Anyone who worked in the industry during the late eighties had to sit through lectures that Japanese managers invariably gave about the superiority of Japanese management. After sitting through one from his Japanese executives, Jim Morgan, of Applied Materials replied “There are good times and there are bad times. There is good management and there is bad management. You can only tell who has good management in bad times and Japan’s bad times have yet to come. We’ve had ours.” Jim certainly proved who had good management on both sides of the ocean. But it didn’t come easy. His success lies in always staying focused on setting the right goals and getting the best people possible to achieve them; then letting them do their jobs while compensating them for their successes. In the process, he built one of the globe’s greatest companies from a failing start-up he had been brought in to rescue in 1976.
