Organizational Effectiveness

I found this on the web, quite interesting:
If the above lists and discussion seem like the textbook chapter titles from a principles of management book, they are. It seems organizational effectiveness is about doing everything you know to do and doing it well. The universals of management – planning, organizing, leading, direction, and controlling – have not changed. They are still important and executing them well remains challenging. The answer here is similar to the finding in the famous meeting between American and Japanese managers. When asked by American guests how the Japanese were making such quality cars, one Japanese manager smiled and said we are following the book. He then presented the “textbook” of assembly line production written by Henry Ford in the early 1920’s. Ironically, one of the leaders of the industrial revolution, Henry Ford, Sr., developed many of the fundamentals of what we now call “total quality practices” in the early 1900s. This approach was only discovered when Ford executives visited Japan in 1982 to study Japanese management practices. As the story goes, one Japanese executive referred repeatedly to “the book”, which the Ford people learned was a Japanese translation of My Life and Work, written by Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther in 1926 (New York: Garden City Publishing Co.) “The book” had become Japan’s standard while Ford Motor Company had strayed from its principles over the years. The Ford Executives could only find a copy at a used bookstore to when they returned to the United States.