The answer is, by law, Socks is nobody's personal cat. His image belongs to the person who copyrights it first, and Bob Pratt, of Presidential Socks Partnership, won the race, along with the right to license his image.

Though he didn't have to do it, Pratt has promised a share of his profits to the Humane Society and the Children's Defense Fund, which happens to be one of Hillary Rodham Clinton's favorite charities. Socks himself didn't even get a bag of catnip out of the deal. "There probably will never be another Ninja Turtles," Freedman said. "It was just such a phenomenal success, and it's really not over. We have three movies, and hopefully a fourth, and a television show, and new products hit the market every year around the world.

The turtles still are the No. 1 toy in the U.S.A. We grossed more than $2 billion last year, with 130 American licensees and more than 600 worldwide." But Freedman wasn't the only entrepreneur hoping to ride in on the "Jurassic Park" wave. 20th Century-Fox was busy signing up customers for "The Pagemaster," a fanciful semianimated feature film starring Macaulay Culkin and Christopher Lloyd, set for release in November 1994. "There are a few event pictures that capture everybody's attention, and we believe 'The Pagemaster" is one of those properties," said Albert Ovadia, president of 20th Century's licensing and merchandising division.

"People are seeing it as the movie of '94." But societal forces also shape the marketplace, and with the recent growing concern over violence aimed at youngsters, new products at this year's licensing show generally displayed a softer, gentler approach. Waldo, of the eye-torturing "Where's Waldo?" puzzle books, soon will emerge both as an animated cartoon strip and a movie; the peanut industry was Good citizens, yes, but civic leaders? It's often hard to mark the end of an era with any precision. The "fall" of Rome took centuries. Even the Oakland A's needed two decades to get from three straight world championships to the cellar of the American League West. So it is difficult, if not impossible, to put an exact date on the end of the Golden Age of native Chicago business.

Was it when our great meatpacking houses. Swift and Armour, merged into faceless national conglomerates? Or the day a British multinational bought Marshall Field's? You could make a case for either but a better one for last Monday, June 14, 1993. That day, it was announced that two Chicago-based corporations companies whose founders placed indelible stamps on this city had been sold to out-of-town interests. From a purely business standpoint, it probably makes little difference that Koll Management Services of California bought the commercial real estate operations of Rubloff Inc. Or that Miami-based Ivax Corp.

snapped up Johnson Products the minority-owned maker of hair-care products. One could even argue that Chicago is better off for the infusion of out-of-town capital. Rubloff had been laid low by the depressed market here; deep-pocketed Ivax says it may expand operations at Johnson's underused South Side plant. But make no mistake something very important is being lost every time this happens, something beyond dollars and cents. Call it civic leadership.

One by one, the companies founded by the great names of Chicago business the names chiseled on the walls of our museums, colleges and hospitals are being taken over by interests with no roots in this city or region. The philanthropic implications are obvious, but the leadership question ought to concern us more. In the Golden Age, civic problems were solved (or at least addressed) by the intervention of corporate chiefs who brought the full weight of their organizations to the table. These chiefs organized, two World's Fairs. They saw to it that the region built the nation's largest convention center and busiest airport.

They hired architect Daniel Burn-ham to plan a lakefront and interior park system second to none. And when it was pointed out that "they" were a bunch of rich white men at the top of a city that was no longer rich or white, they set up multiracial organizations such as Chicago United in an attempt to reverse the neglect. Not every plan worked, but there was a civic mission alongside the quarterly earnings push. Can that be said anymore? Can Mayor Richard Daley ask the head of Koll Management for help in redeveloping the North Loop and Near North Side, the way his father once asked the late Arthur Rubloff? And then seal the deal with a handshake? Can Ivax be expected to consider the impact on Chicago if it ever determines it would be cheaper to bottle Ultra Sheen in Chihuahua rather than Chatham? And who in its Miami management pool is about to take the place of company founder George Johnson as a black entrepreneurial model and civic leader? This is not to say that absentee owners can't be good citizens. One has to be impressed, for instance, at the way Minneapolis-based Dayton Hudson Corp.

has upheld standards at Marshall Field's after buying the chain from the British. It also has been generous in its charitable giving, though hardly on the scale of the store's namesake. Civic commitment of that magnitude is becoming a thing of the past. How could it be otherwise now that Carson Piric Scott is owned by a company in Milwaukee, whose owners are in Switzerland? Or Jewel Food Stores by a company in Salt Lake City? Obviously, our major utility companies will remain local. So will our biggest commercial banks, assuming First Chicago and Continental avoid the fate of Harris, LaSalle and Talman all now owned by foreign bank holding companies.

Last week, in a story that didn't quite get the play of the Rubloff or Johnson takeovers, Harris Bankcorp's B. Kenneth West was replaced as bank CEO by a younger executive from the holding company's headquarters in Canada. Ken West has a list of civic accomplishments as long as your arm. Perhaps the Canadian will, too. But don't count on it.

Norman Ross, the retired First Chicago executive who helped organize Chicago United and many other civic initiatives, says it's inevitable that out-of-towners have a different agenda. "Most of them are looking over your shoulder when they talk to you for that next job, that next assignment. There are good financial reasons for all this. But you wonder about the social cost." You wonder, too, how Chicago will ever find another George Johnson or Arthur Rubloff. Don't expect to really belong at Japanese companies WORKING JAPANESE COMPANY "Working For A Japanese Company: Insights into the Multicultural Workplace," by Robert M.

March, Ko-danasha America 247 pages, $19 Reviewed by Ronald E. Yates, a financial writer who is the Tribune's former Tokyo bureau chief In today's global economy, with thousands of Japanese and American executives traversing the Pacific cutting deals, signing contracts and creating strategic alliances each day, some might wonder why a book such as this one is necessary. After all, 510,000 Americans work for Japanese companies in the United States, and a few thousand more toil away for the Japanese in Japan. At the same time, American companies employ thousands of Japanese in Japan and not an insignificant number of Japanese in this country. So what's the problem? The problem, asserts Robert March, a bilingual management consultant who has spent most of his adult life in Japan, is that despite more than a century of contact, Americans and Japanese still can be pretty dumb when it comes to getting along in a corporate environment.

And the Japanese even though they are not the same nation of ultrana-tionalists who bombed Pearl Harbor 52 years ago and set off a conflagration the Pacific Rim is still recovering from psychologicallyare still an enigmatic bunch. Perhaps the most significant adjustment Americans must make when joining a Japanese company is typified central pot. Today's Japanese corporation is a lot like that feudal dormitory a place of intimate sharing and cohesiveness. In fact, many of today's top Japanese executives began their corporate careers living with co-workers in a company dormitory and share a common "rice bond" with fellow Japanese workers that no foreign employee can duplicate. Japanese see their company no matter how big or small as a kind of extended family.

And while many American executives give lip service to that notion, it is really a hollow claim when contrasted with what goes on in a Japanese company. "If the corporation is family," writes March, "it is also true for the Japanese that the office is home. The long hours spent there, the frequency of overtime or weekend work, plus the intimacies and mutual understanding and knowledge that develop between workmates are parts of the way that the Japanese treat the office as home." But there is more to it than that. It is not uncommon for Japanese to make themselves at home in the office in ways unheard of in an American company. A Japanese executive may take his shoes off and potter about the office in slippers, March writes.

Americans who go to work for Japanese companies need to understand that in the eyes of Japanese colleagues and superiors, they will (with few exceptions) never have the same sei shain, or "regular employee," status in the company that the Japanese have. In fact, they are more often referred Business books to as shokutaku, or "contract employees," by Japanese colleagues. For those wanting to "belong" to a Japanese corporate family, that reality can be a crushing blow to one's ego and sense of self-worth, especially for Americans, who Japanese are quick to point out 'have substantial amounts of both. "It is no secret, and to the Japanese no shame, that they export abroad a company structure where policy, strategy and decision-making are in the hands of Japanese expatriate managers and operations are in the hands of local managers, and where local managers and staff have job security but very limited opportunities for promotion to senior management positions," writes March. There are exceptions to that rule, of course.

Global companies such as Sony, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Matsushita, Fujitsu and certain Japanese banks are engaged in "localization" programs in essence, transferring more of the decision-making to American staff. But March is largely pessimistic about the eventual fusion of American and Japanese corporate cultures. And he is not optimistic that many Japanese corporations will change. While many Japanese will no doubt be bruised and irritated by some of March's conclusions, Americans contemplating employment in a Japanese company should find this book revealing and useful. by an old Japanese expression: "onaji kama no meshi ku" which means "eating rice from the same pot." In Japan's feudal era, when warlords and samurai warriors ran roughshod over the land, the less fortunate Japanese (who Japanese historians will tell you constituted about 95 percent of society) were often apprenticed to powerful landowners, where they were taught such trades as masonry, carpentry and gardening.

These apprentices lived together in dormitories and shared rice that was cooked in and taken from one large, Chicago stock scoreboard Week ended June 18, 1993 By William Hamilton Keeping up 15 most active stocks By percent ol outstanding shares traded Stack Pet. Clot Net By number of shares traded Dow Jones average 30 industrials; daily close; HHoliday Close Net Sales Slock Bond Buyer Index 20 municipal bonds; Weekly close 6.4 Oinu (hds.) chn9 5982 26'l 3600 Abbott Labs Allstate Corporation 77.9 0 13.7 A 12.2 0 9.3 3550 3500 6.0 4AI Motorola Navistar Int'l McDonald's Sears, Roebuck Baxter Int'l Amoco Bally Mfg. Waste Mngmnt 13 I 1 24! Si 3 lO'i Vi 20'4 4i )4i 13 2o'4 J'JJ 12W l'4 24 2i 122 -1N IUSG New Dav Bev. Johnson Prod. Amerlhost Prop.

Glacier Holdings Bally Mfg. Heallh-O-Meler System Software Sanfilippo Porfec TNT Frelghtwavs Ero IMC Ferllilur UAL VldeOcarl 3450 3C 27H- 81 VI 49V- Vfl I 28 -55'- 1 10? Vl 34V4- 32 2 24- 34- 2 15- 72' 2 5357 5113 4364 4170 3718 3470 3379 3334 3009 297 2945 2260 2103 1886 5.8 3400 5.6 3350 Fruit Of The Loom A Sara Lee Gen'l Instrument Santa Fe Pacific Morion Int'l S3 0 4.1 mm 7 14 21 28 4 11 18 May June 3300 23 30 Apr. 5-4 26 2 9 162330 7 142128 4 11 18 M. Apr. May June Money supply Ml In billions of dollars; Monday close Leading pet.

gainers Excludes stocks under 5 ass Leading pet. losers Excludes stocks under ii Commodity futures index 21 key commodities; Weekly close Stock Close Sleek Net Pet. chng cfmo chnq 5'i 30 9 mmi 215 210" Ben Franklin Melhode A United Stationers Richardson Elec. IMC Fertlliier Ero UAL Johnson Prod. A New Day Bev.

Stone Container UNR Industries TNT Frelghtwavs Allied Products Mldwesco Filler Nucorp 0 Medlcus Systems Foole Cone $1080 Toco 104(5 jc- 3 Pet. chin -100 9.1 9.1 8.1 7.8 7,7 7.7 7.0 4.4 4.3 63 6.1 Chemical Waste 24'1 8 7' 2" 13 B4e 15 32 8 20V4 21 v4 22 13 5-w-12 15 444 4- 35' 34- Llltelfuse Inc. Wis IV 114 Ji, 2' I 'A 104a 1 1 44 2' 2 1 23.2 11.1 'Vu 10.7 1 10.3 V4 10.1 9.4 'M 9.1 8 4 8.5 1.1 80 2 7o IV 7.3 11 205 200" Soortmart OeSoto Liberty Bancorp Inc Circuit Systems 6 Dentsply Internt" llonal Inc. Hartmarx Unlmed Inc. Gen'l instrument A Andrew Edgemark Fin.

tUSG 195 26 2 9 162330 7 1421 28 4 11 18 M. Apr. May June 152229 5 121926 3 10172431 7 Mar. Apr. May J.

Sources: Bond Buyer, Federal Reserve and Commodity Research Bureau: Knighf-Ridder "OK, maybe I haven't got a 'Charlotte's Web' or a 'Goodnight Moon' in mei-but I think I may have at least a' the Note: N-New York Stock Exchange: A. American Stook Exchange; traded over the counter, 366-day high; 4 305-dny low. Chicago Tribune.