It is also worth noting that US management is notoriously bad at the actual management. Toyota v. US car manufacturers did not look like a fair fight when Deming was in the ascendant, and it is hard to tell given the scales involved but it looks a lot like the US has been outmanoeuvred in all aspects of industry by the Asians.

US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.

Exceptions abound in the details.

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arkh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is, the Toyota methods relies on people on every level to work to improve processes. If you're an employee and know you'll be there 10 years down the line or even until you retire, you have an incentive to improve said processes.

Now check most Western companies: since the 70 / 80, everything is about reducing headcount. Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream. So why would an employee try to improve things for the company when they know there is no future for them there? Better improve their own career and future prospect. So yeah, things like Kaizen are doomed to fail until things change.

	▲	ghosty141 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream You are missing something here imo, very few companies actually increase pay (or to be more clear, show a clear way to get there) enough to make it attractive enough to stay there for long periods of time. From my experience here in Germany the people staying at companies for a long time are those who don't focus on their career.

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pjc50 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:

- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)

- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)

- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)

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trevvr 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Where does someone like Rover fit in to your matrix? If I can respectfully recommend. If you can go have a read of "We sell our time no more" by Paul Stewart.

Tory governance and fiscal policies had all the responsibility for Leyland, Hillman and more importantly Rover.

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pjc50 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I have to admit it's not that deeply researched. That book sounds interesting.

For Rover in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Venture_Holdings stands out. Similar to Maplin and Toys R Us, an example of the owner-management taking a large amount of cash out of a business that was declining.

	▲	regularfry 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What's particularly interesting here is that one of the success cases (BMW era Mini) was built on a Rover design. They picked it up and ran with it - basically gutted the electrics and power-train to match their existing systems and supply chains - but it was already in flight when BMW came on. That factory was fascinating to work in, looking back on it I saw a lot of Deming-compatible stuff going on that I wasn't equipped to recognise at the time. There was strong German representation in factory management, lots of interaction with people coming and going from Munich all the time. But the production line staff had a large agency contingent so it didn't have the "job for life" ethos that the Toyota Way would say is essential.

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gzread an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

... do you think Japan doesn't believe in freedom and rule of law?

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renewiltord 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fortunately, once we impose a wealth tax on corporations we can solve this. Billionaire corporations should not exist.

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pjc50 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the problems of US corporations are due to being over-capitalized, they're all to do with interactions with the political and media sphere plus unnecessary conflict with the staff.

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renewiltord 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If no corporation is allowed more than 1 million dollars (10 years of median income) then 10 average people can counter a single corporation. That’s a good ratio.

	▲	pjc50 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's also impossible to have a larger business than a restaurant, or almost any kind of technological or manufacturing industry. The limited liability corporation has existed for hundreds of years for a very good reason. Heck, even things like shipping, the oldest insured industry, become impossible. Corporations used to have minimum capital requirements that were roughly in the region of a year's average income. https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/medi... ("corporation has too much money" and "individual has too much money" are different problems; Elon Musk is a problem in the way that Apple isn't)

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b112 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's too arbitrary, and you say that as if a billion dollars is a lot of money.

It's not.

There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!

It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.

Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.

An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.

I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.

Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"

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mcherm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You write: > The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.

But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".

We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.

	▲	b112 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We might presume that was the goal, yet it wasn't explicitly stated. And many have a goal of generic wealth redistribution, and will inject such into any conversation about large companies. One might note the unrestrained concern about fluid capital acquisition, in the post I replied to. It's not having billions in infrastructure that was cited, nor having a large number of employees, both metrics of size, but instead having fluid, unused capital. If we wish to constrain upon size, there needs to be nuance, conjoined with the specific industry, and even sub-industry. Some capital equipment costs can be enormous. Should we work to prevent financing such via stored profit? Should we work to force companies to finance, then pay off, just to feed the banks, rather than store and then spend? Should we tax so that "big ideas" may never occur? I think far more would be gained by ensuring taxation just stays fair between smaller and larger company structures. There's a lot of book-keeping that can be done as a large company, to hide profits, that cannot be done when you're a small mom and pop.