Implementing TPM

2Success of TPM in Japan—JIPM

Prominent Japanese businessmen created a furor in recent years with their claim that Americans have become lazy, arrogant, and complacent. Those charges were overblown. America is still the most productive nation in the world, but its position as an economic leader is threatened. Whether the charges are true or not, they reflect a perception that many Japanese managers harbor regarding their counterparts. The reason they feel this way is simple. Americans, suffering from a “not invented here” syndrome, have failed to embrace superior methods and procedures.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Europe was the economic superpower. Americans not only gladly imported European methods, people, ideas, ...