[The following text is a translation of off-the-cuff remarks made
in Tokyo in 1979 by Mr. Konosuke Matsushita, Executive Advisor,
Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, Ltd., Japan. He was talking to
American businessmen. The remarks are startling to me because of the
foresight they showed (fourteen years ago) and because of the tone:
unusually frank for a Japanese. Matsushita (pronounced sort of like
"Mahts-shtah"), by the way, sells under a number of names in the coun-
try--most prominently Panasonic and Techniques. I found the text in the
previously cited _Total_Quality_Management_Principles_.]

We are going to win and the industrial west is going to lose out:
there's nothing much you can do about it, because the reasons for your
failure are within yourselves.

Your firms are built on the Taylor model; even worse, so are your
heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while the workers wield the
screwdrivers, you're convinced deep down that this is the right way to
run a business.

For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the
heads of bosses and into the hands of labor.

We are beyond the Taylor model. Business, we know,is now so complex and
difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment in-
creasingly unpredictable, competitive, and fraught with danger that
their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilization of
every ounce of intelligence.

For us, the core of management is precisely this art of mobilizing and
pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the
service of the firm. Because we have measured better than you the scope
of the new technological and economic challenges, we know that the
intelligence of a handful of technocrats, however brilliant and smart
they may be, is no longer enough to take them up with a real chance of
success.

Only by drawing on the combined brain power of all its employees, can a
firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today's environment.

This is why our large companies give their employees three to four
times more training than yours; this is why they foster within the firm
such intensive exchange and communication; this is why they seek
constantly everybody's suggestions and why they demand from the educa-
tional system increasing numbers of graduates as well as bright and
well-educated generalists; because these people are the lifeblood of
industry.

Your "socially-minded bosses", often full of good intentions, believe
their duty is to protect the people in their firms. We, on the other
hand, are realists and consider it our duty to get our people to defend
their firms which will pay them back a hundredfold for their dedica-
tion. By doing this, we end up by being more "social" than you.

[This text is available for download from the TQM BBS (301-585-1164).
Filename: CUFF.ZIP]