ABSTRACT
As I mentioned in the opening chapter, in September 1990 I headed to Japan for AIESEC’s World Theme Conference on Sustainable Development. This was an opportunity of a lifetime. A management student at that time, I was all too aware of the rise of the Asian tiger economies, especially Japan. The West was spellbound by the revolution of total quality management (TQM), which the American statistician Edward Deming had introduced in Japan in the 1970s. The Japanese had perfected TQM through their kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement or ‘change for the better’. In fact, I wrote an undergraduate paper on Japanese management techniques for one of my courses, singing the praises of ‘just in time’ (JIT) production methods and the cultural concept of wa, or harmony. I had also read about the shadow side of Japan’s economic miracle – of how the production line system exploited employees, who worked long hours performing meaningless tasks under poor factory conditions.
