“America has been in decline in world markets for the last 30 years”. So says economist Paul Cain. I agree. Yes, I think we have slid a good bit and most of it has happened since 1980. Why? After WWII the United States was one of a very few countries that had a manufacturing base still in tact. The world was screaming for stuff and we were able to make it. This is called an expanding market. W. Edwards Deming, the American that taught the Japanese about quality after WWII, said, “any manager can succeed in an expanding market.” With little or no competition, I might add. It was around 1950 that Deming went to Japan and though the the products from Japan started an immediate cycle of improvement, it took at least twenty years before we here in this country felt the pinch. Remember the first Toyota and Honda cars? I still laugh to think about it. By 1980, the whole world market was changing, as Deming said it would, and many countries were looking for protection from the Japanese, whose biggest crime was that they had listened to Deming, applied his System of Profound Knowledge, and changed the world market as we knew it. By the ’90’s and beyond, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Porsche, Volvo, and most notably, Ford Motor Company, had started giving the world a much, much better product. This was necessary to survive. Today, the quality of everything can be higher, because of what an American taught a devastated, war torn island over 50 years ago. Isn’t it time we found out what that American had taught Japan and tried it ourselves? http://demingcollaboration.com/
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