Nebraskans lead charge in Pan-Pacific Conference

Featured in the October 18, 2001 Scarlet Newspaper

By Tom Simons, University Communications

It began as an idea to help U.S. business people and academics understand innovative Japanese business practices. Twenty years later, Sang Lee's idea has become an event that annually attracts hundreds of scholars from more than 30 countries around the Pacific Rim and beyond.

Dr. Lee

Dr. Luthans

Dr. Digman

In 1981, the U.S. economy was struggling, the Japanese economy was booming and comparisons between the two filled the news.

"The U.S. economy was in terrible shape and American corporations were having a tough time competing against the Japanese, especially in the area of automobiles, machine tools and consumer electronics," recalled Lee, university eminent scholar and chair of the department of management in the UNL College of Business Administration.

"American products had just terrible quality problems. We didn't know how to control our inventory too well and our production processes were stretched out too long."

Lee had been on the Nebraska faculty for five years in 1981 and had earned a reputation as a rising star in the study of global management issues. Educated in both his native South Korea and the United States, he was highly knowledgeable about economies on both sides of the Pacific, and recognized that much of the Japanese advantage was because of two relatively recent management innovations. His background also gave him the insight to see that those new practices were adaptable to businesses in the United States.

Those Japanese innovations were Total Quality Management, or TQM, and Just in Time inventory control, or JIT.

TQM is a companywide quality control technique. JIT allows companies to control inventories by obtaining smaller quantities of materials, thus reducing storage costs and the risks of over-ordering. Ironically, TQM is based on the ideas of an American, Edwards Deming, that had been ignored by U.S. industries.

Kawasaki became one of the first firms to use the JIT system in the United States when it introduced it in its Lincoln plant in 1980 and 1981. The arrival of that innovation in his back yard inspired Lee to organize the Japan-U.S. Business Conference in 1981. Its central goal was to provide American business and academic leaders with a chance to learn about TQM and JIT, including a tour of the Lincoln Kawasaki plant.

About 300 people attended the conference, including 200 American business executives eager to learn about the new Japanese management practices. When a second conference two years later drew 500 participants to Tokyo, Lee and his colleagues in the management department began to understand what they had on their hands.

"At the time I thought the conference was unique and exciting because we felt more or less like pioneers in the field," said Fred Luthans, George Holmes university distinguished professor of management. "International marketing had been around for a long time and international economics has been around forever, but international management was fairly new."

Lee and his colleagues realized, however, that to make a real impact, they had to expand the conference to include other Pacific Rim nations.

"We realized this is broader than just Japan-U.S. or Asian-U.S.," said Les Digman, US Bank professor of management. "There were the four 'Asian tigers' - Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan - attracting a lot of attention at that point and the term 'Pan Pacific' was settled on because it encompassed the whole Pacific Rim area."

In 1984, the Pan-Pacific Conference met for the first time in Hawaii. It has convened every year since, with conferences in Australia, Canada, China, Fiji, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and most-recently in Viña del Mar, Chile, in May 2001. That marked the first time the conference convened in South America.

Despite travel times that can span 44 hours door-to-door, the conference attracts a large crowd. On average, 350 to 450 participants register each year, with a high of 850 for the 1990 conference in Beijing. Even this year's Viña del Mar conference, which drew 220 participants because of the distance from East Asia and a slowing economy, had presenters from 105 institutions in 23 countries on every inhabited continent.

Luthans said the conference offered business scholars something they can't get anywhere else: firsthand information on Pacific rim economies.

It also offers great international publicity for the university, Luthans said, adding that Lee's exemplary reputation helps polish that image.

While the conference has put the University of Nebraska on the map in the area of global management, it has also put a global imprint on Nebraska faculty. For example Luthans, an expert on organizational behavior, had no international expertise or experience before getting involved with Lee in the Pan Pacific Conference. But he since has written International Management. Now going into its fifth edition, it's the top-selling textbook on the subject.

Lee, Digman and Luthans said they think the conference has rewarded the College of Business Administration, the university and the state. It has broadened the perspectives of Nebraska faculty members and has informed their work in the classroom and in service activities performed for Nebraska citizens with a vital international viewpoint. And it has helped attract outstanding international students, especially graduate students, to the university.

The conference has evolved from a professional development seminar for business executives and academics into an almost exclusively academic conference. But it still retains elements of the hands-on business aspect that originally inspired it in 1981, with visits to industries in the host country every year, such as inspection of Chile's wine industry in 2001.

It has also outlived and outgrown its founder's expectations.

"We thought it might last a few years and maybe fizzle out, or who knows," Lee said. "It turned out that the conference has really made a major contribution in many countries. We came up with all kinds of innovative new ideas and discussed some of the major issues, such as the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We offered a forum to discuss ways to overcome those problems.

"Of course we don't know the exact impact, but I've been told by people in different countries that government officials came and listened to some of the papers that were presented and some of the ideas were later reflected in their policies."