Beating Japan

This extraordinarily knowledgeable and closely reasoned landmark book offers a devastating rebuttal to the myth of Japanese industrial and manufacturing invincibility.

The experienced authors draw upon fifteen years of visits to Japan analyzing Japanese companies in order to illuminate not only the widely publicized image of Japanese successes but the structural weaknesses and management flows that have led to an increasing number of humiliating setbacks for Japanese corporate giants. The authors reveal why the same Japanese organizations that have ridden to the top of world trade on a wave of autos and electronic products have crashed in a variety of endeavors that range from real estate and banking to aero space and telecommunications and the jury is still out on such key areas of modern global enterprise as computers and digital technology The reader comes to see how, amazingly often, in planning and performance, the emperors of industry have proven to have no clothes, which leads to the second main thrust of this book: how U.S. industry can capitalize on these cracks in Japan Inc.'s armor to turn the economic tide more strongly in America's favor.

Industry by industry, the authors spot- light exactly how American companies can profit from current vulnerability. There are many beckon- ing opportunities for the laggard U.S. company to do its homework, maximize its strengths, exploit Japan's economic weaknesses, and play the competition game as it should and must be played to win.

Beating Japan is a welcome wakeup call after the abandon-hope business books that have unnerved a decade of European and American readers. Positive and persuasive, packed with practicality, here is a timely and utterly convincing blueprint for American economic survival and supremacy in the 1990s.