Limiting Factors in the United States

To appreciate the different trends in the United States at the very time when the Japanese and Swedes were moving rapidly toward adopting small-group activities, let us turn to a consideration of the contributions of Charles Kepner and Benjamin Tregoe. The comparisons take on added meaning in the light of the aforementioned propensity of the Japanese to extend Western ideas developed for management personnel to blue-collar workers.

Kepner and Tregoe's approach to problem solving and decision making for individual managers was quite influential in American management circles in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time that the Japanese were developing quality circles, these researchers were crystallizing their technique for teaching individual managers how to solve problems systematically. In The Rational Manager , they claimed to have put 15,000 American managers through their courses (Kepner and Tregoe 1965).

An examination of their text leads to a number of interesting observations. First, the techniques espoused for identifying, prioritizing, and solving problems, though on an individual level, were not fundamentally so different from those being taught to blue-collar workers in Japan. In some respects, the Japanese techniques came to be more sophisticated! For example, the Japanese took another American development, value engineering, developed for engineers and used for assuring that the essential functions are provided at minimum overall cost, and introduced it for use among QC circle members. Many American managers would be ill-prepared to handle this technique. It is also a minor irony that in the late

1970s and early 1980s a number of major U.S. corporations explicitly absorbed some of the features of Kepner-Tregoe training into their quality-circle training materials.

In discussing the research of Rensis Likert, Kepner and Tregoe criticized his advocacy of group action and participative management for lacking problem-solving and decision-making techniques. In retrospect, we can see that what was required for the equivalent of small problem-solving groups at the shop and office floor to have emerged at this time was, first, for American managers to have combined Likert's ideas on group action with Kepner and Tregoe's ideas and, second, for them to have had the imagination to recognize that these ideas could apply to employees at all levels of the firm. The proprietary nature of the Kepner-Tregoe materials limited even other individuals from exploring those opportunities. More important, these ideas and solutions simply were not in the repertoire of practitioners. It was not until 1987 that Kepner and Tregoe announced in a promotional brochure a "totally new approach to Statistical Process Control which permits this powerful tool to be used not only by managers but other key shop floor workers and specifically develops trouble-shooting skills enabling them to participate in quality improvement opportunities." Even then, it was being limited to "key" shop floor workers.

We can see that the emphasis on the individual and on the decision-making authority of the manager blinded American managers and researchers at this time to the advantages of group action at the shop and office floor level. This is ironic; one of the typical criticisms of the Kepner-Tregoe training voiced by managers has been that once it is completed and you go back to your firm, there are no structured incentives for using the new approaches. This, of course, is exactly what the group framework of circles would have provided.

In the history of technology transfer—and we may think of these ideas on small-group activities as a kind of organizational technology—it is common that the inventors of a technology are not necessarily the commercializers. The jet engine, for example, was invented in England but successfully commercialized in the United States (Miller and Sawers 1970). The causes of this disjuncture form the basis for an interesting intellectual inquiry.

Why has American management been so slow in adopting the

ideas of American scholars in contrast to the interest shown in their work by foreign scholars and managers? Some explanations are suggested by the preceding analysis of the Kepner and Tregoe contributions and why they took the form they did.

Beyond that, Japan and Sweden are oriented to the outside world to an extent that is hard for Americans to understand. They perceive themselves as relying heavily on export industries to sustain their standards of living. Some one-third of Sweden's GNP is accounted for by exports. The Japanese widely believe that they are able to secure their national survival only by adding value to imported raw materials and then exporting the product. Both Japanese and Swedes thus believe that their success—indeed, their very survival as nations—depends on their ability to search out and absorb ideas from abroad rapidly and efficiently. In both countries, if a solution to a problem is not immediately at hand, it is second nature to management to look for solutions outside their national borders. To succeed in foreign markets, they have learned to be open to different cultures. In Japan this stems in large part from the "catchup" mentality that has dominated the thinking of industry and government officials over the past one hundred years. To catch up you had to be prepared to adopt the better ideas developed in the more advanced Western nations. Moreover, defeat by the United States in World War II and subsequent occupation by a foreign power for the first time in Japan's long, proud history had a profound humbling effect that is hard for foreigners to understand. In the case of Sweden, the humility necessary for strong receptivity to foreign ideas seems to derive more from being a relatively small nation. As one industry official explained to me: "Swedes believe that there is always something better somewhere else. It is inconceivable for them with only eight million people and such limited resources to think that they have arrived at the best solution to a given problem. Therefore, they are always looking for ideas from abroad." The net result is that for diverse reasons mapping their foreign environment in a systematic fashion is a well-institutionalized practice in both countries.

One must be careful not to overgeneralize these observations. For example, the Swedes have been decidedly slower than Americans in grasping the competitive implications of Japanese management practices as related to small-group activities. I would specu-

late that this is both because the Swedes have been more buffered from the strong winds of Japanese competition and because their ideas on democratization have prevented them from understanding what the Japanese have to offer.

Nothwithstanding, the situation of the United States is very different from the situations of Japan and Sweden. Until recently, Americans appeared confident of their own managerial abilities and technology and not very attuned to learning from abroad. Even in the area of hard technology, not to speak of organizational technology, American companies maintained few listening posts in Japan relative to the size of the Japanese effort in the United States. Indeed, even with all that has happened between 1970 and 1985, it can be said without the slightest fear of contradiction that U.S. monitoring of global developments in technology has been, and continues to be, woefully inadequate. Yet increasingly our firms operate in an environment where new developments in management and technology are occurring outside U.S. borders (cf. Row-and 1985:15). To take the example of organizational technology, we have seen how few American managers are directly aware of the contributions of Emery, Trist, and Thorsrud, and they are even less familiar with the Japanese gurus of small-group activity. With a vast domestic market, the United States cannot be said to be export-oriented to the extent of Japan or Sweden. American managers were accustomed to being on top, and until recently there was simply not the same incentive to learn from others.

Moreover, the ideas put forward by American behavioral scientists seemed to fit much better with existing organizational practices in Japan and with the prevailing Japanese managerial philosophy than they did in the United States. The Japanese scholar Takezawa Shin'ichi caught the flavor of this in the following remarks:

The behavioral science model of management, however, is not perceived as an antithesis of the organizational reality as it might be in the United States. Instead, Japanese managers tend to accept the model as an idealized goal which essentially lies in the same direction as their own behavioral orientation. Often, they are puzzled to find out that American management in practice fits the scientific management model far better than that of the behavioral sciences.

(Takezawa 1976:31)

This difference provides an explanation for why these ideas were so eagerly received in Japan and why, once combined with small-group activities, they led to a choice opportunity. Similar judgments could be made in comparing Swedish and American management responses.

In the United States these same ideas did not lead to a choice opportunity; rather, they were seen as threatening by many managers and union leaders. The prevailing adversary relationships between managers and workers and managers and unions constitute a formidable obstacle to the adoption of new ideas about organizing work in a cooperative fashion. The potential improvements in productivity obtainable through cultivation of worker's loyalty and cooperation have tended either to be seen as trivial or dismissed as unachievable. In short, the gap between existing practices in American industry and the new managerial philosophies has been so great as to make search for and adoption of innovative solutions problematic. In the unionized manufacturing sector, even when top management has pushed in new directions, it has often been unable to have its ideas implemented. The everyday routines of individual workers, middle managers, and union officials seem grounded in struggles for power and control in a way that often defeats promising initiatives.

The upshot of all this is that small-group activities were not a serious part of American management's agenda of solutions in the 1960s and 1970s. Nor was the issue the province of any particular managerial level or department. It is no wonder then that Japanese and Swedish managers acted more quickly than American management in searching out, adopting, and transmitting ideas about small-group activities.