LESTER THUROW
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possibly imitate the Japanese in this respect-the cultural differences
are too great.
LESTER THUROW: I never said that we should imitate the Japanese. I am
saying that they are going to put a tremendous pressure on us to do
things differently-not exactly the way they do them, but as well as
they do them.
ROBERT NOZICK: How did the Japanese select their workers at the San
Diego plant? Did they take over an existing plant?
LESTER THUROW: No, the San Diego plant was new. But the Japanese
have had phenomenal success in taking over existing Motorola
plants. They took over Motorola in Chicago, where it was dying,
going bankrupt, and, using exactly the same workers, they turned
the whole thing around within a year.
American companies are now trying to learn from the Japanese
style of management. It is a process of pushing the decision-making
farther down in the enterprise; instead of having your boss decide
what to do, you decide. In an engine assembly line in a Japanese
automobile factory, each worker orders his parts for the next day.
That makes the worker responsible for predicting how many engines
he is going to build the next day. So inventory control, instead of
being a management function, has become a worker function.
If
you
order the parts for three engines then you are under tremendous
pressure to assemble three engines.
The Japanese are making their system work in America. Let me
give you an example of one thing they do at Sony in San Diego. You
know that when you buy a piece of consumer electronics, it usually
has
a
tag which says it has been inspected by "5101" or something
like that. Instead of having this lillIe tag, they put a lillIe card with a
picture of the inspector and his or her name. On the back of the card
it says, "I've just inspected this product for you and I'm sure it's
going to work, but if it doesn't, put this card in the mail." You just
know that if your name and your picture are on a product you are
going to do a slightly better job of inspecting it.
The Japanese also excel educationally. The other day, the New
York Telephone Company said it had to interview fifteen people to
find one person literate enough to be a telephone operator in New
York City. Japanese schoolchildren outperform American school–
children in mathematics at every grade level. College entrants' test
scores have been falling for fifteen years in the United States. We
need to bring our educational standards up to theirs.
American business is also bogged down by our legal system. In
