Challenge Facing American Business FACING

INTRODUCTION--The Big Mad about American Business . . .

"[America's future] will be grimly habitable and our founding fathers' dream of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will have become a nightmare if the author's many dire warnings come true."

Brumbach spends pages dismissing this 192-page diatribe of "ruminations" by Terry, but he still finds interesting Terry's basic tenet: "He regards [growth-driven capitalism--an established paradigm] as an irrational, self-destructive economic system, the sole purpose of which is to provide goods for consumption, at ever-increasing levels 'dominated by immoral and rapacious corporations, at once out of control and in control of us by driving a widening wedge between us and the social and political ideals of our founding fathers.'"

Brumbach (and Terry) is hardly alone in assessing recent American business leadership with strident terminology. Littleton Maxwell of the Business Information Center at the University of Richmond (VA) has recently reviewed a work by James Moore, a Cambridge (MA) management consultant and author, who "forecasts the death of competition as it is now known and predicts a future of organized chaos." [Emphasis added.] Heller has quoted a 1994 Fortune magazine article, describing a long-time U.S. business star, Proctor & Gamble, as "the ultimate hierarchy--to be unkind, an inwardly pointed pyramid of anal-retentive order-takers loathed by competitors and re

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LL show arrows connecting one subbox or line in each chart with another, and what the arrows signify is INFORMATION--either instructions or ideas or performance data or customer addresses, whatever. The essence of any rubric that is going to work will always be: control and passage of data. Management by Objectives (MBO), to move further into the past, was given a fair shot as a management tool in the '80s and early '90s. As Heller succinctly viewed that period, though, "MBO had only one defect: it didn't work." One entrepreneur who did away with the practice, Paula Marshall-Chapman of The Bama Companies, Inc.--a three-billion-biscuit per year supplier to McDonald's, found the most onerous part of MBO, the connecting of annual performance reviews of employees with salary adjustments "demeaning . . . It took the joy out of doing anything for the company." So she threw the whole thing out, did a benchmarking survey of similar companies, and increased pay levels across the board to 25 percent above the industry average. Came then: Total Quality Management(TQM)--to which Ms. Marshall-Chapman aspired, along with much of the world. Heller noted by 1995, however, that this methodology was already under attack as "counterprodu

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