The business winds of change produce an effect called weathervaning, where companies tend to pivot in the direction of the flow. It also can also be called herd mentality.
Competition sometimes inspires creativity, but more often it inspires replication. A company feels its competition has an edge, so they evaluate what their competitor is doing and assume it must be right because they seem to be succeeding, and then they duplicate it.
Business writers make a fortune from advocating for the new trend. Speakers make fortunes off paid public appearances at events and their publicists get them on all the trendy business media outlets. The industry eats this stuff up. CEOs read the books and give copies to all their managers to inspire them to jump on board the latest trend. The working staff go through repeated training classes. And like swimming in a rip tide, it’s best to go with the flow, right? Those that advocate different viewpoints slowly can be marginalized.
A few examples come to mind: ISO 9000 certification, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM) and offshoring.
Do you remember in the 1990s how American industry was all over offshoring? They relentlessly pursued cheap labor and manufacturing in foreign locations where their governments were eager for business growth and access to North American intellectual property. I worked with a number of companies that had moved their production facilities to these countries but kept some of their engineering and management stateside. Speaking a foreign language became a huge asset for some people moving up the management chain. Others had to quickly endure rapid language training classes.
In the pre-smartphone instant translator world, I purchased an English-Portuguese dictionary, which I still have as a reminder. Former associates learned Dutch, German, Swedish, Chinese, and more. Others had to learn British English going into former empire colonies like India. It was a boon time for language educators — new self-taught software tools started emerging like Rosetta Stone in 1993, and later Babbel in 2007 got a good hand up from industry. Berlitz put customized language programs in for companies such as in 1991 for McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Company, “which wanted the program to enhance its employees’ global competitiveness.”
What motivated this push to offshore? My theory is that it started with a shift toward a short-term focus away from the long term. We saw the rise of making quarterly earnings calls that exceeded expectations at the sacrifice of long-term capital investment.
