why Michael Porter questioned whether Japanese firms had any strategy at all—at least as he understood the term, that is, as a means to a unique competitive position. The Japanese advance during the 1970s and 1980s, he argued, was not the result of superior strategy but of superior operations. The Japanese managed to combine lower cost and superior quality and then imitated each other. But that approach, he noted, was bound to be subject to diminishing marginal returns as it became harder to squeeze more productivity out of existing factories and others caught up by improving the efficiency of
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