Let Them Eat Sushi
Peters, Tom
Let Them Eat Sushi Forget Japan. The way to make America great again is to be more like us. by Tom Peters In two issues of the Harvard Business Review last year, George Gilder, the supply-side...
...Something about American values has enabled ordinary people, assembled haphazardly from around the world, to build the largest, richest, and freest economy in history...
...You make your own career around here...
...In fact, our per capita purchasing power remains far above Japan's...
...Random House, $19.95...
...The quality that made for success in school—high IQ, the right study habits, good family background—became more and more closely linked with success in life," he observes...
...It would have been invested pretty much where it has been ." Magaziner and Patinkin also seem to think the continued growth of our service industries is a de facto case for decline, even though service industry technology spending per employee is higher than manufacturing spending...
...would cause our corporations to be more disposed toward exporting...
...Yet, overall, we seem to be moving more in the direction of rigidity, not flexibility...
...We are not obsessed with keeping the skills of our workers up to date, as our competitors are...
...And there's General Electric's attempt to make new refrigerator compressors competitive with those produced by the Japanese...
...This package of values may be suitable for Japan, China and Korea [but] in America [it] is an unhealthful, alien influence...
...To be sure, there is a great deal that our biggest companies have to learn that has little to do with culture...
...by Tom Peters In two issues of the Harvard Business Review last year, George Gilder, the supply-side maven, and Charles Ferguson, an MIT policy analyst, squared off over America's future...
...On the other hand, most American parents probably harbor a sneaking desire for their carefully nurtured young man or young woman to end up as an IBM marketer, a business school professor, or a lettered professional in the medical services...
...Furthermore, a person from Mars skimming this book might guess that the United States, which can apparently do nothing right, had a per capita income of about six cents and that U.S...
...Likewise, Japan's high per capita income alarms them...
...government chose not to support the technology...
...Fallows lays out a much more daunting challenge...
...His latest book is Thriving on Chaos...
...Benjamin Franklin moves to Philadelphia and succeeds...
...The less that formal schooling matters, the more likely second chances become—and the harder people will try...
...Each of the nine case studies, which form the core of the book, are based, it seems, on scores of trips and hundreds of interviews...
...Little, Brown, $18.95...
...First, shift the emphasis on public assistance from "entitlement" to "insurance" He criticizes Medicare and Social Security for "guaranteeing a subsidy to everyone, not just to the people who need the protection that an insurance system would offer...
...The studies track three distinct problems— competing with low-wage countries, competing with developed countries, and developing future technologies...
...The key was Corning's willingness to tailor its products to local markets...
...One of our superstars here was a guy who literally walked in off the street...
...What Conant would have preferred . . .was a program restricted to a `carefully selected number' of the most able veterans . . . . But Conant and Hutchins could not have been more wrong about the GI's...
...Second, all welfare "should be tied to work...
...The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battle Shaping America's Business Future...
...For Corning, the turning point in optical wave guides was a big order by a sophisticated, entrepreneurial American service firm—MCI...
...Many men who'd been classified as 'subnormal' and 'morons' did fine on jobs demanding skill once they got the job," he writes...
...Ira Magaziner, who coauthored Minding America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy with Harvard political economist Robert Reich in 1982, is back with The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battle Shaping America's Future, co-authored with Mark Patinkin.* The message is more subtle this time, but still unmistakable—our survival depends on a more manipulative economic role for government...
...He suggests that we do have something special, but in many respects we've been working to undermine that specialness for the best part of a century...
...We ask them to send us a program they've written, that they're proud of...
...The company ended up with big sales in Japan, the industry leader...
...Corning's persistence in wave guides, or GE's in refrigeration, are rare exceptions...
...But numerous observers, such as Gilder and leading Japanese consultant Kenichi Ohmae, contend that MITI's role has been highly overrated...
...They honor the scholar, place great emphasis on credentials and academic degrees, teach children always to defer to parents and social inferiors to their superiors, and assign people very early in life to the rank that they will hold as adults...
...America will be in serious trouble if it becomes an ordinary country, with people stuck in customary, class-bound roles in life," he writes...
...Well, it wouldn't have...
...One said, "You get the chance from the outset to say what you want to say...
...Why, then, review these two books together...
...Former federal budget director Charles Schultze put this view succinctly in an interview in Harper's magazine a few years ago: "I don't think MITI really has 'much to do with Japan's success . . People seem to think that without an industrial policy, most of Japan's huge investment would have gone into industries like plastic toys, souvenirs, fisheries and kites...
...3M has stayed more vigorous than most of its giant-firm peers, and executive after executive explained why in terms that Fallows would find comforting...
...This can't be the moral" Reading Magaziner and Patinkin is exhausting...
...We do not ." Fallows's concern, following a two-year stint in Japan and Malaysia, is unabashedly cultural: "In the long run, a society's strength depends on the way that ordinary people voluntarily behave...
...We don't do much competitive analysis in general, and none when it comes to foreign competition...
...GE went from scorn for, to despair over, its foreign counterparts, before finally opening a successful plant in rural Tennessee where displaced workers eager to retrain voluntarily undertook 50,000 hours of instruction in the newly required skills...
...Just as everyone should be entitled to insurance against disaster but not to guaranteed subsidy, everyone should be expected to work in exchange for benefits paid for by other Americans . Fallows's third suggestion is the toughest to implement, "de-emphasizing credentials and eliminating Confucianism ." The logic: "A modern society needs good schools...
...This can't be the moral...
...When the 2.3 million veterans enrolled, they turned out to be phenomenally successful...
...But the underlying and unremitting theme of the Magaziner and Patinkin book is: "More like them" And that's probably a mistake, a tragic mistake from which we might not recover...
...Fallows saves his most extreme vitriol for IQ tests...
...Shut off from the relevant technology by the wary Japanese, the key to Samsung's rise was getting it instead from American companies...
...If we took Magaziner and Patinkin at their word on this, then the American success stories they cover—each involving crucial management decisions—could teach us nothing...
...was still in the race—is now a $40 billion firm...
...The deficiencies of our biggest corporations, which Magaziner and Patinkin chronicle so astutely, should be addressed with dispatch...
...Other countries have tools— traditional, ethnic solidarity—to help them get by in those circumstances...
...Magaziner and Patinkin call for shifting some defense spending to commercial spheres, programs to support the upgrading of worker skills, "surgical" trade responses (hitting the other guy precisely where it counts when an essential market appears closed to us), export financing support, sliding capital gains tax scales to encourage long-term investment, and an economic coordinating group "like the National Security Council ." With the exception of the NSC for economics and the surgical trade strikes (a nice idea on paper, but the basis for perpetual protectionist escalation in practice), I have little problem with such a list...
...the American colonies throw off the British...
...He uses the example of the GI Bill to great effect...
...Magaziner and Patinkin report the frightful truth that at the height of its battle in refrigerator compressor technology, not one GE refrigeration engineer ever visited the Far East—and this was not 1955 or 1965, but the early 1980s...
...our overall productivity is still way ahead as well...
...The authors are tireless globe trotters, reporting from Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, Singapore, Ireland, Louisville, and Providence, Rhode Island...
...Fallows writes: "Confucian societies are meant to be static...
...When it comes to recommendations, the authors may be diving off the deep end in implying that government support in the exact style of Japan, Korea, or Germany is the key ingredient to success in the newly globalized economy...
...Because any American renaissance, economic or otherwise, will be built upon the strength of our people, their everyday actions and aspirations...
...We talked him out of going to college and he's been here ever since" Fallows has several national policy suggestions to deal with these stultifying cultural trends...
...The hobo jungle Jim Fallows just wants us to be—or get back to being—our disorderly selves...
...Finally, Fallows argues passionately that America should remain open to immigrants...
...America's culture is America's greatest potential strength...
...Now he one-ups the anthropologists and sociologists, and perhaps the economists as well...
...Ordinary people matter because there are so many of them...
...what's more, service industries now drive most advanced manufacturing product development...
...At the same time, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was at the top of the bestseller lists, predicting American decline unless we turn inward and trim our obligations to others...
...culture never rears its head for them, no matter how indirectly...
...Finally, Magaziner and Patinkin appear to be nonplussed by any economic success beyond the U.S...
...There is Korea's Samsung, which despite entering the microwave oven business just 10 years ago—when Japan was far ahead and the U.S...
...productivity was a tiny fraction of Japan's...
...Chuck Yeager bends the Army's admission rules to get his chance to fly...
...My concern is with the implicit message: government as savior...
...More Like Us: Making America Great Again...
...At the same time, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was at the top of the bestseller lists, predicting American decline unless we turn inward and trim our obligations to others...
...And Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto's The Third Century was predicting the opposite—a renaissance—if we absorb and nurture our new wave of immigrants, give up our fixation with copying Japan, and acknowledge the central role of entrepreneurial firms...
...And to do so mainly through voluntary actions rather then state direction . . . Japan is strong because each person knows his place...
...For example, they are maddeningly imprecise about how such support in the U.S...
...Gilder foresaw a new Tom Peters is a frequent contributor to the The Washington Monthly...
...When it was proposed that the program apply to all veterans, the most prestigious members of the educational hierarchy were outraged: "Robert Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, warned in 1944 that when GI's came home, 'Colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles.' In the same ungenerous spirit, James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, said in 1945 that the Bill was 'distressing' because it did not `distinguish between those who can profit most by advanced education and those who cannot.' The Bill was clearly a scheme to push people beyond what their intelligence permitted...
...Ira Magaziner, Mark Patinkin...
...Fallows's thesis: America's real talent lies in disorder and vitality...
...And we are all too willing to chuck it all and go overseas...
...golden age if only our entrepreneurial spirit could be unfettered...
...So too does the slightest drop in America's market share in the world aircraft industry...
...The reader from Mars would also conclude that the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) had made no mistakes in choosing which industries and companies to support or neglect...
...According to them, Korea's growth is a cause for concern, not rejoicing...
...Voluntary behavior matters because it's too hard to supervise everyone all the time" In two brilliant chapters, Fallows contrasts "the Japanese talent for order" with "the American talent for disorder?' He could not be further from Magaziner and Patinkin: "America is not like Japan and can never be...
...The Silent War is arriving on the shelves at the same time as Jim Fallows's More Like Us: Making America Great Again.** Reporter Fallows one-upped the experts in 1981 with National Defense, which may well be the best book so far on America's crushing problems with defense management...
...Many of the examples are striking...
...Now the battle lines are to be drawn again: More like them...
...Older, less flighty, more seriously motivated than ordinary students, the early GI Bill scholars became the most successful group of students American universities have ever seen ." The fastest-growing and most successful entrepreneurial firms have always known that background means little, Fallows contends...
...But modern Americans should not use schools as a filter, sorting people into categories early in life . . . .The more that schooling matters, the harder it will be for anyone to overcome an initial handicap...
...And golden age if only our entrepreneurial spirit could be unfettered...
...He cites research indicating that the basic reason behind the tests is wrong...
...He quotes a 29-year-old vice president of Microsoft: "We have a lot of walk-on talent...
...Or consider Corning Glass, which made a go of its foray into optical wave guides—an improved instrument for transmitting radar, radio waves, or phone calls—even though the U.S...
...More like us...
...The chances are unlimited ." Of course, 3M is an anomaly among big outfits in America, but there are tens of thousands of would-be 3Ms sprouting up all over the United States, from the Rust Belt to the Asian- and Hispanic-founded entrepreneurial firms that are causing the economic surge in the Los Angeles Basin...
...While at work on this review, I was also conducting some research in Austin, Texas at 3M's new "breakaway" facility—the big, entrepreneurial company's first major move beyond St...
...Ferguson begged the powers that be to rein in the entrepreneurs via a higher capital gains tax and to provide incentives for sizeable Japaneselike consortia in vital markets...
...Abraham Lincoln is elected after countless defeats...
...It's true that American parents are still far more willing than Japanese or German to see their children engage in entrepreneurship...
...What is chipping away at American vitality, Fallows believes, is "an unnatural Confucian element" that began in the late nineteenth century when schools started to become the key to American mobility...
...The disproportionate share of the ambitious people of the world . . . fighting for a chance to use their ambitions in the United States," he says, "are America's major advantage over other countries, especially Japan ." Except for a footnote in the middle of the book, Fallows never discusses industrial policy...
...The charge sheet against America's biggest outfits (the only ones considered in this book), while familiar, is correct and bears repeating: We remain all too complacent vis-a-vis our overseas competitors...
...This connection sounds obvious, commonsensical and unavoidable, but it is not any of those things, and it was not inevitable that schools should have taken on the role they now play...
...Paul...
...James Fallows...
...Ferguson begged the powers that be to rein in the entrepreneurs via a higher capital gains tax and to provide incentives for sizeable Japaneselike consortia in vital markets...
...America is strong when people do not know their proper place and are free to invent new roles for themselves . . For better and for worse, this has always been a changeable, self-defining, let's-startover culture in which people with talent, energy, or luck believe they can invent their own lives" This is even reflected in our choice of heroes, Fallows asserts: "Most of our national myths are about people who won't listen to others and end up doing what supposedly can't be done...
...GE had some 30 engineers working on microwave ovens, while one Japanese competitor had 280...
...Industrial policy, implicit or explicit, is the essence of the Magaziner and Patinkin book...
...They look at microwaves in Korea, computers in Singapore, tool-and-dye in Germany, optical wave guides in Japan, even ball-point pens in Rhode Island...
...border...
...Fallows is on to something—this is the real threat to American vitality, not our unwillingness to be "more like them...
...The strength of The Silent War is the rich, highly believable reporting...
Vol. 21 • April 1989 • No. 3
