Right and a lot of the lean manufacturing (and 8-hour work day) research that lead up to MMM came from stuff done by Ford and Toyota before World War 1. If ther

Right and a lot of the lean manufacturing (and 8-hour work day) research that lead up to MMM came from stuff done by Ford and Toyota before World War 1. If there hadn't been two world wars and the cold war since then I imagine this sort of knowledge might have spread around faster. You are being overly optimistic about the pace of human cultural development. The rest of the world is only just starting to realise again that perhaps we have cultural issues that lead to low quality results. Bell Labs have numerous advantages over the rest of the world when it came to fostering the sort of culture that produces high quality results. Just reading the history books really isn't enough for that to come about. TLDR; I blame Windows ME on World War 1.