Customer Reviews

Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge

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Japanese business has grown and thrived. The organizations are built on a paternal structure with lifetime employment at one company: virtually unheard of anymore in American business. The employees are trained and work in all facets of a company, not just in one department. They are expected to work long hours and not be home too early lest the neighbors think that they rank low in value at work and the honor of the family name be put in jeopardy. They begin training children as early as four years of age to groom them for the most prestigious universities.

Amazing to look back at the garbage that was written and eaten up by paranoid US management. Life time employment, company loyalty , and payment based on tenure are the exact things that have undone the Japanese companies. Sorry Bill but you should have picked a letter earlier in the alphabet.

William Ouchi claims that American productivity is stagnant or declining and he's right. But what he fails to mention is that corporations are firing their workforce here , in favor of nations where they can get people to work for slave wages, in order to increase productivity ( this done courtesy of american tax payer). And profits for these Companies are not stagnant or declining, but are reaching record-breaking highs. The fact that this is being done renders any of the points Ouchi makes in this book invalid. Why learn any lessons from Ouchi about how to increase productivity in the US when you can just fire your work force, pack up and go to another country while a lazy tax payer like myself foots the bill?