ABSTRACT
Business organizations have engaged in periodic assessment of their performance since the beginning of the industrial era. However, until the early 1980s, the process of self-assessment was largely an individual undertaking. Each business carved out its own design of the assessment process that suited its needs and environment. Such customized assessments, and the resulting course corrections, however, turned out to be grossly inadequate in terms of providing the strategic advantage that was expected from the self-assessment. The early 1980s witnessed Japanese industries strategically assaulting American and European companies with unprecedented ferocity and taking large chunks of market share, particularly in automobile and electronic industry. Several studies by westerners ascribed the substantial Japanese gains in competitive grounds primarily to ‘a triumph of sheer manufacturing virtuosity’ (Hayes and Pisano, 1996). There is wide agreement about what caused the mass market movement towards Japanese products during the 1970s and 1980s. It was not the relatively low cost of their products or protection available from Japanese government, as had been conveniently conjectured by many industrial experts, instead, it was the sizeably low incidence of defects, high reliability, and durability of their products that triggered the momentum in favour of the Japanese companies (ibid.).
