When comparing America with Japan, which was in vogue not too long ago, it soon became apparent that the two cultures employed two entirely different approaches. Japan favored improvement that was gradual and continuous, while America tended more towards a "stop and go" approach - start strong, plateau, fall behind and then lurch forward to outdistance our competitors.

America Falls Behind, then Lurches

An example of America’s approach was with the space program. Mankind’s imagination was captured by Russia’s successful satellite launch and subsequent orbit, and America quickly realized there was some catching up to do. Our country’s immediate response was to increase the budget towards educational programs that dealt with mathematics and science, as well as those programs that emphasized defense and space research. It was President Kennedy who declared that landing a man on the moon and returning him to earth would be a national goal. This goal had the desired effect of mobilizing America in a common pursuit of that very goal.

Kaizen Comes to America

Masaaki Imai established the Kaizen Institute in 1986 in order to help Western companies introduce the tools, systems and concepts of kaizen . Also in 1986, Imai published his book on Japanese management and taught America how to pronounce kaizen . This bestselling book has been translated into many languages and disseminated around the business world. The definition of kaizen, in simple terms, is the idea of continuous improvement that involves everyone in the organization at a minimal cost. Its place falls somewhere between the maintenance of the status quo and pure innovation. In an interview given after the distribution of his book, Imai reflected that the concept still had not been fully embraced by many companies in the Western world.

America - with a hint of Kaizen

American Kaizen

In contrast, the principles and concepts of kaizen are widely utilized in Japanese firms. For instance, firms in Tokyo use the concepts to spur on its workforce to greater levels of improvement. This has had great success in Japanese firms, as it is no great leap for them to embrace concepts that embody a national norm. The improvements that this concept brings are small, but cumulative, which may be why America has shown little interest, and kaizen fails , is that  as a culture, we are interested in instant gratification, and hesitant to put in the time and effort to stage experiment and gather metrics to achieve seemingly insignificant gains in the short term.

To combat this attitude, and address the value and importance of the kaizen principles, an event known as the Kaizen blitz was initiated. The purpose of this five-day event is to spend a portion of time addressing one single issue that has been deemed important in order to illustrate the simplicity and universality of the kaizen model. Unfortunately, though it may strive to improve the overall process, the event may have lost much of the original power, in the sense that in striving towards the improvement of the overall process, the original goal of a gradual change is overshadowed by the more pressing goal of immediate change. In other words, the kaizen blitz, which strives to fulfill the kaizen concept, instead serves a far more American approach.

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