Zig Ziglar Explains: How We Can Outperform and Outsell the Japanese

There are 120 million people in Japan and 242 million in the United States, yet Japan outstrips the U.S. in billionaires and banks and is eroding the American hold on its own prime real estate.

Item: The world’s top 10 banks are Japanese.

Item: Eighty percent of Waikiki’s beachfront hotels are Japanese owned.

Item: Japan is the world’s number one creditor nation; the USA is the world’s number one debtor nation.

Item: Japanese firms bought such American architectural corporate symbols as Atlanta’s IBM Tower, Chicago’s Hyatt Regency Building, New York’s Citicorp Headquarters and Tiffany Building, and Los Angeles’ Arco Plaza.

Hardworking Americans are asking why the Japanese are doing so well in the very businesses that, a few decades ago, were dominated by Yankee know-how and marketing expertise. The answer is a surprise kick in the pants – and Zig Ziglar has some solid suggestions for sending that kick back across the Pacific.

In 1945 a defeated and demolished Japan watched as General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, marched ashore after receiving his orders for occupation through United States military channels. His mission was overwhelming – demilitarization, democratization and economic development. By May 3, 1947, MacArthur had met the first two goals of his assignment. The third proved to be the greatest challenge.

“Today real estate in the city of Tokyo is worth more than all the real estate in California. I find that one of the interesting facts that point out how we have failed as leaders to provide the right goals and objectives for our people.

I think the decline in our ability to compete is in direct proportion to the decline in the traditional values upon which our country was founded. According to U.S. News and World Report, the average 20 year old American has seen a million commercials on television. That boils down to 1,000 a week, 50,000 a year. And most of those are instant problem solution commercials. We’ve conditioned our society to believe that everything has an instant solution. We’re then told in music that we’re supposed to be free to do whatever makes us feel good. Along the way we have forgotten that total freedom leads to total anarchy which leads to slavery. We have forgotten that if you take the train off the tracks, it’s free but it can’t go anywhere.

These are messages that influence people away from productivity and toward consumerism and indulgence and more specifically they lead to a something for nothing philosophy. And as a psychologist will tell you, unrealistic expectations can be a seedbed of depression. Psychology Today, in its October 1988 issue, pointed out that the average 30 year old American is 10 times more likely to be depressed than his father and 20 times more likely to be depressed than his grandfather.”

What makes the Japanese more competitive – better strategy, better planning, better products, better values? In contrast to Americans are they just more competitive – superior? To answer these nagging questions, we must go back to the source. And, surprisingly, the source is us.

To carry out the third and final phase of his postwar mission, MacArthur recruited a 29 year old American engineer named Homer M. Sarasohn, the son of a Midwestern manufacturing representative. Sarasohn’s impressive wartime and postwar engineering and manufacturing credentials made him the perfect choice to revamp the outdated Japanese manufacturing and management systems. What they needed, he reasoned, was a solid and strong dose of good old Yankee know-how and he set out to instill not only the philosophical basis for companies to perform, but also the management principles that would become today’s models of efficiency. Once these were in place, he went on to teach the neophyte Japanese corporate heads how to run a manufacturing operation that would be second to nothing in America. Obviously his students, names that now read like a corporate who’s who of Japanese industry — Masaharu Matsushita (Matsushita Electric), Takeo Kato (Mitsubishi Electric), Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka (cofounders of Sony Corp.), and others, learned their lessons well.

“The Japanese encourage education, excellence and commitment. The average Japanese child spends over three hours a day outside the classroom in studies whereas the average American child spends a little less than 30 minutes a day. Dr. William Kirby, the commissioner of education for the state of Texas, went to Japan and did a comprehensive study on their educational system and found that beginning in kindergarten, for one hour a day, continuing through high school, Japanese children are taught a course teaching them the advantages of honesty, integrity, hard work, enthusiasm, responsibility, a positive mental attitude, respect for authority, loyalty, patriotism and free enterprise. And those kids are taught that they are going to have to work when they get out of school.

The average Japanese worker saves, on average, 16 percent of his income. The average American worker saves 3 percent of his income. Ask the average Japanese teenager what he’s going to do after graduation and he can lay out a game plan. If he’s going into the business community, he’ll tell you which company he’s going to go to work for, exactly what he’s going to do, where he’s going to live. Ask the average American teenager about life, he can tell you how much money Michael Jackson got for his Pepsi commercial, or how many touchdowns Joe Montana passed for or how much money Herschel Walker made. He can tell you about the dream world. But he cannot identify what he really wants to do with his own life.

The Japanese have cooperation between the various bodies. Their leading educators, their leading businesspeople, banking and industry, as well as the government officials, got together and decided to become the number one nation in the world in the production of textiles in the fifties. They reached that goal. In 1960 their goal was to become number one in the world in the production of steel. A little nation half the size of Texas, 120 million people devastated by the war, no natural resources, no iron ore, no coal, did it because they did not look at what they did not have; they looked at what they did have. A resourceful, committed, hard-working, thrifty people reached that objective. In 1970, it was automobiles. They were going to be number one in the world in 10 years. They missed it by one year.”

Where did those “Japanese” principles originate? On this side of the Pacific. Because MacArthur’s plan for Japan called for U.S. occupation authorities’ messages to reach every Japanese village by radio, almost overnight Sarasohn had to turn plants with dirt floors into efficient modern manufacturing facilities. At MacArthur’s instigation, Sarasohn used the tools of a dictator to instill the principles of democracy and he was wildly successful at it. To be sure, the Japanese were willing pupils. Under the circumstances, they also had no choice. They absorbed the basic management course that Sarasohn proposed, and it is still the model that every ambitious manager uses as a standard to develop a professional modus operandi for corporate success. No magic wand here, just down-to-earth basic American principles of how to run a good, clean, honest, hardworking, practical, efficient shop. The mystery is why Americans have forgotten what was once second nature in a country that led the world into the industrial revolution and the high-tech search for outer space.

“The success of the Japanese system is because of what they started doing years ago. The American worker proved to be the superior to workers anywhere. It’s not a worker problem, it’s a leadership problem. We’ve looked at management and have become good managers but we’ve not really taught and developed leaders and there’s a substantial difference between the two. I visited a Matsushita plant in Japan that has 2,100 people. In the month of June they had a goal to have eleven and a half thousand ideas from the 2,100 workers in that plant. And the goal was that two thirds of them were to be usable ideas. They had the results up on the bulletin board and we asked about it. In the month of June they came up with 11,700 plus ideas, but only 62 percent of them were usable. They were ideas for improving productivity, profitability, and making it a better place, a more productive place to work. Now, the leadership provides the goals but they use ideas from everybody. And they encourage those ideas. Effective leadership can mobilize the resources that are inherent in a company. You can improve your competitive powers by improving the mental productivity of everyone pulling for the same cause in the company.

There’s no drug problem in Japan. In America go to any plant and ask what’s their worst day as far as productivity and they’ll tell you that it’s Friday and that their next worst day is Monday. They only have three full productive days. You can’t compete three days a week with a people who are working hard five or six days a week.”

A manager who had worked previously in General Motors’ Chevrolet division, tells of his first impressions the minute he started with Toyota. He realized that they were more consistent in their priorities. In their business, quality always comes before profits. Chevrolet, on the other hand, had an acceptable level of deficiencies from all their suppliers. At Toyota, that is totally unacceptable, although it wasn’t always the case. When Sarasohn first surveyed factories that were producing radios in postwar Japan, there were not only no quality standards, but the acceptable level of deficiency was a full 50 percent. They threw out half of what they made. Now the Japanese quality standards are far more stringent than any in the U.S. The question is how can we deal with a competitor who makes a stronger commitment to satisfy the customer needs for a higher quality on a consistent basis?

“Since we missed the boat at home and missed it in our educational structure, I think our only solution is to start educating our people on the advantages of being hardworking, productive and saving their money. That’s going to require leadership at a corporate level on our part.

A lot of people will say, `Well, people’s values, that’s their business.’ That’s true. However, I challenge anybody, if we have a young person or a worker or a salesperson who shows up on time, who is honest, has character and integrity, who’s a hard worker, who has a good positive mental attitude, who has his or her direction in order, to tell me that person is not going to be a success and be of value to his or her company.”

Printed on the first page of the seminar that has become the bedrock of Japanese corporate success, and underlying Homer Sarasohn’s principles for industry in postwar Japan was “The Objective of the Enterprise.” It stated that the philosophy of the corporation – its social mission – was the objective of the enterprise. Today, as in years gone by, every consistently successful American corporation has a clearly stated mission which defines the corporate culture and touches social concerns.

Sarasohn’s prescription for success to Japanese businessmen was simple: 1) a concise, complete statement of the company’s raison d’etre – a well-defined target for the idealistic efforts of the employees; 2) quality ahead of profit with rigorous quality control methods in place; 3) respect for every employee equal to respect for management – good management was to be democratic management and bosses were to listen to the workers. And that is the BIG secret behind Japanese corporate and management success. Revolutionary stuff, isn’t it? It was for us over two hundred years ago.

“The chairman of Sony said that U.S. managers aren’t willing to invest in the future because they’ve already bought this year’s profits. It seems like we’re competing in a football game where one team is measured by the clock and the other by a calendar.

We’re too concerned about immediate profits. Stockholders have a great big voice, our tax structure changes so often that a lot of the corporations are puzzled where they will be in five years if they make an investment in hopes of making a profit five years from now.

In Japan work hours are substantially longer than ours. However, there’s a movement in Japan now to encourage executives to take more time off to spend with their families. To my mind, there’s a vast difference between the peak performer and the classic workaholic who is basically lazy. He or she works out of fear and greed. It is easy to continue what you know how to do, love to do and are paid to do. It is more difficult for the workaholic to learn how to communicate with his or her family. The workaholic is using work to hide from the world. The peak performer on the other hand, works out of love. They love the job they have. They love what they’re producing. But mostly they love to produce for the people they love. What I’m saying is that as a society, we need to start spending more time developing a quality of life instead of just a standard of living. The irony is that if you take care of quality of life first, the standard of living is going to go up. But if you go just for standard of living that does not necessarily mean the quality of life is going to go up. As a matter of fact, a lot of times it will go down.”

And how did the Japanese mentor Sarasohn devise such a revolutionary and ingenious systems approach to the complex management strategies of a post war world? He referred to U.S. management texts that were already in existence, he relied on the scientific management principles, long since out of vogue, of Frederick C. Taylor, he stressed the basics, and he enlisted the help of another engineer, Charles Protzman. Together they established the basics that are being used even today as the foundation for every successful Japanese corporation.

“U.S. News and World Report, in their January 13, 1986 issue, reported a study done on the one million millionaires in America, which revealed that the typical millionaire has been working 20 to 30 years, likes meat and potatoes, hates to spend money on a cab, is far more likely to be a salesperson than a doctor, and is still married to his high school or college sweetheart.

Everybody believes in the importance of honesty, courage and integrity, hard work, having the right attitude, accepting responsibility and being dependable. We all believe in those values but, according to the Thomas Jefferson Research Institute, over 90 percent of what was taught in 1776, and most of the educational structure was at home, had a religious or moral base. By 1926, it was down to 6 percent, and by 1965, the percentage was so low that it could not even be measured.

Do these values work on Main Street and Wall Street? Dr. Ken Blanchard, who coauthored The One Minute Manager, points out in the December 1987 issue of Executive Excellence that had you invested $30,000 in the composite Dow Jones, right across the board 30 years ago you’d have a little over $100,000. He said, though, had you invested the same $30,000 in the 21 companies in America which have ethics as the base from which they operate and an announced public policy that the reason they’re in business is to serve the public, you would have in excess of $1,000,000 today.

In the same article, a study done by Arizona State University revealed that the corporations who paid dividends for the last 100 years, have ethics as their corporate base and an announced public policy that the reason they’re in business is to serve the public. In Secrets of Closing the Sale, I reported on the study done by the Forum Corporation out of Boston. Of the 341 salespeople studied, 173 were super successful and 168 were moderately successful. Each group had the same relative skills, getting prospects, getting appointments, making presentations, demonstrating features and benefits, answering questions, handling objections and closing the sale. But there was a dramatic difference in the end results. Because they discovered people don’t buy based on what you tell them or show them. They buy based on what you tell them and show them which they believe, and they believe salespeople who are honest, who follow up, and who are courteous and appreciative of all the support people in the home office and at the customer’s site.”

American dedication to quality craftsmanship, once the envy of the manufacturing world, was used as a model by Sarasohn and Protzman. They even quoted an American company’s statement of purpose on the first page of their revised edition of the management text and included the following as well, “Every business enterprise should have as its very basic policy something of this nature, (to aim) the entire resources and efforts of the company toward a well-defined target, a target that would benefit society.” They also wrote, “A leader’s main obligation is to secure the faith and respect of those under him.”

“Of course there are some problems in the Japanese system. They have been overly driven to recoup their losses after the war. As a matter of fact the Japanese government is now encouraging the workers to take more time off and to get into the consumer market instead of relying so heavily on the savings market. The objective seems to be to get the Japanese to start enjoying some of the prosperity and wealth they’ve accumulated.

The Japanese worker is appreciated, recognized, respected and listened to a great deal more than his or her counterpart in this country. Management goes to the very bottom of the scale for ideas there.

Our higher education system is infinitely better than the Japanese system and our spontaneity and creativity, which has always been a part of the American system, is light years ahead of anything I saw in Japan. The American worker, given the same type of leadership, could produce far better.

We have studied management in this country, but have failed to study leadership. We have not provided our work force with the leadership and direction and when you combine that with our ever increasing family problems as well as drug and alcohol problems, it accounts for the decline in quality that we saw thirty years ago. However, in the last seven years the quality of our automobiles has increased rather dramatically. The American worker who is focused and directed and led properly is the best worker in the world and can turn out the best product in the world.

Politically, we think of our system as the freest and the best in the world. And we have tremendous natural resources that don’t exist in Japan. We have all the natural advantages really, and they should keep us forever ahead of the Japanese or any other nation.

It’s like the story of the passenger pigeon. At one time we literally had billions of passenger pigeons in America. When Daniel Boone was walking the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, according to the World Book Encyclopedia, one flock was sighted that was over 500 miles long and 250 miles wide and it literally blocked out the sun. I’m confident that everybody back in those days were certain that we would have passenger pigeons forever. But we buried the last one back in 1917. Now the same thing is true of our leadership and our surpluses in other areas. We assumed that we had it, would always have it, and then we went to sleep at the wheel.”

Today managers and executives across America are looking to the Japanese systems – systems which are clearly based on American prototypes but which by now have been modified, improved and strengthened by purely Japanese components – for solutions to American problems. We have forgotten our own basics, and have slid down a dangerous chute where pure liberty has been replaced by absolute license; leadership offers little more than laissez-faire; profligate waste endangers our natural bounty and planning for the future equates with selling after a short term gain. At 72, Sarasohn himself decries the current American aping of Japanese companies. He recognizes that America’s strength was – and still is – in the creativity, energy, drive and practical sense of its people.

“As people we were all born to win. Man is engineered for accomplishment and success. But in the last few years we have been conditioned to believe otherwise. So much of what we see and hear on TV and in music is violent, negative, and obscene and we are the product of what goes into our minds.

It’s the prime responsibility of the sales manager to encourage salespeople to immerse themselves in positive reading and listening and to create a climate that encourages positive self-development.

The University Of Southern California did a study and discovered if you drive twelve thousand miles a year in a metropolitan area that you can learn as much in three years listening to cassettes as you can in two years of college education. But the sales manager needs to set that example and constantly sell that idea.

If the manager wants salespeople to be enthusiastic about working 45 or 50 hours a week, it comes back to selling. Seven hours of the day the salesperson is working for someone else. It takes about that long each day to pay for the car, clothes, food, insurance, vacation and all the rest that goes with living. The last one hour of the day ought to belong to the salesperson. And he or she ought to be thinking that everything sold in that last hour – all the profits – should go into a savings, retirement or investment account.

Now if the salesperson is not in good physical condition to begin with, when it comes to that last hour he or she is going to be too pooped to pop. Smoking, drinking, overeating and lack of exercise all take their toll. So a sales manager must begin by encouraging physical fitness among the salespeople. Then they’ll be more productive. In a typical week I probably work about 40 to 45 hours. On the road a typical workday is 12 to 14 hours. However, when I am home I spend a great deal of time with my family. To maintain the energy to speak and travel and run my business, I need to be in shape so I run regularly five times a week and I eat right and I don’t smoke or drink and I feel great!

I am busy but I am relaxed and at peace. The underlying factor for me is my faith. If your faith is sound and you’re secure in your eternity, then everything else seems, in perspective, not that big a deal. The thing that bothers me the most is seeing people with ability who aren’t using it – people who are just coasting along.

I am not suggesting that we should emulate the Japanese and their systems. What I am saying is that there are some very important lessons that they can teach us which we originally taught them and which we have forgotten. We need to make better choices for ourselves in order to fulfill our potential. We need to learn how to delay gratification. We need to accept responsibility for our own conduct and we need to teach our young people how to work again. And if we do those things and maintain a positive mental attitude, we’ll have taken some giant steps.

Quality education, leadership, training and production will produce explosive growth in the remainder of this century and well into the next. I am the eternal optimist. I know we will turn out the leaders needed to return America to the number one economic and socially responsible nation in the world.”