Successful Japanese Management Practices: Lessons for U.S. Students?

The U.S. has trailed virtually all other industrialized nations in productivity growth for the last 20 years. America's annual rate of growth is a little more than 1 percent per year, which has brought the rate of improvement in the nation's standard of living to a virtual standstill (.004 percent average annual increase from 1973 to 1988). Besides the possible erosion in America's standard of living and quality of life, productivity is fundamentally important to national security. Twenty-one percent of U.S. manufacturing is dedicated to defense and fully one-third of all high technology industry goes to defense. If productivity declines and makes these defense goods more expensive, or worse yet, makes America's defense industries noncompetitive globally thereby forcing them to close down, then our national security will become heavily dependent on foreign technology and manufacturing. That is an untenable situation.