Laughing Stock

clipped from www.ft.com Japanese car companies, which overtook US ones in the early 21st century, leading to the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler last year, used a method of industrial innovation called kaizen, usually translated as “continuous improvement”. Meanwhile, Detroit perfected the technique of occasional improvement. As the Big Three – GM, Ford and Chrysler – slid deeper into trouble over decades of complacency, union obstructionism and mismanagement, they would occasionally stage a temporary recovery, with some new car or initiative prompting books and magazine articles about a Detroit revival. This all proved to be illusory, with Detroit’s detour from making cars (ground that it had in effect ceded to foreign rivals by the mid-1990s) to producing “light truck” sports utility vehicles as the biggest deception of the lot. These were just upward blips on a long, steady descent from technological dominance to global laughing stock.