MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation, Operations Management and Research

America’s Most Successful Export to Japan: Continuous Improvement Programs

By Dean M. Schroeder and Alan G. Robinson

April 15, 1991

JAPANESE SUCCESS with some management practices may depend on cultural factors that are not present in the West. But that is not true as far as continuous improvement programs are concerned; CIPs were developed in the United States long before they were introduced into Japan by U.S. trainers working for die post-WWII occupation authorities. Schroeder and Robinson synthesize the fascinating history of improvement programs, from the early “awards scheme” of a Scottish shipbuilder to the present day. They propose four fundamental principles that can help managers build the competitive advantage no one can steal—a constantly improving, highly productive, and committed workforce. Dean M. Schroeder is Schulz Professor of Management at the College of Business Administration, Valparaiso University. Alan G. Robinson is Assistant Professor at the School of Management, University of Massachusetts at Amberst.

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Another area in which U.S. firms have often lagged behind their overseas competitors is in exploiting the potential for continuous improvement in the quality and reliability of their products and processes. The cumulative effect of successive incremental improvements and modification to established products and processes can be very large and may outpace efforts to achieve technological breakthroughs.
---Made in America
MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity1

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT Programs (CIPs) unleash employee experience and I creativity to improve both products and processes. They are often cited as the most important difference between the Japanese and Western management styles and as a major factor in Japan’s economic success.2Yet the CIP was conceived, developed, and brought to maturation in the United States. After World War II, the U.S. government helped to export it to Japan, where it was well received and promptly flourished. Despite the long history and well-documented benefits of such systems, few U.S. companies have invested effort in CIPs equivalent to that of their Japanese competitors. Japanese companies have put almost forty years into the development and refinement of CIPs, or kaizen programs as they are known in Japan, and have brought the art and science of managing them to new levels of sophistication. The aim of these programs is precisely to design and implement a system whose natural equilibrium is constant... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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