Management practices in Japan differ from those prevalent in the West partly because of different cultural assumptions regarding the basic character of humanity itself. Whereas opinion in Western tradition tends to favour the pessimistic assumption, Japanese tradition (as represented,...

Proposes that features unique to Japanese industrial management practice such as excessive emphasis on training, a mainly intuitive, pragmatic approach to problems of productivity and quality (as against exclusive dependence on scientific methods), the ethos of hard work, the quest for...

This article presents the view that the remarkable post‐war improvement of Japanese product quality is attributable primarily to human factors in addition to experience gained in war‐time manufacture of military hardware. Other factors responsible for the phenomenon include organisation for...

Describes a microcomputer software system for total productivity measurement in manufacturing organi‐zations, named TOPROD, developed by the author. Beginning with a discussion advocating the greater use of total productivity ratios in industry, the six main programs of the software are...