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In Search of the Excellent Heart
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10018 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
3,075 Words |
| Author
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Lewis Austin
Lewis Austin is research analyst for the Beacon Hill
Multicultural Psychological Association. He is the author of
Japan: The Paradox of Progress and Saints and Samurai: The
Politics and Culture of the Japanese and American Elite. He
has worked in Japan as a banker and a social scientist, and
has taught at Yale and the University of California. |
The research for In Search of Excellence began on the Fourth of July 1979. The date of the book's birthday is not fortuitous. That was the time when the great American corporate monuments first began to show serious signs of decay. Penn Central, Chrysler, and Continental Illinois became the leaders in a long line of corporate mendicants who would approach their governmental overseers of emergency abrogation of the normal laws governing business failure. It was the beginning of a radical new tax policy. From that time on the majority of the people--who didn't own shares--were to subsidize massive grants of survival capital to the executives and owners of the great business enterprises--who did. A new pattern was emerging. American business, which had begun as a Darwinian free-for-all in which the fittest survived, was becoming a game which was safer but also less profitable: now managerial clumsiness, ignorance, miscalculation, greed, and self-satisfaction were to be subsidized by the public.
In 1986, as the biggest American banks try doggedly to ignore the fact that bad loans are pushing dangerously close to overshadowing net assets, we are beginning to see more clearly how the transfers of funds necessary to shield corporate managers from the consequences of their mismanagement have been arranged. Inflation played the major role in cushioning bad management in the Carter era. In the Reagan period we have relied on the doubling of the national debt. The net effect of this so far seems to have been squeeze out small enterprise and to cushion large. Indeed, now the taxpayers spend 20 percent of the time they work for the government in paying off the government's creditors. Corporations in trouble are subsidized by government, government borrows from creditors, domestic and overseas, but the lender of last resort is the public. The giant international deficit which goes with this policy means that American assets are increasingly transferred to overseas owners. Is it surprising that the American people--spending more and more time working to pay off the national debt, more and more likely to be working for a foreign-owned enterprise--are losing confidence in the ability of the people who are supposed to be running the show?
American "Ungenuity"
Managerial failure and work-force failure are closely linked. As the Japanese took a close look at American business with a view to purchase, they were often appalled. Koji Kobayashi, chairman of the Nippon Electric Company (NEC), observed of his new Washington offices: "In Japan, the president doesn't have to spell out exactly do this or do that…all of the..-members of the
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