TITLE : M-FORM SOCIETY: HOW AMERICAN TEAMWORK CAN RECAPTURE THE COMPETITIVE EDGE, THE.*

PREFACE

Lastspring,I had a parking-lotconversation with a friend.It was one of those fifteen-minute delectations at the end of an evening,an opportunity for two ordinary people to plumb for just a moment the problems of civization.lt was the kind of conversation best held in the semidarkness of the parking lot ofthe Chinese restaurant, where the dim light camouflages our conamonness and permits us to discuss problems of State,to be for a moment Plato, Hobbes,or Adam Smith.

As it happens,my partner in this dialogue was John Doyle,a man who was trained as an engineer and who now serves as vice-president for research and development of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation, where he oversees the stream ofinvention that is his company's lifeblood. Five years ago,John was reading books on mmanagement, creativity at work, and productivity.More recently,he has been reading books on economic history. Like many of us, he has been wondering why we feel this persistent economic malaise,why we doubt the staying power of the business recovery that was underway by spring of l983.Some of the books he has been reading are very good at detailing the woes of American industry, others have argued that our present state of economic decline is both inevitable and irreversible.John, however, has the mind of a scientist. He is a skeptic. He is skeptica1 of the idea that anything is inevitable, that anything is impossible,that any widely believed theory is correct. In fact,he observed as he finally headed for his car(an American product)"You know that most ofthe truly major inventions were impossible. At the time they were invented,all of the prevailing belief explained exactly why they would not work. After the invention appeared, the scholars developed new theories to explain its existence."

It was in that spirit that I sat down to write this book. Everyone knows that teamwork between business and govemment is impossible in America. Everyone knows that interest-group politics in Western nations are inevitable and that they are inevitably paralyzing to the nation. We have extensive theories in economics and political science that explain why this is so. Perhaps those beliefs are superstitious. Perhaps we can develop teamwork without giving up our freedoms. In this book, I describe the ways in which I believe we can achieve just such a state of teamwork.

My first book was titled Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the lapanese Challenge. In that book, I used the example of teamwork in the Japanese company as a way to challenge the pessimism of those Americans who believe that teamwork on the job is not possible, that there must always be an adversarial relationship between manager and worker. The book consisted largely of my description of an American company, which I called Company Z. Company Z had on its own developed a very successful form of teamwork, a combination of discipline and support, of collaboration and individual effort, that has made it one of the great success stories of our time. What was interesting about Company Z was that it had many of the appearances of a Japanese company, although it was in every way American.

In this book, I once again retum to the Japanese example, but this time to reveal that cooperation and teamwork are possible between business and govemment. Once again, my goal is not to suggest that we should emulate the Japanese, but rather to bring into sharp relief a clearer understanding of what we are and what we can be. The key is to use the Japanese example as the foil against which we see ourselves more clearly. Once again, I point to an extensive example of successful cooperation in America, this time in a study of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

When I sat down to write the final chapter of Theory Z, I intended to write a grand statement on what our government should do to go along with the efforts of our managers. It was only with all of the horses pulling together, I reasoned, that we would achieve progress. At the end of one week, I had made several starts but had written nothing that was sensible. I concluded that I had better leam something about the business-government relationship.

The great freedom of being a professor with tenure is the ability to choose to study anything at all that interests you. The great obligation is to choose to study something of importance to which you can make a contribution. I have spent the past three years working as part of a sixteen- person research team that has attempted to leam something about what ed States and other westctn nations can do to improve the quality of team work between business and government.It has been an excating and rewarding intellectual enterprise for all of us, and I have attempted to communicate that excitement in this book.The time for mulling over our woes is past.It is time to look ahead, to establish the teamsork that we need: is the time for action .