Innovate or Perish: Managing the Enduring Technology Company in the Global Market

The Global Picture from a Lofty Perch

Credit the thin atmosphere. As I dangled on a ski lift climbing above up to 11,000 feet above sea level last winter, an insight into an economic truth I had learned on a ski lift years before suddenly came to mind.

The initial lift trip took place in the late 1980s. Ascending the snowy slopes of Sunday River, Maine, I listened intently as my lift partner, a Jewish émigré from Poland who had worked many years in America as an electrical engineer for Japanese-owned NEC, spoke reassuringly into my half-frozen ears about the fearful specter of that Asian country’s phoenix rising in the East.

“Sure, Ed, everyone is convinced that this is the end of American industrial dominance,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Everyone is writing bestselling books about how we are all going speak Japanese and eat sushi. Rockefeller Center is being sold to the Japanese. Well, not to worry. We are cowboys. They can’t invent anything. They’re not allowed to think. They have to be in agreement with everyone. They will never be able to outthink us in America.”

The man was a prophet in his own (adopted) country. Just two years later, the Japanese industrial “apocalypse” had vanished. Poof, and the Rising Sun was yesterday’s hysteria.

Twenty years later, again on a ski lift, I remembered that engineer’s prophetic view of Asian cultural stumbling blocks as I thought about the current debate raging over globalization’s impact on our country’s supremacy in innovation. ...