Back in the late 1980s, I got interested in the Japanese concept of kaizen, the imperative to improve continuously in the workplace.
I read about it and interviewed people about and I lamented the fact that American businesses just didn’t get it. While big Japanese companies were constantly putting out products that were a little bit better than their previous issues, American companies seemed to crank out the same tired products year after year.
On the race track of corporate competitiveness, American companies seemed doomed back then to be lapped by the Japanese. (And, indeed, American automakers have been hurt by kaizen-driven Japanese companies.)
But somewhere along the line it occurred to me that I had it all wrong. Sure, kaizen works fine in the Japanese culture with their fewer and bigger intergenerational companies. But America has something that works better in our culture of small businesses that come and go quickly: entrepreneurship.
American companies improve through a kind of creative destruction that comes from entrepreneurship. Garage tinkerers in the United States invariably come up with inventions (think Bill Gates or the YouTube guys) that blow past the competition. The existing companies must get better quickly or die.
In other words, American businesses improve not so much by little measurable bits but by great entrepreneurial lurches.
All this came to mind last week when USC’s Marshall School of Business released a survey of entrepreneurs in Southern California.
It showed that opening your own business is a bracing experience. Ninety-four percent said their entrepreneurial journey was enjoyable. The urge to strike out on your own apparently can be a little spontaneous because a surprising 49 percent said they did no formal feasibility study or even wrote a business plan. Still, 86 percent reported revenue growth over the last two years, and more than a third saw their sales double.
Many local entrepreneurs said it was one of the great experiences of their lives, said Tom O’Malia, director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at USC. “Not only would they do it again, many of them already have,” he said. “More than half were on at least their second startup.”
All this is reassuring. For our economic system to work, entrepreneurship must be rewarding and fun so it will continue to draw the best and brightest. Entrepreneurship is crucial in keeping the American economy and competitive with Japan and other countries. And, I dare say, entrepreneurship is crucial in keeping America itself strong.
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It’s obvious that there are at least three relatively fast and cheap ways for Los Angeles to relieve its traffic congestion: Create one-way thoroughfares, synchronize traffic lights and install more left-turn signals. (What is L.A.’s aversion to left-turn signals, anyway?)
So it was great that the city decided last week to install synchronized traffic lights and install 33 left-turn signals. But geez, what took them so long to make this obvious decision?
It’s mystifying why local governments aren’t more proactive about taking some of these relatively simple and cheap steps to relieve traffic. It’s more mystifying why more people don’t demand it of them.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at
[email protected]
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