FLEXIBILITY is a magic word in business these days, but the chairman of R. H. Macy & Co., which runs the world's largest department store, believes in setting a course and sticking to it. "Once we agree on a policy, we don't change it without considerable consultation," says Jack Isidor Straus, 63, who last week reported that Macy's quarterly earnings rose 25% above last year's rate. For Macy's big Manhattan store, Straus's policy is to maintain a middle-income emporium "that you'd expect to have just about everything you want." But at the company's 45 other stores in eight states, he has determined just as firmly that managers are to decide what "middle income" means in their own localities. Competitors say that Straus has developed some of the best executives in retailing through Macy's training program and its habit of promoting from within. The great-grandson of one of Macy's pioneers, Straus began as a floorwalker in the women's corset department after leaving Harvard ('21). His son is now a Macy's vice president.

THE belated success of color tele vision delights Joseph Sutherland Wright, 52, who steered Chicago's Zenith Radio Corp. into the field in 1961, five years after RCA paved the way. Boasting that Zenith's sets cost more but are worth it, President Wright expects his color TV sales to double to 180,000 sets this year. RCA will market about 500,000 color sets in 1963, but Wright has broken its monopoly in color TV tubes by building a plant to supply half of Zenith's tubes. Joe Wright has an unlikely background for an executive. Son of a Montana dentist, he worked through law school as an aide to Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler in the 1930s, later became an antitrust lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, where he tangled with many businessmen--including U.S. Steel Counsel Roger Blough, who lost to Wright in a steel-pricing case. Changing sides in 1952, Wright was hired as Zenith's counsel with the job of cracking RCA's control over some TV patents. He won the case, has been in a rivalry with RCA ever since.

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