The Japanese competition is not the problem. Japanese workers are working just as hard to raise their families just like us. It is the company management that didn't know how to compete that is the problem.
I was seventeen, visiting a friend's house in Buffalo, New York. I walked up to his father — a man who had just lost his job at the local factory to Japanese competition — and told him I was sorry. That was his answer, and it has stayed with me ever since.
Buffalo in the 1980s was living through the same collapse as Cleveland, Detroit and Rochester. Friends would come to school and tell us their fathers had been fired from the local plant. Watching your friends' families face that kind of hardship changes how you see the world.
On TV there were scenes of autoworkers taking sledgehammers to Toyotas at union rallies, and congressmen smashing a Toshiba boombox on the Capitol lawn — an expression of a deeper frustration, that we were not as good as we thought we were.
I left Buffalo in my early twenties with a vague but consuming objective: understand why Japanese companies made such exceptional products, and bring that knowledge home. What I found was more complex than I expected. The question that started as why do they make better products? became what makes any company capable of competing globally, and why do so many who try, fail? Not every business is built to go global, and not every business should. For the businessman, what matters is knowing what kind of company you have, what kind you can become, and where the boundary between local and global should sit for you specifically. For young people looking at options for future careers, knowing what kind of company you are entering can be illuminating — an accounting or HR person in a Local-Local company will find a similar position in a Global-Local company very different.
The question what makes any company capable of competing globally, and why do so many who try, fail? is now at the center of everything I do. Products can cross borders. The people carrying them often cannot — not without a framework for understanding that what they encounter abroad isn't simply different customs, but a different common sense: a different operating system for perceiving, predicting and responding to social reality. The gap between knowing about a culture and being able to operate from within it is the gap that derails most international engagements, and almost no one addresses it seriously.
GARP was built to address it seriously.