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In the early 1980s Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence (Harper & Row, 1982). The book tells the story of 43 American companies and the eight basic principles of management that made them successful. The bestseller marked the beginning of a growth era in business publishing.
About the same time another book was published that didn't find quite as wide of an audience as Peters' and Waterman's, but it was equally reflective of the angst in American business as U.S. companies struggled to compete with rising foreign competition. Robert Hall's provocatively tided Zero Inventories (DowJones-Irwin, 1983) described Japanese production methods and what the just-in-time movement of material was all about. These concepts eventually evolved into what is today known as lean manufacturing.
I recendy caught up with Hall and asked him how he thinks U.S. industry is doing today, more than 20 years later, in its pursuit of stockless production. Like a good academic, Hall hesitated to offer any thoughts without having any relevant data or research to...