Good articles. One key point that he fails to bring out is the impact wall street had on this problem. Used to be business could plan longer term. In recent years it was all about quarter to quarter profits and this was driven solely by wall street and the impact failure had on stock price. It is difficult to manage a business that will delivery quality products and services when every three months you have to show profit improvements or you company value falls dramatically. That process helped our auto makers fail and Japan auto makers to succeed. Banks also felt this wrath when quarterly profits fell. Many good CEO's have been fired because of the short term (3 month) decisions that had to be made to satisfy the wall street profit hungry crowd.