Japanese Improvement Methods – Suitable to the World?

The Kaizen concept originated in Japan is now almost known to most of the world population who engaged in management. The concept of continuous improvement through small steps at a more frequent rate is a welcoming approach to many organizations. Of course, a number of industries, institutions, households, and personal lives have benefited from this method and other Japanese methods.

If this small incremental improvement method is more successful, then why have many industries from other countries failed to implement these simple Japanese methods of improvement? Is it because this approach needs more effort or more understanding or more inertia to begin? Are people are lazy? Only the Japanese can do this quickly? Is it cultural-based philosophy? So it doesn’t suit to other cultures in the world? These questions were gone very deep within me.

We know that many ancient cultures in Europe, Asia, Africa and other part of the world had exhibited wonders in the form of construction, art, education and great quality, engineering, science and technology centuries before. If so, how could they make it? There were no industrial management and statistical process control existed during the ancient times. How did they manage to build such everlasting arts and structure with great quality and engineering?

In my opinion, every culture has its own method of improvement, and these are natural to the human being who lives in the culture for many years. We lost our management techniques and simply adopted other cultural techniques which are very different to our way of thinking and working. There is no harm in following good things followed and succeeded by others. But some attempt to be made for what was followed in my own culture in this field of study and they could succeed without other cultural methods.

We should follow our own way of approach of benchmarking good practices within our culture and apply the principles to the way of working. Let us go deeper and identify the roots.