The thing about Kaizen is that you have to have processes and products to improve upon in the first place. Japanese companies are very big on things like PDCA and 4M change management, but the idea is to achieve continuous incremental improvement while preventing quality from backsliding when you already have something good.
It doesn’t work very well for product planning or business planning, where Japanese companies rely more on ideas like innovation, market research (which is an inexact science at best) and, increasingly, corporate cultures that reward trying new things regardless of how well thought out.
We are being outpaced by competitors in the rest of Asia, so there is a sense of urgency throughout industry to speed up the pace of innovation for the sake of the next new thing, which leads to bad decisions at the outset sometimes.
Kaizen is still there, quietly making things a little bit better with each PDCA iteration, but it is no longer a driving force behind corporate policymaking. As an in-house translator for a major manufacturer, I saw this process unfold before my very eyes during the last decade and a half. And Kaizen sounds more and more like a relic of the '80s and '90s these days.
