In case you haven’t noticed – because you haven’t bought a television set, a car or a newspaper recently – Japan and Germany have been doing pretty well. Their factories are running at a fast clip, their banks are brimming with money.In Paris, the signs taped to storefront windows that until recently were in English or Arabic are now in Japanese. In New York, the trendy foreign tourists that were only yesterday called Eurotrash are treated with deference – at least until locals ascertain that they are not from Dusseldorf or thereabouts. This phenomenon is mercifully too new to make the Japanese or Germans smug. They still remember that their present wealth may be as transient as the poverty of only a generation ago. When the wheel of fortune turns, as it surely will, the travellers will want to keep their fond memories and not carry an unnecessary burden of resentment.
Sumo Wrestler
This is a most appropriate attitude, for the signs that a zenith may have already been reached are starting to show up. Tokyo’s stock market, as sturdy as a sumo wrestler only six months ago, now looks as fragile as a chrysanthemum. And Bonn’s coffers may soon be turned over to sticky-fingered commissars an hour’s drive to the east. Even more threatening is a situation developing in the United States that could grey the wisest heads at either end of the new economic axis: a softening economy in the market that has made both reborn nations so much dough. If America tightens its fist, its leading vendor nations will surely feel the squeeze.Slower economic growth abroad – let alone a recession – may not mean much to most Americans. But it should, particularly to IBM and anyone that depends on IBM for a living. This is because IBM didn’t make a dime last year from the half of its business that it did at home. It made all its money overseas, and the two biggest national markets IBM exploited were in Japan and Germany. Diminished profits in these countries would seriously harm an already weakened IBM, which needs to make easy money someplace while it figures out what to do about its future. There is a case to be made that some short bad times in IBM’s two top customer nations could turn out to be the best thing for the company. The argument begins with a sobering difficulty and ends with a new awareness and discipline. We have heard this rhetoric in other times and places, however, and we find it easiest to analyze when put in a simple, somewhat abstracted form. Its essence is that one should periodically bang one’s head against a wall because it feels so much better when one stops. For the record, and to underline our particular distillation of this theory of betterment through suffering, we would like to describe the exact moment at which we became aware of the breathtaking stupidity of such thinking.
By Hesh Wiener
During the height of the Vietnam war, we overheard an extremely bright college student explain to another why the grossest excesses of that conflict were going to be good in the long run. Terrible things done for bad reasons would eventually provoke a moral reaction, went the student’s argument, and maybe even a revolution, it continued. At the time, we were convinced that the class we were walking to wasn’t going to teach us a lot more if we flunked or if the professor hit us with his boring book. Also, until that very moment, we believed that this student, who was doing a lot better than we were in the subject, was so much brighter than us that we ought to listen to his every word. Well, we did come out ahead. We had one of those too rare moments of awakening when one realizes that the kid getting As was just a crazy geek and that there is still room in this world for common sense. This all brings us to the nature of thought in Tokyo, Bonn and Armonk, the three most influential capitols of the present world. In each, there seems to be just a little overdependence on one idea. And in each, that idea may be reaching the end of its run, at least for now. Naturally, because the ideas in each capitol are the result of nature’s most
unlikely bit of bad chemistry, the human brain, they are all good, but in the wrong place for the time. Tokyo seems to be absolutely convinced that engineering is the answer. Electronic engineering, automotive engineering, financial engineering and even a little social engineering are all held in high esteem. Bonn, with the help of Frankfurt, banks on accumulation. Money, production capacity and influence are piled up for their own sake. In Armonk, it all comes down to marketing. We won’t elaborate. And we won’t begin to advise our wise neighbours in Japan and Germany, either. But we can’t resist sharing our observations with IBM. Nor should we.
Customer trust
Our livelihood depends on Big Blue, too. IBM’s leaders might want to send a large delegation of mainframe marketers to Japan so they can become inspired about engineering. They would return endowed with the belief that making their huge machines smaller is an honourable mission. And if they were also imbued with a feeling that large computers can once again become disposable things rather than permanently installed racks for successive generations of electronic circuits, that might constitute progress, too. A brief side trip to quality control school wouldn’t hurt, either. In Germany, these same executives could assiduously study ways to sow rather than harvest such things as goodwill. The reservoir of customer trust that once seemed infinite is visibly diminished now. Here and there jetsam is poking up through the surface, making navigation hazardous and proving that there is indeed a pollution problem. But is this sort of excursion really necessary? One who is unfamiliar with the fundamental problem of education might well think so. An untrained observer might point out with great accuracy that all the evidence IBM needs is at hand, and add that certain lessons are best learned discreetly. A visible effort by IBM to rectify its problems would prove needlessly embarrassing. Sadly, people don’t learn that way, not even IBMers. It is easiest to absorb information in an unfamiliar setting, one that poses the greatest possible threat: the unknown. Also, it is often better to learn from the other fellow’s misfortunes. Even though the lessons learned are indirect and therefore not as effective, the tuition costs are much lower. Copyright (C) 1990 Technology News of America Co Inc.
