Over the past several years considerable progress has been made at Beta in increasing senior management awareness of the importance of reliability and manufacturing excellence principles, a condition that is difficult to find in most manufacturing plants. But this progress is not good enough. Without additional progress, jobs may continue to move to countries with lower labor costs; the sad thing is that it's just not necessary. The U.S. and so-called "Western" manufacturers can compete with the low labor costs of Asian and other foreign manufacturers, particularly those that are less labor intensive. A case study will be provided in Chapter 3 on this under the heading "Offshoring/Outsoucing." Moreover, consider the gains in market share by Toyota, Honda, and others that are making cars in the U.S. using essentially the same workforce and technology. The issue is NOT workforce capability or technology. It is management. U.S. managers, Beta's included, are often much too focused on costs and cost cutting and not enough on processes and overall performance. Costs are a consequence of your business system design, and market share and output are more important than costs per se, we've seen lots of studies indicate that cost cutting has a very low probability of success. Consider General Motors and Ford, who have both done extraordinary cost cutting over the past two decades, all the while continuing to lose market share and experience declines in overall business performance. Layoffs and...