Kaizen and revolutionary principle: A marriage of opposing world views?
The government in Ethiopia is keenly introducing a concept that has little to no resemblance with its revolutionary principles
By Taye Negussie (PhD), Tsedale Lemma and Emnet Assefa
Since Oct. 2009, shortly after the introduction of a nationwide Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), an idea introduced to bring radical changes among state institutions but, in the process, virtually stalled them for months and now widely deemed to be a failure, the Ethiopian government started advocating the idea of kaizen–a Japanese management philosophy–among private and state owned companies; the idea was first brought to the attention of Ethiopia’s late PM Meles Zenawi in 2008.