The Sun Also Sets < Part-3 / Japanese Management : Art and Practice > ...

The success of lean production, consensus and kaizen was extraordinary. By the early 80's, Japanese companies were beating the Americans ragged in everything from price to quality, and the skies of the Pacific were dark with aircraft carrying managers to Japan to study companies like Sony and Toyota. Bookstores were full of volumes with titles such as "The Art of Japanese Management" and "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Kaizen." In the late 80's, Americans looked on impotently as Japanese companies bought Rockefeller Center, Columbia Pictures and other totems of Americana. In "Rising Sun," a thriller about corporate skulduggery in Los Angeles, Michael Crichton even paid Japanese managers the ultimate compliment of demonizing them. Americans seemed obsessed by two racist stereotypes of the Japanese: they were either clever little Asians producing ever smarter gadgets or fiendish strategists cunningly working together toward the same unstated goal. Management books -- even those by Mr. Ohmae -- only reinforced these myths.

Yet by the mid-90's, all those books on the secrets of Japanese management were yellowing in the remainder bins and Mr. Ohmae was becoming better known as a critic of Japan rather than an apologist for it.
What had changed was not just that Japan's companies were struggling against a prolonged recession and an expensive currency, crippling though these were. The prevailing wisdom was that Western companies had learned everything they needed to know about Japanese management; now it was the Japanese who would have to learn from the West.

There is no doubt that the West -- and America in particular -- has caught up quickly. Three decades after he had been spurned in his own country, Mr. Deming was rediscovered in June 1980, thanks to an NBC television documentary, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The day after the program was broadcast, Mr. Deming's phone started ringing, and he spent the rest of his life (he died in 1993) giving seminars and being feted by American bosses and politicians. In America, "Total Quality Management ( TQM ) " was the most influential fad of the 80's. In 1987, the American Government created an equivalent of the Deming award, the Baldrige. One of the most successful adopters of the new approach, Motorola Inc., claimed that, in 1987-92, T.Q.M. added $3.2 billion to the company's bottom line.

Western manufacturers have also learned the secrets of "Lean Production," largely by forming joint ventures with Japanese companies. The Ford Motor Company purchased 24 percent of Mazda in 1979, giving Ford's senior managers full access to Mazda's main production complex in Hiroshima.

The General Motors Corporation formed a joint venture with Toyota in California, transforming one of its most unproductive, strike-ridden plants into a model of efficiency. The ease with which Japanese "transplant" factories put down roots in North America and England proved that lean production was not something that could flourish only on Japanese soil.

And some Westerners improved on what they learned. Companies such as Motorola and the Chrysler Corporation have formed close links with their suppliers without subjecting themselves to the rigidities that have often bedeviled Japan's keiretsu system. "The traditional keiretsu are no longer the model of best practice," said Jordan Lewis, an expert on producer-supplier links. "For this, one has to look to the West."To some extent, the role of master and apprentice has been reversed: even Toyota has had to turn to Ford to discover how to improve the relations between its engineers and its shop-floor workers and to Chrysler to learn about "Value Engineering" -- a new way to speed up car production by using more interchangeable components in different models.