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The debate between formal planning and informal learning-between cerebral control and insightful adaptation-seems to smoke out all kinds of interesting things. Now Michael Goold has identified himself as a coauthor of the BCG Honda report, and argued that because "the report was commissioned for an industry in crisis," it had to take a "managerial rather than a "historical" perspective.
Might I suggest that Goold has inadvertently hit the proverbial nail right on the head. To argue that being managerial means the need to ignore the history is exactly the problem. The BCG report erred in its inferences about how Honda developed its strategy, and so misled any manager who read it.' Read that report and the implication is that you should lock yourself in your office and do clever competitive analysis. Honda never would have produced its strategy that way. Read, instead, Pascale's account of the Honda executives' own story and you get the impression you should sell your Rolls Royce, buy a pair of jeans, and start riding motorcycles around Des Moines, Iowa. There is a critical difference between doing "random experiments" and simply exposing oneself to the chance to be surprised by the marketplace and so to learn.
Reading Pascale's account, one has to ask: What makes the Japanese so smart? This is a story of success, not failure, yet they seemed to do everything wrong. True they were persistent, their managers were devoted to their company, and they were allowed the responsibility to make the important decisions on site. But when it came to strategic thinking, they hardly appear to be geniuses. Indeed, the story violates everything we believe about effective strategic management (and much that BCG imputed to those clever Japanese). Just consider the passive tone of...