Mozart, Gardel and The Third Revolution

Mozart, Gardel and the Third Revolution
A new Leadership for the generation of wealth

By José María Kokubu Munzón
For The Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship
1
Especially produced for The Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship
On the Argentine Bicentennial
Mozart, Gardel and the Third Revolution
A New Leadership for the Generation of Wealth
By José María Kokubu Munzón*
For The Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship of Japan
Considering music as the ultimate mirror of

society, it is impossible to resist drawing
parallels between the democratic movements
in France or the thirteen American colonies
and the impulse toward equality that
underlies the string Quartett.
Robert Winter
At night, with your dirty face

Of little angel clad in jeans,
You sell roses round the tables
At the restaurant of Bachín’s.
Horacio Ferrer
1789 – EUROPE-USA (Mozart): The First Industrial Revolution
The Marriage of Figaro — European apogee — 1st musical comedy — American and
French Revolutions — Bourgeoisie–Middle class
1917 – ARGENTINA (Gardel): The Second Industrial Revolution
Mi noche triste — Convergence between Europe and The Americas — Tango and
Jazz — Russian Revolution — Fordism-Socialism — Middle class–Proletariat
1950 – USA-JAPAN: (Deming): The Third Industrial Revolution
Deming in Tokyo — Convergence between East and West — Rock and Roll —
Toyotism — Total Participation-Societal Networking
*
Japanese Management consultant. Coordinator of the J-Key International Program for the Association for
Overseas Technical Scholarship of Japan. Member of the Board of the National Tango Academy.
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE – A new Humanism for a new Management …………………………..………………….3
CHAPTER I - 1789 EUROPE-USA (Mozart): The First Industrial Revolution
1. Introduction………………………………….…………………………………………………………….…..5
2. Aesthetical aspects......................................................................6
3. Ethical aspects…………………………………………………….………………………….……………….9
CHAPTER II – 356 BC EUROPE-ASIA (Alexander): Western authoritarianism
1. Western-style leadership……………………….…………….………………………………………..13
2. Cultural models of the absolutist man………………..……………….……………………….18
CHAPTER III - 1917 ARGENTINA (Gardel): The Second Industrial Revolution
1. Historical context…………………………………………………………………….……………………..24
2. Aesthetical aspects……………………………………………………………………….…………………26
a. Imitation vs. analogy

b. Possibilities of tonal music
3. Ethical aspects……………………………………………………………………….….…………………….29
a. Liberation from dualism

b. Accessibility to the masses
c. Orientation to weaknesses and acceptance of limits
CHAPTER IV - 1950 USA-JAPAN (Deming): The Third Industrial Revolution
1. The Third Revolution in the World……………………………………….….……..….…………32
2. How does it work? ......................................................................37
3. The Third Revolution in Argentina.………………….………………………………..…………..42
4. Liberation or dependence? ............................................................45
EPILOGUE – 2010 ARGENTINA: Chiquilín de Bachín.………………………………………………………53
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PROLOGUE – A new Humanism for a new Management
It is common knowledge today that Total Quality Management is a

must for competitiveness in business. Rather than a matter of
principles, it is a matter of survival. For the local implementation of
a Japan-inspired advanced management system, however, it is not
enough to comply with some norms or follow certain formalities. For
this revolutionary style of doing business to have real impact in our
companies’ profits, we must first become familiar with some
dangerous aspects of Argentine idiosyncrasy, taking advantage of
Japan as a mirror that can show us an image of constructive criticism.
This essay, especially prepared for AOTS Argentina Kenshu Center for the 200th Anniversary of
the May Revolution of Argentina, is intended to help Argentine businessmen (a) to better
understand Asia as a major business opportunity and (b) to adopt a benefit-oriented lean
management system, which can help Argentine industry to become truly dynamic and globally
competitive. It tries to give warning about certain hidden pitfalls in our culture, potentially
harmful for those two purposes. It also attempts to induce a useful reflection on a new type of
Humanism, modest, sensible and practical, and on the present conditions of the productive man
of Argentina, astonished spectator of a globalized reality of multiple motivations and influences.
Both the humanistic and the productive aspects are important because both the maker and the
consumer must be considered as persons in their totality, as members of an indivisible system of
material and symbolic values, who seek to cover their necessities and wishes through mutually
beneficial exchanges.
Based on Okita Report I and Okita Report II1, I consider two main objectives for Argentina:
1. The enhancement of profitability, productivity and quality.
2. The opening of Asian markets for Argentine high-value-added products.
Japanese Management is, basically, the art of observing reality and of managing human aptitudes
and behaviours. It’s the art of choosing one’s objectives and of administering the necessary
resources for their easy obtainment. Finally, Japanese management implies a permanent
1
First and second issues of the Study on the Economic Development of the Argentine Republic, donated to
the Argentine Government by JICA in 1987 and 1995, respectively.
4
attitude towards improvement, based on the acknowledgement of one’s own weaknesses.
With that spirit in mind, I invite you to consider the weak points in our relationship with Asia,
currently, the engine of World economy:
1. Lack of presence in East Asia

2. Lack of strategy
3. Scarce training to interact with Asians.
The journalist Andrés Oppenheimer refers to these defects in a note published on the Argentine
newspaper, La Nación, on April 13, 2010. I extract three ideas:
1. The huge purchases of Latin American raw materials by China have been a heavenly blessing for
the region: bilateral trade has grown from Ar$ 10,000 million in 2000 to Ar$ 140,000 million in 2008.
This has helped the region to survive during the world economic crisis.
2. We are connecting with the engine of the world economy of the 21st Century with exports of the
19th Century. This is positive in the short run, but on the medium term it creates dependency on a
few basic low-value-added products that generate less employment than the exports of services or
manufactured goods.
3. What Latin America needs most is to diversify its exports, adding value to its raw materials and
innovating in order to get new exportable products. Otherwise, the recent growth of exports will
only be momentary and the region will have wasted out one of its biggest commercial
opportunities in history2.
In order to become real protagonists of contemporary World, the Argentineans face the
challenge of studying the Eastern way of thinking with critical pragmatism, and to integrate it
with our local culture, as well as with the vast European heritage. We need to do so in depth,
with systemic criteria, with multidisciplinary extension and with a prejudice-free spirit, strongly
focused in on our own convenience.
* * *
2
OPPENHEIMER Andrés, “El desafío de cambiar la relación con China”, Claves Americanas, Noticias del
Exterior, La Nación, Buenos Aires, April 13, 2010.
5
CHAPTER I
1789 EUROPE-USA (Mozart): The First Industrial Revolution
1. Introduction
In the same way earthquakes are external manifestations of

tectonic derivations that have progressed along the centuries,
external revolutions, such as the American Revolution, the
French Revolution or the Russian Revolution are motivated by
the conjunction of many invisible changes that gather
momentum throughout long-lasting periods of time. Similarly,
visible political revolutions are determined by long invisible
evolutions in thinking, led by the great intellectual geniuses
and expressed in the culminating moments of philosophy and
the arts.
Although I only mention three examples, this number is

arbitrary and only intended to help the purposes of this essay.
In fact, the Revolution is only one and inexhaustible, since
sudden changes, even if replicated in more than one instance,
are the consequence of a unique gathering of energy that is
liberated in different stages. Following this, we can say that,
for example, in the cases of the American, French and Russian
Revolutions, the common restlessness responded to the search
of a better dignity for men and women and of a more just
social order. Those ideals were typically expressed in the
motto: “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”.
If this is true, in order to understand the changes of the World —and, also, those of Argentina—
in depth, it is advisable to study them from a global, calm and sensible systemic perspective,
oriented to the macro and micro historical processes, in the manner most advanced management
systems advise. On this line, the study of our May Revolution with an open-minded spirit
liberated from stiff ideological frames will bring important benefits for Argentina and its people.
Let’s therefore try to reflect on the political, economic and social reality of present-day
Argentine men and women under the light of some governing principles of Japanese management,
emphasizing the contrasts between western and non-western cultures. To illustrate our subject
6
matter, considering after Robert Winter “music as the ultimate mirror of society”, I will resort to
the analysis of sung music —a good example of how dualism can be overcome, unifying the level
of the senses (music) and the level of intellect (words) — and will comment the deep changes
introduced in Opera and Tango, respectively, by Mozart, near 1979; and, by Gardel, in 1917,
coinciding with two crucial moments in the history of human societies.
First, I will try to find the relationship between the Mozartean revolution in music and its
contemporary revolutions: scientific, philosophical, industrial and political. For such purpose, I
will analyze the matter in the two aspects —words and music— that constitute the selected
genres, being both Opera and Tango the result of an intimate union between a melody and a text.
Following Kierkegaard3, let’s remember that music conveys the sensitive and aesthetic contents,
and that words convey the conceptual or ethical contents that accompany the former. Once this
matter cleared, we can examine in more detail the Copernican turn introduced by Mozart in the
history of human thinking.
2. Aesthetical aspects
We can start by the aesthetic revolutionary aspects of Mozart’s music, following a description of
the String Quartett, one of the most emblematic musical forms of his time. To this purpose, let’s
check Robert Winter’s ideas:
The emergence of the string Quartett in the last half of

the eighteenth century coincided with dramatic changes
in the structure of European Society. It is impossible to
resist drawing parallels between the democratic
movements in France or the thirteen American colonies
and the impulse toward equality that underlies the string
Quartett. For the first time in Western music, an
instrumental style evolved in which voices of equal
importance were committed to a spirited, give-and-take brand of conversation. For example, in
Mozart’s string Quartett K. 465, we hear neither monarchs nor servants. To understand the novelty
of such revolution, we have only to listen to the Baroque version of musical equality: the fugue. In
a fugue, an opening subject stated in one instrument is shared subsequently by all the voices. On
the surface, this seems quite democratic. [… But] there is a stiffness in this formal exchange
among voices (much as we might imagine the stylized posing in a conversation among eighteenth-
century aristocrats) that does not suggest a genuine democracy. […] In the Mozartean Quartett, we
can see how fluid —even irrelevant— the boundary between theme and accompaniment had
3
KIERKEGAARD Sören, Don Giovanni. La musica di Mozart e l’eros, Italian translation by Remo Cantoni and
K. M. Guldbransen, Verona 1976, Arnoldo Mondadori editore, pp. 58-76.
7
become. All the voices are important, but each voice portrays a distinctive character and makes a
distinctive contribution. This is musical democracy at work. […] Mozart’s routinely customized
themes gave his music an individuality that was new to Western music. Not only did the themes
exhibit an individual character, but in the course of a movement they underwent the same trials
and tribulations that beset characters in a full-length novel. We do no violence to the spirit of
Mozart’s age —nor to the view of music as the ultimate mirror of society— if we trace the evolution
of an imaginary heroine throughout the course of the first movement of K. 4654.
However, the Mozartean Revolution was even more radical

because it went beyond the musical democracy that we have
referred to. Indeed, Mozart’s style also encompassed a
profound humanization of musical language, making his
compositions —not any longer a grouping of notes designed in
an objective and scientific manner and tied to rigid
schemes— to adopt the form of human discourse and follow
the natural occurrence of feelings. In this way, it became a
true “representation of a specific idea of time, based in the
mental archetypes or cognoscitive models that regulate the
perception of the world as movement” 5. That great change consisted of the development of a
composing technique that became apt to represent “life, captured in the flagrant immediateness
of its occurrence” 6.
Another feature of that new aesthetic capacity was the

power to musically create spatio-temporal
circumstances that can now acquire a credible virtual
reality. Consequently, the new Mozartean musical
language permitted the construction of well
differentiated musical characters with high dramatic
potential. The first scene of The Marriage of Figaro is
a good example of what we are saying: the orchestra
starts, creating an auditory sensation compatible with segments of space measured in regular
spaces of time; that is, with the measures of the room assigned to the future couple. Enters then
Figaro, singing the numbers “Five… ten… twenty… thirty. Thirty six… forty three… ”, which
express the length of the spaces formerly insinuated by the orchestra. Next, Susanna his fiancée
4
WINTER Robert, “Quartett listening – Democratic impulses” in An Illustrated, Interactive Musical
Exploration (Microsoft Multimedia Mozart), by Robert Winter with The Voyager Company, 1994.
5
GALLARATI Paolo, La forza delle parole. Mozart drammaturgo, Torino 1993, Giulio Einaudi Editore, p. 40.
6
Ibid., p. 6.
8
appears —foreign to his objective measurement and just concerned about her own subjective
matters— singing “Now I am really happy”.
The key to this credibleness is described by the Italian musicologist Paolo Gallarati, who
emphasizes the switch from an imitative criterion in music to a criterion of analogy —to which
we will turn again, when dealing about Mozart as protagonist of an anticipated convergence
between East and West— through which musical notes are not just a servile imitation of facts.
They reflect instead a deeper reality that resounds in human emotion:
The poetic aspects of Mozart’s theater definitively eliminated the idea that, following the
imitative conception of drama expressed by Aristotle in his Art of Poetry, had accompanied the life
of Opera since its birth: as an eminently surrealistic spectacle, musical theatre could not aspire to
represent reality but could only represent the mise en scène of mythical, fabulous or historical
vicissitudes, projected in the remoteness of a courtly or pastoral world, where music was only
called to decorate the text.
[…] Mozart stated and demostrated the opposite. He imposed a complete overturning to the entire
history of European theatre, showing how he could achieve, by analogy and not by imitation, what
the rationalistic thinking could never have considered possible: a representation of life captured in
the flagrant immediateness of its occurrence and based on the dynamic force of individual
psychology. In the building of the characters, in the fusion between seriousness and comicity
through which they are brought back to the unity of a common psychological root, the leap
accomplished by Mozartean theatre after Idomeneo7 was then enormous8.
The last element we will analyze in this section is the consolidation of tonal music in mostly all
its formal and expressive possibilities. In times of mature Mozart, not long had passed since the
innovations manifested by Bach in The Well-Tempered Clavier, which responded to how the
human brain processes the sounds. However, that great scientific and technical advance was not
enough to endow music with the degree of liberty it acquired in the last quarter of the century
with the discovery of the Sonata Form. From then on, music learned how to respond to the
cognitive structures that permit the comprehension of musical information relating it with the
elapsing of time. It was that great discovery what permitted the association between the musical
language and singing, in a humanized, balanced and realistic way9. Paolo Gallarati sustains that
Haydn and Mozart generated a new musical syntax as from 1775, later adopted by Beethoven
7
The first of the seven modern operas by Mozart.
8
GALLARATI Paolo, La forza delle parole. Mozart drammaturgo, Torino 1993, Giulio Einaudi Editore, p. 6.
9
Cf. KOKUBU MUNZÓN José María, Mozart y Gardel. La música de las palabras, Buenos Aires 2007, Editorial
Dunken, Capítulos VI y VII.
9
since his very first works. The features10 of this new syntax where described in detail by Charles
Rosen11.
3. Ethical aspects
The new aesthetical language of Mozart and Haydn only achieved its completion when it
incorporated, through its association with the words, the reflections, the feelings and the ethical
questionings that are typical of the human condition.
Indeed, the string Quartett is a purely instrumental genre, purely musical; purely aesthetical, it
could be said. The ethical aspects, on the other hand, appeared with the addition of words, with
the theatrical action provided by the libretto. In such a way, the internal revolution implicit in
the conquest of the new musical style acquired the ability to accompany the external, explicit
revolution when combined with stories that contain elements of specific human interest. The
idealized models of Opera Seria will then tend to be left behind.
Let’s now observe how revealing the stories are in the magnificent operatic trilogy by Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.
Let’s briefly examine the action:
a. In The Marriage of Figaro (1796), we learn about the

tribulations of Figaro, a servant that becomes levelled with Count
Almaviva, an aristocrat, an absolutist despot, his rival. Here, the
revolutionary subject appears with its want for “Liberty, Equality
and Fraternity”, expressed in the confrontation between the
Count’s wishes and those of his employee. The concept of limit
responds to a need for respect and consideration for the others.
In the case of the Count, he, the absolute despot will have to
kneel for forgiveness before his wife for his unfaithful behaviour.
So happens, reaching an exultant happy ending. However, the ideal of Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity genially expressed by Mozart in The Marriage of Figaro will only be accomplished
partially. In Mozart, the ideal will have to undergo other two key instances to become a possible
10
Brief, periodical and articulated phrase; rhythmical simmetry and variety; thematic transition;
modulation as a dramatic fact; conventional materials in strucural funcion; contrast between tonal tension
and stability; reinterpretation of the phrases in the context; expressive complexity; thematic contrast;
dynamic contrast; art of thematic expansion, clarity of the phrase; form owed to the material, not imposed
from the exterior; absorption comical elements and elements of dance.
11
ROSEN Charles, The Classical Style. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, The Viking Press, New York 1971, Italian
translation: Lo stile classico. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Milano 1979, Feltrinelli, pp. 46-126.
10
reality. Indeed, it will be perfected in the two following operas.
b. In Don Giovanni (1787), human desire demolishes all limits; the overwhelming personality of
the despot does not tolerate any opposition12. He does what he wants, just
because he wants to; thirsting for liberty at any cost, no matter the damage,
shattering all possibilities for equality and fraternity. At the final moment, the
hero is offered repentance. But, understanding repentance as vileness, Don
Juan, the absolute incarnation of bodily Ego, refuses submission to any
superior force and disappears in yells, dragged to the abyss.
c. Così fan tutte (1790,) shows a decisive moment in Mozart, in which he

left idealism behind, suspecting that this is one of the most dangerous
elements of romantic excess. With the disappearance in Don Giovanni of the
material, corporeal Ego’s ghost, it was still necessary for Mozart to destroy
the ghost of the ideal Ego… For that purpose, Mozart and Da Ponte put two
young fiancés to the tough task of testing how, in only one day, the illusory
image they had of their lovers is torn into pieces. The young men are forced to face a bitter
reality they had refused to accept. It’s curious how Mozart boldly set himself off against the
current of nascent romanticism. In this work it seems as if Mozart, in blatant contradiction with
the ideals of his time, could finally purge his romantic idealism. As it can be imagined, this opera
was strongly rejected during all of the 19th Century and a good part of the 20th, respectively
marked by idealism and ideologies.
Descending from the ideal being to

the real flesh and blood individual
is painful but necessary. Here we
can anticipate the difficulties that
Western man can face when trying
to apply Shoji Shiba’s WV model 13
in his attempt to manage a
corporation with the realism and
common sense that are natural to
Japanese-style management. Così
12
Don Giovanni literally says to Leporello: “Finiscila, non soffro opposizione!”.
13
The WV model shows the problem solving activities continuously moving between the level of thought and
the level of experience. You sense a problem, explore it broadly, formulate a problem to work on, state a
specific improvement theme, collect data and analyze the situation, find the root causes, plan a solution,
standardize the process to include the new solution if it is good, and then take on the next problem.
11
fan tutte, the last opera of the Trilogy, was explicitly nicknamed as “The School of Lovers”, in
the manner of a learning platform that would provide a solid basis for the two subsequent
operas: The Magic Flute and La clemenza di Tito, where the search for a new man is manifested,
liberated from myths, idealisms, self-sufficiency; reconciled with the limits that allow a
harmonic integration with the Other14.
There is one last element of the Mozartean revolution that is perhaps the most important: the
overcoming of dualism. Indeed, with The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart accomplished a feat, until
then unthinkable in musical theatre: he merged opposite elements into one single unit, serious
and comic, religious and profane, learned and popular, real and ideal; besides taking to the
maximum aesthetical dignity such simple characters as a barber and a maid. Here we find Good,
Truth and Beauty, integrated in one single reality. Almost two centuries before that miracle,
Shakespeare had produced an analogous change, revolutionizing spoken theatre through his
realistic adherence to human nature, to the point of being celebrated as the “grandest master,
because he is always a servant of nature” 15.
Samuel Johnson, in the preface to Shakespeare’s dramas, stated that these
are, in a strict and critical sense, neither tragedies nor comedies but rather compositions of a
different genre, that represent the real state of earthly nature, which participates of good and evil,
joy and pain, mixed in an infinite variety of proportions and innumerable modes of combination16.
As we will see later, Tango will become, one and a half century later, the incarnation and
continuation of the same type of realistic spirit, good observer of life and nature.
Mozart chose a path totally divergent from the rationalistic, analytic, anthropocentric, idealistic,
dualistic and absolutistic model that Western civilization further continued to intensify. As
French musicologist Jean-Victor Hocquard points out, Mozart set off —anticipating himself two
centuries to Deming’s trip to Japan— on a road that brought him close to Eastern thought and
aesthetics, the road of simplicity, common sense, acceptation of limits, rectification of passions,
14
For the Argentineans, the benefits of such modesty could help construct a new capacity to relate
ourselves with our own history, with our own culture, based on a critical and objective analysis, oriented to
the possible improvements we can contribute with to the future. Further on, when we review some
characteristics of Japanese management, we will see the close relationship between these three operas and
the Third Industrial Revolution, which proposes a style of leadership opposed to the old schemes of
Taylorism.
15
HERDER Johann Gottfried, “Shakespeare” en La fortuna di Shakespeare, Milano 1965, Il Saggiatore, vol. I,
pp. 114-34.
16
JOHNSON Samuel, en La fortuna di Shakespeare, Milano 1965, Il Saggiatore.
12
minimalism of resources, cultivation of silence and spiritual refinement, as can be sensed in The
Magic Flute, in La clemenza di Tito… Mozart, without ever having heard of these words became a
worthy example of Wabi, Sabi and Shibui17, typical of Japanese aesthetics.
There is a still deeper achievement, which is the capacity to represent human reality through
analogy as opposed to imitation, through a process of subjective abstraction, through a labour of
refinement and careful internalization. Let’s see what the Italian writer, Fosco Maraini, has to
say about Oriental art in order to see the degree of rapprochement to the Eastern way of
thinking achieved by Mozart in his last stage of maturity:
The Oriental artists carried into effect, since many centuries ago, the experiences that the West
has attempted only in the last hundred years: to capture the essence of any personality (human,
animal, vegetal, mineral) not in similarity but rather in certain aspects that had been ignored until
the artist should discover them, truer than similarity itself: of those aspects, perhaps countless,
they chose the simplest, the purest, then reduced them, stripped them, until getting to the soul,
to the last “wind” of life18.
The later transformations of history would justify Mozart’s election, understood by his posterity
as not altogether glamorous, not really “heroic”. Although it’s true that with the Revolution and
its guillotine a growth in liberty, scientific knowledge and production capacity were
accomplished; at the same time the greediness for conquest, the voracity for raw materials, the
covetousness for new territories, the hunger for new markets, the exacerbation of colonialism,
the traffic and exploitation of slaves and the dehumanization of the production systems got
worse… The wars of South American independence suffered a great influence from that heroic
way of understanding human destiny. The great ideologies of the twentieth century were being
sown. Considered from an a posteriori logic, wouldn’t it have been natural to foresee a second
instance of cataclysms, possibly severer than the first one?
* * *
17
Wabi: subdued beauty, simplicity, Sabi: rusticity, patina; Shibui: astringency.
18
MARAINI Fosco, Ore giapponesi, Bari 1957, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 401.
13
CHAPTER II
356 BC EUROPE-ASIA (Alexander): Western authoritarianism
1. Western-style leadership
Following Socrates and Plato, Western thinking recognizes Aristotle as

one of its founding fathers, and Alexander de Great, his possible
disciple, as its prototype of leadership. From that time on, the
analytical capacity of humanity has developed in an exponential way,
together with military technology. When during the Renaissance that
capacity overcame the scope of theocentric speculation and invaded
the mundane territories of art and science, the West took the road of a
new notion of humanism, marked by anthropocentrism, by the
development of technical powers and by a growing capacity for
domination of man over other men as well as over nature. Later, we reach Descartes, who based
his new philosophical system exclusively on reason. Almost contemporarily, the absolute
monarch arrogated himself the right to say “L’État c’est moi” (“I am the State”), because his
reason assisted him. From this time forth, according to the rationalistic spirit of the times, music
also started to travel together with science: in 1722 the first Treaty of Harmony appeared,
conceived by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Later, with Kant, subjectivism in all its strength burst into
the conscience of his generation. Thus, the Age of Enlightenment culminated in great
contemporary revolutions: scientific (Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica), economic
(Industrial Revolution), aesthetic (Don Giovanni), philosophical (The Critique of Pure Reason)
and political (American and French revolutions).
Focusing that period, the Swiss scholar, Karl Barth (1886-1968), described
Mozart’s contemporary as the “absolutist man”, accomplished expression
of the illustrated despot. It is important to keep that image in mind
because it would become the model of many leaders of the future,
including some present-day less illustrated businessmen, officials and
politicians. We can recognize that time as “The Age of Absolutism”,
which refers to the political order consolidated with Louis XIV and
reaffirmed under the monarchs of illustrated despotism, such as Joseph II
of Habsburg and Frederick of Prussia. Such an order was the manifestation of “a certain ideal of
life, based in the implicit belief in the omnipotence of human capacities” 19. Within that spirit of
19
BARTH Karl, Images du XVIIIe siècle, Neuchâtel et Paris 1949, Delachaux et Niestlé, pp. 15-16, in KOKUBU
MUNZÓN José María, “El Management japonés y el Informe Okita: Una revolución para los argentinos” en
14
omnipotence, man developed to the maximum potential the possibilities of his own strength and
claimed himself self-sufficient, finding “in himself the reason and justification of his power” 20.
This is the absolute prince, in the peak of his glory and justified by his reason. However, three
years after The Marriage of Figaro, the ideal image of the despot fell when the French National
Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming the
principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity for everyone. Four years later —under the
benevolent gaze of goddess Reason—, Marie Antoinette’s head tumbled down (she had hold the
child Mozart on his lap) in order to give assurance to the new principles.
For the assurance of the Revolution, such methodology proved insufficient: still now, we have a
lot of homework to do if we want to reach the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Karl
Barth clearly shows the other side of the absolute prince, which is
The absolute revolutioner, who rebels against the first, whom he considers violator or even thief of
his rights and forces out from him the power that he had unlawfully held. Thus, inverting the roles,
and because it’s him now who holds the power, the second takes the place of Louis XIV and says
after him “I am the State” 21.
In this way,
The portions of society that have taken hold of power determine as they like what is just for the
Revista Temas de Management Volumen VII, noviembre de 2009, Universidad del CEMA.
20
Ibid.
21
BARTH Karl, Images du XVIIIe siècle, Neuchâtel 1949, Delachaux & Niestlé S. A., p. 36.
15
whole, because they know (don’t they?) what is of right. Being that so, how can anybody prevent
them from declaring that right as valid for everyone? Then, that new minority repeats what the
ancien régime did within the same vicious circle of actions and reactions22.
Humanity deepened these revolutionary methodologies, only to discover that the possible
varieties of absolutism are infinite, because
within that new absolutism, other interesting varieties are also possible: in the interior of the
revolution from below, one can incline oneself towards conservatism or towards radicalism. One
can also, as constitutive principle of the State, either emphasize the individual as such or the
nation that unites all the individuals. In this way one will have now a liberalism, now, as its
23
opposite, a nationalism… .
It’s easy to imagine that, virtually, the list of “isms” and “reasons” can
be lengthened as one likes. The fact is that the absolutist man is an
expression of the multiple aspects of analytical dualism, which became
exacerbated with the passing of time. Absolutism responds, for
instance, to the excision established by reason between (1) the
universal and the singular, (2) ethics and aesthetics and (3) subject
and object.
Let’s examine now —as an illustration, inevitably schematic— some of the aspects that link the
said excisions with individual absolutism. Individualism, proceeding from the initial dichotomy
“I” and “Not-I”, will be later projected into different collectivized versions.
(1) Dichotomy between the Universal and the Singular24: Triumph of the
rational conception of an individual that possesses the strength to impose his
reason to the others. The singular expresses “his” reality and makes it
universal by imposition. Going further, Louis XIV’s formula “I am the State”
evolved along the centuries through many historical examples. The most
obvious and tragic culmination of that way of thinking is expressed in the title
of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle): a singular individual imposes himself
by strength —or by the seduction of his theory— upon an entire nation,
aspiring to transform “his struggle” into a universal struggle. We all know how the tragic
22
Ibid., p. 39.
23
Ibid., p. 40.
24
Dunken, Capítulo II, “Música y Palabra”, pp. 31-49.
16
encounter between that individual theory with collective praxis resulted in the destruction of
those who were interposed in his way (finiscila, non soffro opposizione25).
(2) Dichotomy between Ethics and Aesthetics: It breaks the natural unity between Good,
Beauty and Truth and, according with its judgement, elaborates a system of ethical obligations
that will be imposed by reason or by force. Any human, aesthetic or sentimental considerations
that could jeopardize the ideology imposed by the group holding the power will be left aside.
Beauty is then totally relegated to the functional service of politics, while Good and Truth will
be assimilated to the arbitrary dictates of an extremist ethical-ideological system.
(3) Dichotomy between Subject and Object: This form of division separates the individual from
nature and his fellow beings. It permits lessening the persons into mere things. The Subject
aspires to be the absolute master of reality. Naturally, it is the stronger subject who will prevail
and the rest, now turned into objects, will have to surrender to the whims of the first one. Such
as we said about Don Giovanni and Hitler, the overwhelming personality of the despot does not
tolerate any opposition. He will pursue his liberty or his struggle at any cost, no matter the
damage.
The ideologies of the 20th century will respond to this

manner of understanding things, projecting the dialectic
way of thinking into matter, movement, history, and all
domains of knowledge. Such a gnoseological-
epistemological representation served as a basis to
construct theoretical moulds with which people attempted
to “correctly” shape thinking, society and nature. Some
scheme established a priori provided an answer to all possible human questions, it gave a
meaning to all work and to all struggles and was a major source of hope for a better world. I
refer, concretely, to Marxism and Capitalism, the two great ideologies that, victors of World War
II, separated the planet into two hemispheres ideologically confronted. With the fall of the
Berlin Wall and, close to our days, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the lack of coincidence
between theory and practice of the traditional ideological systems became evident —reality did
not respond to the expected patterns. Perhaps, the failures of Minister Martínez de Hoz’ table26,
Plan Austral, Plan Primavera and minister Cavallo’s convertibility law can be understood as
equivalent examples of the final supremacy of reality over all theories.
25
“Stop it! I don’t tolerate any opposition” says Don Giovanni to his servant Leporello.
26
“La tablita” de Martínez de Hoz.
17
The Italian writer, Fosco Maraini, conveniently illustrates the Oriental attitude towards dualism-
authoritarianism:
We have to remember, finally, that the thought of Asia, intuitive, synthetic, loves to include
rather than to exclude, to embrace and sublimate rather than to destroy or to replace. Our
[Western] universe is solid, objective, compartmentalized, rigorously dualist, it is natural for us to
split things into matter and spirit, good and evil, past and future; it is also natural for us to think in
terms of absolute truth and error, of true religion and false religion; but for the Oriental, all
religion is way, tao, michi; there are more convenient ways, more expeditious, more courageous,
more splendid, such as there also are ways more quiet, of lesser determination; but they all reach
the summit27.
The dualistic way of thinking constitutes a truly

handicapping mental defect. This idea is solidary with a
passage of the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset,
who refers to one typical aspect of this type of arbitrary
thinking: “To belong to the left is, the same as it is to
belong to the right, one of the infinite manners that a
man can choose to be an imbecile: both, indeed, are
different forms of moral hemiplegia” 28 . If we want to
cure ourselves, we’d better not base ourselves on the
demonization of the enemy and his subsecuent defeat.
We must rather understand that external revolutions only
result in cosmetic, ephemeral solutions because they do
not attack the problems that are at the base but, rather, having the power to create rational
justifications for any desire, they are capable of bringing things to a worse state than the
previous one in their attempt to transform them, even with good explicit intentions. The case of
Napoleon is a clear example of this type of processes. In effect, as the French author, Maurice
Bellet, says,
The Bastille! The Berlin Wall! But those walls, too visible, conceal the secret and implacable wall
that separate human beings between up and down, inside and outside, with and without. The wall
gets reconstructed recurrently because there is an imperious need of absolute violence, so that the
world and reality cannot be known but by domination, exploitation, exclusion or eradication29.
27
28
Quoted by Marcos Aguinis in his article “Entre la izquierda y la derecha, dos valores”, La Nación, 29 May,
2009.
29
BELLET Maurice, Je ne suis pas venu apporter la paix… Essai sur la violence absolue, 2009 Paris, Éditions
Albin Michel, pp. 168-169.
18
The topic is inexhaustible. Getting now to the central intention of this work, I will highlight just
one of the features of the absolutist leader: the orientation to strength, one of the main
impediments at the time of effectively applying the Japanese management technologies.
2. Cultural models of the absolutist man
Mythology reveals how man sees himself and what are his main terrors
and desires. One of the great cultural models of Greek mythology is
the titan Prometheus, heroic, immortal and powerful. It is him who
creates man, modelling him out of clay and becoming trapped for ever
in the dilemma of either being beneficial to humanity or transgressor
to the gods. Thus, an enmity is established between heaven (the gods)
and earth (men) that seems not to have any possibility of solution but
through struggle and conflict.
In the Theogony, Hesiod introduces Prometheus as a lowly challenger to Zeus' omniscience and
omnipotence. In the trick at Mecone, a sacrificial meal marking the "settling of accounts" between
mortals and immortals, Prometheus played a trick against Zeus. He
placed two sacrificial offerings before the Olympian: a selection of
beef hidden inside an ox's stomach (nourishment hidden inside a
displeasing exterior), and the bull's bones wrapped completely in
"glistening fat" (something inedible hidden inside a pleasing
exterior). Zeus chose the latter, setting a precedent for future
sacrifices; henceforth, humans would keep the meat for themselves
and burn the bones wrapped in fat as an offering to the gods. This
angered Zeus, who hid fire from humans in retribution. Prometheus
in turn stole fire in a giant fennel-stalk and gave it back to mankind.
This further enraged Zeus, who sent Pandora, the first woman, to
live with men. She was fashioned by Hephaestus out of clay and
brought to life by the four winds, with all the goddesses of Olympus
assembled to adorn her. "From her is the race of women and female
kind," Hesiod writes; "of her is the deadly race and tribe of women
who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets
in hateful poverty, but only in wealth."
Prometheus, in eternal punishment, is chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where his liver is eaten
out daily by an eagle, only to be regenerated by night, which, by legend, is due to his immortality.
Hesiod revisits the story of Prometheus in the Works and Days. Here, the poet expands upon Zeus'
19
reaction to the theft of fire. Not only does Zeus withhold fire from men, but "the means of life," as
well. Had Prometheus not provoked Zeus' wrath, "you would easily do work enough in a day to
supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the
smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste." Hesiod also expands upon
the Theogony's story of the first woman, now explicitly called Pandora ("all gifts"). After
Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora in retaliation. Despite Prometheus' warning,
Epimetheus accepted this "gift" from the gods. Pandora carried a jar with her, from which were
released "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death". Pandora shut the lid
of the jar too late to contain all the evil plights that escaped, but hope remained in the jar30.
The story of Prometheus and Pandora is part of the Greek side of our civilization. Let’s take a
look at what the Judaeo-Christian side presents, whose traditions are one of the basements of
Western thinking. In the Genesis we find that the desire for transgression and unlimited power,
the wish of being like gods, lies in the bottom of all human beings:
And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye
eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil31.
But, as in Prometheus’ case, the appetite for power comes together with a feeling of guilt and a
necessity for punishment. So speaks God to the man:
Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I
commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou
30
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus
31
Genesis 3, 4-5
20
shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return32.
In order to contrast those viewpoints with the Oriental ideas, Maraini points out that
The doctrine of original sin is, indeed, in absolute contrast with all the teachings that Asian man
has been accustomed to since early childhood. Confucianism and Shinto are clearly optimistic with
respect to the nature of man and his final destiny; in the West Buddhism is considered to be a
pessimistic philosophy, and it may be so under certain aspects because it denies both reality and
the importance of the world, but on the other hand it is deeply optimistic because all, even the
miserable fish in the sea and the most disgusting worm on earth, how much more, naturally, men
and women, at the end of all ends will become Buddha, will be united dissolving themselves into
Nirvana, in the absolute. For millennia, millions of Chinese and Japanese have been studying from
books in which the following assertion recurs: “Man is fundamentally good”. Go tell them now
exactly the opposite! In order to make them understand the doctrine of original sin and of
redemption, first you have to destroy the belief that man is naturally good, only after having made
him evil, wicked and lost can we get ready to redeem him. What a useless turn, is the objection of
the Oriental mind, at this point33.
In addition to these two examples, there are many other stories, such as Sisyphus’, which point
at the conflictive relationship between man and his efforts towards self-fulfilment, with work
and with the challenging of superior forces, inevitably parallel to their counterparts of guilt and
punishment. The heroic challenge is seen as a desirable ideal: “ye shalt be like gods”. The road
of man from the times of Renaissance on, takes up the path of a new anthropocentrism that
promotes reason and moral strength as the centre of his ideal of greatness. We can see that
dualism —as opposed to the modesty implied in the acceptance of reality— is intimately related
to idealism. Also, the desire to accomplish excessive ideals takes to exert the violence of the
strongest, be it an individual or a group. And, through a convenient process of rationalization,
the thirst for power will be coated with ethical constructions that will justify before other
people’s eyes the practice of violence and the arbitrary imposition of few over many.
The man of the Age of Enlightenment will take that model of leader to its most typical state:
rationalistic, idealistic and heroic. Indeed, the most important operas of the eighteenth century
were ordered by the monarchs with the purpose of exalting their virtues, in many cases, far from
their true human and moral reality. The same spirit drove Beethoven to tear apart the title page
of his Sinfonia Eroica, with his dedication to the hero Bonaparte, when he discovered the true
32
Ibid., 3, 17-19
33
21
intentions of the real Napoleon. We are getting close to the central
problem faced by today’s Western manager that wishes to practice
Kaizen (continuous improvement) in his company. Indeed, the lack
of adequacy of the real man to the standards of the ideal man
brings about other multiple consequences derived from the original
frustration. Some of them are the negation of reality, envy, the ill-
treatment of the talented, violence, the compensation of one’s
own deficiencies through the stealing of power or money. All those
evils come together with two twin brothers: inferiority complex and authoritarianism.
Milos Forman’s Film, Amadeus, well illustrates this problem and its relation with idealism,
mediocrity and Oedipus complex. Let’s recall the scene that features Mozart defending his opera
The Marriage of Figaro from the attack of his colleagues and courtiers, who respond to his
mediocre rival, Salieri. Here we can see Mozart, Salieri, Emperor Joseph II, Count Orsini-
Rosenberg, Baron van Swieten, Kapellmeister Bonno, Chamberlain von Strack and other courtiers.
Van Swieten: Mozart, music is not the issue here. No one doubts your talent. It is your judgment
of literature that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, this thing would still remain a
vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on such rubbish? Surely you can choose more elevated themes?
Mozart: Elevated? What does that mean? Elevated! The only thing a man should elevate is… —oh,
excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm stupid. But I am fed up to the teeth with elevated things! Old dead
legends! How can we go on forever writing about gods and legends?
Van Swieten (aroused): Because they do. They go on forever —at least what they represent. The
eternal in us, not the ephemeral. Opera is here to ennoble us. You and me, just as much as His
Majesty.
Bonno: Bello! Bello, Barone. Veramente.
Mozart: Oh, bello, bello, bello! Come on now, be honest. Wouldn't you all rather listen to your
hairdressers than Hercules? Or Horatius? Or Orpheus? All those old bores! People so lofty they
sound as if they shit marble!
Van Swieten: What?
Von Strack: Govern your tongue, sir! How dare you?
Beat. All look at the Emperor.
22
Mozart: Forgive me, Majesty. I'm a vulgar man. But I assure you, my music is not34.
In that scene, we can watch the genius struggling to integrate realism to his work. In Mozart’s
shocking phrase we can confirm the relation between linguistic register and the expression of
authentic feelings, such as we’ll see when dealing with the Gardelian revolution: the idealized
characters are so boring and unreal as if they “shit marble”. On the opposite side we can find
Salieri, his mediocre rival, his mortal enemy. Inflamed with anger against God (perhaps his
indignation is specular to Zeus’ when Prometheus cheated on him giving him bones instead of
beef), Salieri insults Him in a memorable scene, before throwing his crucifix to the flames:
Salieri: From now on we are enemies, you and I. Because you choose for your instrument a boastful,
lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because
you are unjust, unfair, unkind I will block you, I swear it. I will hinder and harm your creature on
Earth as far as I am able. I will ruin your incarnation.
In this way, as if he couldn’t even integrate the two hemispheres of his own brain, the dualistic
man, Promethean, oriented to strength, remains trapped in a dialectic cage that prevents him
from dealing properly with reality, elaborating ideal models and seeking refuge in them. A no
less harmful practice —related with other dichotomies such as substance and accident or essence
and existence— is the confusion between form and content, appearance and reality. As a result,
they now sell forms and appearances to society that simulate “liberty”, “equality”, “fraternity”,
“democracy”, “people”, “excellence”, “quality products”, “customer care”, “social
34
Source: http://www.screenplays-online.de/screenplay/6
23
responsibility”, etc. With some talent for media handling and with some ability for dialectic
sophisms, any value can be adulterated. And society buys. In any case, it can always find a good
scapegoat when it feels it’s been defrauded.
* * *
24
CHAPTER III
1917 ARGENTINA (Gardel): The Second Industrial Revolution
1. Historical context
While in Europe World War I was getting close its last part,
Mi noche triste (1917), within the growing capitalistic world,
accompanies the second instance of the Industrial
Revolution that takes advantage of many rationalistic,
scientific and ideological elements with the purpose of
improving the productivity of the companies, even at the
cost of a progressive dehumanization. In the West, such new
ideas found their expression in Frederick Taylor’s theories
and, later on, in Henry Ford’s production system. Series
production will result in the consolidation of the middle
class and the alienation of the working class.
Contemporarily, the birth of the communist world with the
triumph of the October Revolution and the later
conformation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will be the clearest consequence of that
serious social problem, together with the polarization of the World into two severely conflicting
systems.
Meanwhile, the consumer of the emerging Argentine middle class enjoyed listening to Gardel’s
records, listening to him on the radio or watching him on the brand-new talking movies. At the
same time, “cultivated” music divorced “popular” music and, while at the street people
whistled Gardel’s tunes in the most naïf tonal language, in the conservatoires élites were formed
that responded to the new learned musical aesthetics: dodecaphonic, serial, electronic,
concrete, etc.
From the musical point of view, we know that Tango
already existed in the second half of the 19th century, and that before 1917, year in which Carlos
Gardel recorded his version of Mi noche triste, it had begun its worldwide expansion. Gardel
discovered the rich possibilities latent in this peculiar kind of music and, through the adoption of
Italian musical and theatrical traditions, created a major genre out of a lively entertainment for
brothels or low-class gatherings. Gardel’s impeccable musical taste and the fast development of
the mass media at the beginning of the 20th century started an overwhelming cultural trend,
which captivated a fast growing middle class at both sides of the River Plate. Gardel’s stylistic
25
innovations had wide diffusion within the musical milieu of Buenos Aires, and some bandoneón
players such as Ciriaco Ortiz soon adopted these new modalities and applied them to their own
instruments. Another founding figure was Julio De Caro who enriched instrumental tango with
musical criteria borrowed from European chamber music such as alternation, contrast and
parallelism of voices, and expressive utilisation of the different instrumental timbres. Two
bandoneón players, who originally belonged to the De Caro ensemble, Pedro Maffia and Pedro
Laurenz, followed the track opened by Ortiz and re-directed the history of bandoneón playing into
a brand new path. Many more figures contributed thenceforth to the progress of this genre and
established a completely new relationship between spoken words and music through an effective
synthesis between recitative and aria styles. In 1936 Argentine Tango reached the summit of its
dramatic possibilities as made evident in Nostalgias, exemplary work by Juan Carlos Cobián and
Enrique Cadícamo. The way was cleared for the creativeness of Aníbal Troilo and Astor Piazzolla to
unveil unforeseen possibilities for future developments. Piazzolla, moreover, besides introducing
Argentine Tango into the most important stages of the world, initiated a fruitful dialogue with
composers and interpreters of other genres, both popular and academic. After the tumultuous
arrival of Rock and Roll, Argentine Tango run into a virtual backwater until the round-the-world
revival we seem to witness today35.
In order to understand how deep the Gardelian Revolution was, we

must first become aware of the relationship with the Mozartean
Revolution, because, as we saw in the introduction, both Mozart and
Gardel represent two instances of one same revolution that
continually seeks a higher degree of simplification, refinement and
subjective abstraction for music. As also happened with the French
and Russian Revolutions, the subsequent one is deeper than the first
one because it represents an advance or radicalization with respect to
the former, even if originally derived from it.
As an apparently trivial example at the linguistic level, Mozart had become aware that the
vernacular tongue was as dignified as Latin or Italian in order to express sublime feelings. He
created a true national opera, in local language, which reached full aesthetic dignity for the first
time in history. This can be seen in The Abduction from the Seraglio or, better, in The Magic
Flute36. Tango gave one more step in that direction, considering that in order to reflect reality,
it may not be enough just to use the vernacular tongue, Spanish (as opposed to the French or
English skills boasted by the well-to-do classes), but the new revolution needed to go deeper and
35
Read more: http://www.mozartygardel.jmkokubu.com.ar/?p=111
36
In The Magic Flute, Papageno includes words from the popular slang, as is the case of “Steine soll ich
fressen” instead of “Steine soll ich essen”.
26
use a linguistic register still closer to reality: Porteño slang or Lunfardo37. Here again, realism
associated with the resonance of facts in human subjectivity, knocks at the door of music to
make it truer and more humane. That is why we can say that the Gardelian Revolution
represents a further advance in the harmonic integration between Good, Truth and Beauty.
As in the case of the string Quartett, pre Gardelian tango was mainly instrumental.
When human voice participated, it did so just as one more

instrument. Tangos with words had, just like pre Mozartean Opera,
comic or mythical contents. With Carlos Gardel, tango music
became humanized when associated with a conceptual content of
human interest. Just like Mozart, Gardel placed the aesthetical and
ethical components of the genre (music and lyrics) at the same level.
Lita, by Samuel Castriota was a tango that fulfilled all the features
of the old style, rhythmical and expressive monotony included, just
as in the case of pre Mozartean Fugue. But when Pascual Contursi set words to that melody, he
incorporated a story, a “libretto”, and transformed tango into a true three-minute opera. Mi noche
triste was the title with which Lita, the old Guardia Vieja tango, was named in its “operatic”
version. In that brilliant re-elaboration, Gardel accomplished the miracle of modifying the original
instrumental music so that it could serve to the conceptual ethical content of what he was singing:
38
the story of a forlorn man ,
very close in spirit with the misfortunes of Così fan tutte, after a brutal descent from the ideal
world to the real world. Just like in Mozartean operas, Ethics and Aesthetics became again
integrated into a humanized and indivisible unit.
As in Mozart, Gardel’s improvement was closely related with tonal music and its association with
words and singing. So let’s consider now the two constitutive aspects, ethical and aesthetical of
the Gardelian Revolution, keeping in mind that the latter represents a further advance in its
capacity of subjective abstraction, compared to the Viennese classical period, thanks to the
apodictic fusion between the melody and the words.
2. Aesthetical aspects39
37
I am preparing a juicy article on this topic in Spanish.
38
Dunken, pp. 34-35.
39
As in the case of the Mozartean revolution, this division between aesthetical and ethical aspects is
schematic, only functional to a first analysis. In the case of Tango, the boundary between both aspects is
even less marked.
27
a. Imitation vs. analogy
For Tango, the evolution from a principle of imitation to a principle of

analogy is more crucial than it had been for Opera. Here its importance
is vital because if in an opera the composer could still maintain the
Aristotelian units of time, place and action, in a three-minute long
tango that would be impossible. Consequently, Tango depends
exclusively on the power of music and poetry to evoke credible spatio
temporal situations —by analogy between the described facts and the sensations that these facts
produce in the individual. Pre Gardelian tango had to undergo a shift from surrealistic expression
—of the idealized characters in first person— to the tango-like verismo that we can enjoy today.
This power is a direct derivation from the aptitude to generate a musical theme, in a modern
way, such as became established in the Sonata Form, with contrasting, clearly-identifiable first
and second themes. Paralelly, the musical theme is much related with the human disposition for
the perception, intelligence and memory of the sounds —for the recipe to work, the theme must
have the property of being easily differenciated and remembered. Equally, only adapting the
sounds to the perceptive structures of the brain a composer will become able to create catchy
tunes, of enormous importance for modern popular music.
b. Possibilities of tonal music
When a popular musician takes a guitar and plays —or invents—

a tune, accompanying himself with the “tones”, he is doing
tonal music, by contraposition with many other types of music.
Even if he doesn’t know music, he can do music without need
of any theories. This is possible because there is a
correspondence between the harmonic functions of tonal music
and the linguistic laws formulated by Michael A. K. Halliday in
his triple system of Tonality, Tonicity and Tone40.
As Chomsky discovered, the human brain, educated or instinctive, trained or without training,
has a language “chip”, a built-in Universal Grammar 41 . When the laws of music get to be
40
TENCH Paul, The Intonation Systems of English, London 1996, Casell, p. 7.
41
Dunken, p. 57.
28
identified with the laws of language, the former get automatically adapted to that universal chip,
common to all men and women. That is why, from the appearance of Tango henceforth —this
applies also to Jazz—, a further consolidation of tonal music was reached together with the
culmination of its formal and expressive possibilities.
Both in Mozart and in Gardel, those changes became viable when the laws of music were put in
parallel with the laws that regulate the comprehension of the sounds, taking advantage of the
possibilities of music —in its quality of immanent action and neutral semiotic system— to be
combined in a synergic way with the semiotic system of plain speech42. From that discovery on,
both composers and interpreters became able to associate melodies with words in a humanized,
balanced and credible way. The original progress in that direction was Gardel’s cityzenship
certificate as a revolutionary of Western thinking.
Once that new manner of composing and interpreting was established, several of the great
virtues of tango were derived:
• Physical humanization, thanks to a unique combination of the music with the rhythm of
the heart, represented by the beat; and with the rhythm of breath, expressed in the
melodic phrasing.
• Emotional humanization, once music becomes able to integrate a dramatic action, which
is equivalent, as Stefan Kunze says, to “incorporating the events into its construction” 43.
• Spiritual humanization, once tango acquires the capacity of saying, thanks to the wide
freedom of interpretation and phrasing that distinguishes tango from all other musical
genres.
In other words, from the rigid forms of the Baroque (Fugue, Prelude, Suite, etc.) passing through
the classical Sonata Form, music loses its exoskeleton, provided by objective structures and
becomes vertebrated by structures and functions distinctly internal, that depend exclusively on
the processes of human perception and respond more and more to a higher degree of subjective
abstraction.
42
Cf. GALLARATI Paolo, La forza delle parole. Mozart drammaturgo, Torino 1993, Giulio Einaudi editore, p.
13.
43
KUNZE Stefan, Il teatro di Mozart. Dalla Finta semplice al Flauto magico, traducción del alemán de
Leonardo Cavari, Venezia 1990, Marsilio editore S. p. A.
29
3. Ethical aspects
a. Overcoming of dualism
The Gardelian Revolution overcame dualism in many

aspects. For example, in the loss of the comic or
brothel-like character —very amusing but with
disputable aesthetic dignity. From then on, popular
music became able to fully express sublime concepts
for the first time in history. In that sense, paraphrasing
Gallarati, we may say that Gardel “imposed a
complete overturning to the entire history of popular
music, showing how he could achieve, by analogy and
not by imitation, what the rationalistic thought could
never have considered possible: a representation of
life captured in the flagrant immediateness of its occurrence and based on the dinamic force of
individual psychology. In the building of the characters, in the fusion between seriousness and
comicity through which they are brought back to the unity of a common psychological root, the
leap accomplished by Gardel in popular music was then enormous”44.
This will lead to a good integration between the tragic and comical aspects within a comedy-like
realism, as can be appreciated in tangos like Aquel tapado de armiño. But there are many other
manifestations of dualism that are overcome by tango, such as is the case, among many others,
of the following dichotomies:
• Man-Woman
• Spirit-Body
• “I” - “Not I”
• Music-Dance
• Composer-Interpreter
• Music-Words
• Ethics-Aesthetics
• Theory-Practice
• Obligation-Desire
• Learned-Popular
44
Cf. GALLARATI Paolo, La forza delle parole. Mozart drammaturgo, Torino 1993, Giulio Einaudi Editore, p.
6, and Chapter I, (2. Aesthetical aspects) of this same work.
30
• Religious-Profane
• Myth-Reality
• Strength-Weakness
• Elegant people-Ordinary people
b. Accessibility to the masses
Industrialization also comprised music,

accompanying the installation of the
middle classes and of the proletariat, so
the phonograph, the radio, the motion
pictures and the television were the
successive vehicles for the arrival of tango
to all the social segments.
Also, as we saw earlier, with the addition

of a text, the capacity of speaking in music
grew into a capacity of saying, of great importance for communication. This entailed the newly-
acquired power to better associate music with conceptual and dramatic contents, adding a
human action to the immanent action of pure music. Thus, the interest for varied types of
people became redoubled because many basic existential aspects could be treated, such as those
expressed in the tango Como abrazao a un rencor; sentimental aspects, such as we can find in
Nostalgias or Sur; and moral issues, such as in Silencio, Pan, Tormenta or Chiquilín de Bachín.
In this way Tango helped in the construction of an inclusive new “we”, thanks to the poetry
created around the most ordinary things such as a street lamp, a neighborhood, a sidewalk or a
train. This represented a liberation from solitude and self-absorption of the immigrants and
popular classes by the language, through the construction of common symbolisms; and in the
language, through the creation of a new way of speaking, Lunfardo, a newly-adopted slang,
shared by everyone.
c. Orientation to weaknesses and acceptation of limits
31
The association of a melody with a text needs that the composer put
himself at the same level with the lyricist, having to discuss with him
the details of the work. The composer has to deal with an alter ego,
with an “other” that possesses what he himself does not. In other
words, he has to deal with his own limit. In the Tango, that interaction
between parts became more marked than in Mozart and Da Ponte’s
association, because everybody equally, producers, consumers,
composers, poets, arrangers, instrumental interpreters, vocal interpreters collaborate
equivalently to the final result, which is not marked on the musical score. But the result will
equally be, as in the case of The Marriage of Figaro, the creation of a virtual reality that
convinces. Works as Silbando, Los cosos de al lao or Balada para un loco, just to give some
scarce examples, are obvious illustrations of how credible spatiotemporal and dramatic
situations can be evoked within just three minutes of music.
Before concluding this section, let’s apply to Gardel —relating him with Mozart and Japanese
management— what Fosco Maraini says about the importance of capturing
the essence of any personality (human, animal, vegetal, mineral) not in similarity but rather in
certain aspects ignored before the artist should discover them and truer than similarity itself: of
those aspects, perhaps infinite, to choose the simplest, the purest, reduce, strip, until getting to
the soul, to the last “wind” of life45.
Inspired in Figaro’s boasts, the Gardelian Revolution is also an impudent revolution. After all,
who was Gardel? He was the son of an unmarried mother, just like Figaro. Where did he come
from? It’s unknown. How is it possible that now anyone can listen to Beethoven on the radio?
How can it be that he who was born in a humble cradle now rubs shoulders with princes? How is
it possible that the sublime can now dwell anywhere, in any person, not in the gods, not in the
titans, not in heroic Greece, not in the Rome of the Caesars, not even in Callao Avenue but at
the crossing of San Juan and Boedo?
* * *
45
MARAINI Fosco, Ore giapponesi, Bari 1957, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 401. (El subrayado es mío).
32
CHAPTER IV
1950 Deming: The Third Industrial Revolution
1. The Third Revolution in the World
Just like the two revolutions described in the terrain

of music, the Third Industrial Revolution represents a
humanization of management that proposes a 180º
turn with respect to Taylor’s theories, of heavy
mechanistic inspiration. The lucidity of pioneers like
Walter Shewhart, Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran or
Kaoru Ishikawa led industrials to become conscious of
the fact that the traditional methods of industrial
production neglected the human factor in a high
degree. Indeed, in modern management, the human
factor is now considered as one of the main pillars of
competitiveness. Such pioneers proposed a radical change, since
TQM 46 is a management technology that promotes a systemic change in the organizations and
affects all the corners of the company. Its origins go back to the second half of the 1920s decade,
when Walter A. Shewhart, in the Bell Laboratories, developed a theory of statistical quality control.
Shewhart had a strong influence on W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and on the Japanese quality
management movement that became strong in the decade of 1950. This movement received the
impulse of Japanese specialists like Kaoru Ishikawa, Genichi Taguchi and Yoji Akao and became
significantly consolidated.
At the beginning of the eighties, the concept of TQM, originally North American in its essence was
re-exported from Japan to the United States, a country that was experiencing the consequences of
a surging of electronic products and high-quality cars imported from the Orient. A documentary on
the NBC chain broadcasted in 1983 entitled “If Japan can, why not us?” contributed to awaken
American conscience on the issues of quality. Apart from the mentioned specialists, other
Americans like Armand Feigenbaum and Philip Crosby worked on the creation of this new
conscience47.
46
Total Quality Management.
47
YACUZZI Enrique, “¿Tiene relevancia la Gestión de Calidad Total? Reflexiones a la luz de las ideas de sus
fundadores”, Serie Documentos de Trabajo, Buenos Aires 2003, Universidad del CEMA, p. 2.
33
On the heading of this essay, we associated Deming’s arrival in
Tokyo, in 1950, with a movement of convergence between the East
and the West. We know, naturally, that European culture had
already had many contacts of all types with the East along history:
Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Mongolian Empire, the
Arab Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire, etc. In
the domain of culture, these encounters became more and more
profound. For example, in the times of Bach, Montesquieu published
his novel Persian Letters 48 , where he satirized on European culture as if it was narrated by
Orientals. Also, the relation with the Turks, although bellicose, witnessed a mutual interest and
a mutual influence. Half a century later, Mozart —besides including explicit reflections about the
morality of the Europeans, of the Turks and about the idea of liberty of the English woman—
incorporated for the first time in history Turkish musical instruments in his opera The Abduction
from the Seraglio. This addition to the Western orchestra was definitively consecrated by
Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony. Later, the European painters were captivated by the Ukiyoe
prints. Van Gogh even copied “textually” several of Utamaro’s prints. Also Klimt was greatly
inspired by the techniques and aesthetics of the Momoyama period.
The European and North American influence in

Japan was still stronger. Once Japan’s isolation
policy (Sakoku) was abandoned, the fascination
that its people took for the West was expressed
in a constant import of fashions, technologies,
scientific advances, imitations, adoptions,
elaborations, fusions, etc. From the Meiji
Restoration onwards, Japan entered into a stage
of vertiginous modernization and
industrialization, following the European and North American models. With wise eclecticism,
they picked up the best achievements of each nation in order to adopt and adapt them to their
own tastes and needs. There was already an important basis of a craft-oriented culture,
reflected in the veneration for monozukuri (to do things) and a system of commercial
corporations that was functional to modernization.
Then Japan, following the political and economic models of the great powers of the nineteenth
century, not only joined the race for industrialization but sought progress through the conquest
of territories. The world was becoming narrow few spaces were left without colonial “owners”.
48
Lettres persanes.
34
Together with Germany and Italy, Japan joined the club of newly unified or modernized nations,
with few lands of their own and with great avidity for more. Also in Japan, the model of
leadership oriented to strength was becoming tense, making the clash with the central powers
inevitable.
The result is well known: for the

Japanese, on August 6th, 1945
everything changed… The belligerence
of the defeated was reduced to pieces
after a clash against absolute limits,
imposed by a stronger foreign power
and by a terrifying scientific discovery.
From the disaster on, taking advantage
of their natural propensity towards realism and pragmatism, the Japanese started to develop an
improved people-management system —people was the only resource that was left— that would
make of limits (that’s to say, of the “orientation to weakness” and consideration to the other,
i.e. the “customer”) a natural environment for reasonable expansion, continuous improvement
and development of common well-being.
In order to better understand the nature of the

changes that followed the defeat, the
comparison between the basic way of thinking
of Japan and that of the West is illustrative.
For that purpose, let’s analyze the divergent
conception that both cultures have about
garden design and cultivation, a human
activity much related with management
philosophies and tools. We will once again
make use of Fosco Maraini’s lucidity, who
describes, around the conception of the Japanese garden, Western culture as contrasting with
Oriental culture:
We are at the antipodes of the geometrical garden, Italian style. In the latter, the fundamental
reality is the diagram, the scheme, the intellectual music of the lines, the relationships, the
surfaces, the homage to Euclid; Matter, no matter how skilfully one wants to make it pleasant,
exploiting the colours, the lights, the shapes, the rapprochements, works only as some kind of
filling. The flower can only be a flower where “florality” has been decided (the flowerbed), the
gravel, where the “path-ity” has been decreed (the path); the tree, where the “tree-ity” has been
35
anticipated (hedges, tree-lines, centres.) It is a first-degree artifice: the man-king imposes his law
to what he in fact despises: matter, in order to celebrate what really interests him: his own
thinking.
In the Oriental garden,

instead, although it’s true
that the artifice is pushed
much further, for it is the
case of a second-degree
artifice —nature, in fact,
can be considered as
defeated twice; one time
because it has been
modelled by man and, a
second time, because it is
not allowed to show it, not
even minimally—, it is also
true that in this culmination
the cycle is closed: the
homage is no longer to
Euclid but to life. There is
no abstract, external
scheme that is imposed
from the outside onto the
ground and that things will
have to fill in; things are,
instead, dynamic nuclei that determine and modify the space around them —such as happens with
the heavenly bodies, according to modern physics. The Western garden is the son of the intellect,
the Oriental one is the son of love. The Western garden is hierarchical; man, animal, statues,
plants, soil and water, each in its place. The Oriental garden is fusion: man-leaf, sun-joy, water-
thought49.
For this reason, once we want to implement the Third Revolution in the West, the Japanese warn
us about certain chronic dangers of our civilization that may lead us astray. Let’s just check a
tiny example: the fact of not knowing how to take advantage of certain good things that may
have resulted from processes that, themselves, had been not so good. We have in Argentina a
certain tendency to get lost in ethical and theoretical speculations of little practical value. Again,
Maraini illustrates this problem brilliantly:
Today is a journey of little activity: I can see, here and there, some elderly couples admiring the
49
36
garden with reverence, walking around
the entrance, carrying some silent boy by
the hand. The garden has as background
the thick forest of Higashiyama, sharply
climbing to the sky; always the same
desire to be absorbed by nature, hiding in
her bosom, more than dominating or
possessing her in the landscape… I
remember one visit to this same place,
many years ago, in the full moon of
September, considered to bee the most
beautiful of the year. Our friends of the temple had invited some Japanese and foreign
acquaintances. For the occasion, also the pavilion was opened, as was common at times of
Yoshimasa50: the sliding walls (amado, fusuma and shoji) had been removed and the moonlight
inundated the tatami, the straw mats. We sat exactly where, more that four centuries ago,
Yoshimasa and his friends got together in order to compose poems, play contests to see who had a
better discernment for different fragrances, or listen to the liquid and pure music of the flute. I
don’t know how, at a certain time an argument arose, very different to the conversation that we
should have been holding at such time, in such place.
—Beautiful, very beautiful— said a protestant missionary whose name I can’t even remember —but
when I think that Yoshimasa was here, surrounded by his voluptuous exquisite things, while in
Kyoto people were dying at the streets, of hunger, of plagues, under the attack of bandits; well,
then I think that all has been perverted by an original evil that no splendid result can justify…
There was who gave him the reason, there was who contradicted him; they ended by arguing
animatedly in I don’t know how many different languages. The poor Japanese, who had come to
poetically enjoy the moon and the garden, must have thought “the usual foreigners!”. The process
to Yoshimasa on the one hand was very easy; on the other hand, it raised the most terrible
questions of all philosophy, the relations between beauty and good, between beauty and
50
Ashikaga Yoshimasa (
, January 20, 1435—January 27, 1490) was the 8th shogun of the Ashikaga
shogunate who reigned from 1449 to 1473 during the Muromachi period of Japan. Yoshimasa was the son of
the sixth shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori. Several years after becoming shogun, Yoshinari changed his name to
Yoshimasa, by which name he is better known. During Yoshimasa's reign Japan saw the growth of the
Higashiyama Culture (Higashiyama bunka), famous for Japanese tea ceremony (Sado), Japanese flower
arranging (Kado or Ikebana), Noh Japanese drama, and Indian ink painting. Higashiyama culture was greatly
influenced by Zen Buddhism and saw the rise of Japanese aesthetics like Wabi-sabi and the harmonization
of imperial court (Kuge) and samurai (Bushi) culture. In 1460, Yoshimasa initiated planning for construction
of a retirement villa and gardens as early as 1460; and after his death, this property would become a
Buddhist temple called Jisho-ji (also known as Ginkaku-ji or the "Silver Pavilion"). Yoshimasa retired in 1473.
In February 21, 1482, the construction of the "Silver Pavilion" is commenced. In January 27, 1490 (Entoku 2,
7th day of the 1st month), the former-Shogun Yoshimasa died at age 56 in his Highashiyama-dono estate,
which marks the beginning of the end of Higashiyama culture. Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashikaga_Yoshimasa
37
usefulness, between the gods and the men, between the men an the world51.
What lies under such a different way of thinking? What roads has
Japanese civilization taken, so divergent from ours? Fosco Maraini
also shows the contrast between the Japanese civilization and our
dualistic-rationalistic-idealistic Western civilization.
Indeed, “Zen, together with most of the Buddhist schools and a

good part of Oriental philosophy, sustains that the key to the
understanding of Cosmos lies on the overcoming of all illusory
forms of dualism: “I” and “not-I”, life and death, good and evil,
matter and spirit. What is the importance of death if the Universe remains alive?” Contrarily to
the dualistic-rationalistic-idealistic conception of the universe, Zen stands out for the negation
of all confidence in the intellect. Salvation, illumination, are born suddenly, they explode within
intuition. So, a garden is a place where I and not-I can merge and sublimate, in the same way
rivers join the ocean. The garden is more important than treaties, syllogisms or old scriptures. It
is the singing of things” 52.
That is why the Japanese garden is not man that dominates nature, as in the case of the Western
“Euclidean” garden, but rather nature that absorbs man and sublimates him. The Japanese
understand any human undertaking with the same concept. So, the company, just like a garden,
is a place of privilege, where people and things can occupy their place, expand, and complete
themselves with contrast and closeness, light and reflection, living to the rhythm of the hours
and the minutes.
Now we are ready to better understand why Deming obtained in Japan the success that was
denied to him in his own country. Besides the natural disposition of the Japanese to learn from
their mistakes, Deming found in Japan a cultural context strongly oriented to aesthetics and to
practice, very favourable to the effective development of his brand-new concepts of
management.
2. How does it work?
Now let’s see how the Japanese management system operates today, starting from three simple
principles:
51
52
Cf. Ibid., p. 363.
38
a. The pleasure of pleasing is so big, or bigger, as the pleasure of being pleased. The
Market-In conception derives from here, together with the brilliant idea of substituting
the “push” forces by “pull” energies. This principle led to world-famous technologies
such as Streamlining, Kanban or Just-in-Time.
b. The level of the intellect has to be in permanent dialogue with the level of
experience, contrasting the veracity of our thoughts with the objective data of reality.
Here is where the WV model53 derives.
c. To make the workers tasks easier is the basis for the profitability and
competitiveness of the company.
These three principles are vital for Lean Production because “whereas the Market-In model
keeps you focused on doing the right things, the WV model keeps you focused on doing things
right54”. Also, only when the worker’s tasks become easy to perform is it possible to increase
output, productivity, competitiveness and quality, all at the same time.
The Third Revolution is, as the preceding two, a revolution in thinking that responds to a vision
of man and society opposed to the one traditionally cultivated in the West. Indeed, the
revolution of total participation proposed by Japanese management contradicts all the terms of
the Western leadership model, oriented to strength, founded on individual or collective
absolutism and on the supremacy of the dualistic-rationalistic-idealistic scheme over nature.
Let’s see what Enrique Yacuzzi recommends for a company to reach an optimal level of
competitiveness:
It is indispensable to practice a new type of management, led by people interested in and

committed to their organization, able to convey enthusiasm to their staff and eager to train their
employees in the best ideas and tools. A kind of management sensitive to the dialogue among the
different disciplines studied by the organizations, so that the grey areas of one department can be
illuminated by the experience and wisdom of the others. A type of management, finally, that can
organize the company as a school of modesty, ruled by group wisdom, data analysis and respect for
the customer55.
53
The WV model shows the problem solving activities continuously moving between the level of thought and
the level of experience. You sense a problem, explore it broadly, formulate a problem to work on, state a
specific improvement theme, collect data and analyze the situation, find the root causes, plan a solution,
standardize the process to include the new solution if it is good, and then take on the next problem.
54
SHIBA Shoji, GRAHAM Alan & WALDEN David, A New American TQM. Four Practical Revolutions in
Management, Portland 1993, Center for Quality Management-Productivity Press, p. 142.
55
YACUZZI Enrique, “¿Tiene relevancia la Gestión de Calidad Total? Reflexiones a la luz de las ideas de sus
fundadores”, Serie Documentos de Trabajo, Buenos Aires 2003, Universidad del CEMA.
39
We can now better see that Japanese management proposes a radical revolution compared to
the Western traditional management system. In effect, when in 1950 Edwards Deming presented
in Tokyo the concept of “chain reaction of quality, cost and productivity56”, he was proposing a
revolutionary movement that got rid of all the doctrines of management that were in use at his
time. He introduced the concepts of systemic view, statistical variation, theory of knowledge
and use of psychology as a motivating lever 57 . Kaoru Ishikawa, on his part, also considered
Quality Control as “a revolution in thinking” 58 that put the customer in the centre of his sight.
The Third Revolution is the revolution of total participation.

So is stated by Shoji Shiba, Alan Graham and David Walden,
who say that in this change,
implicit in the four revolutions of management thinking is

the need to practice Total Quality Management at four levels: individual, work group, organization,
and regional or industry levels. […] The individual level of TQM practice is necessary to shift the
purpose of each employee’s work from just doing the work assigned to satisfying the customer, and
to give the individual employee the tools necessary to accomplish this task. It brings the idea of
customer/supplier relationships to everyone in the company. If employees are to meet and satisfy
the customer or next process, their skills must shift from just doing daily work to doing both daily
work and improvement work. Making such shifts effectively requires a system59.
Further on, Shiba & al.’s book shows how, in order to abandon the old production philosophy,
the Third Revolution requires overcoming the subject-object dualism, which facilitates the using
of persons as objects:
TQM teaches that understanding and fulfilling the expectations of customers is

the best and only lasting means to business success. To this end, TQM emphasizes
a concept called market-in, which focuses on customer satisfaction as the
purpose of work, in contrast to the older concept of product-out, which focuses
on the product as the purpose of work. The traditional concept of work says that
a job is done and done well if a product is produced according to the manual for making it and the
product works up to its specification or standard. This is called the product-out concept, because
the focus is on the company’s effort to output what it considers to be a good product.
56
Ibid., p. 4
57
Ibid., p. 5.
58
Ibid., p. 9.
59
Management, Portland 1993, Center for Quality Management-Productivity Press, pp. 29-30.
40
The product-out concept is often practiced in a fashion that suggests that the customers are stupid
—that they don’t understand their real needs. Often companies with a product-out orientation
reject a customer complaint about a product with the statement “you are using it incorrectly” or
“it’s not meant to do that.” Also, workers frequently believe that their job is just to do what is
specified in their description, product standard, or production manual, and nothing more;
managers may have this same attitude of “not my job.”
But why do we work? Work is the means to the purpose of satisfying customers. The market-in
concept focuses on input from the market and says that the job is not done well until the customer
is satisfied. The market–in concept says, “the customer is king” (or queen —the Japanese translate
their version of this saying as “the customer is god”). The market-in concept says that every
employee has customers. The company has outside customers, of course, and they must be
satisfied; however, each person in the company, no
matter how far from the external customers, also has
customers. The now famous TQM slogan, “The next
process is your customer,” means that each product or
service step must satisfy or serve all subsequent
processes. Therefore, internal customers (the next
processes) have the same importance as external
customers60.
Let’s consider now some practical advantages of the “orientation to the weaknesses”,
understanding “weakness” as the difference between the current situation and the target.
a. focus on facts — base actions on facts, not opinion.
b. focus on process, not results — results are the driven (effect) variable and you must focus on
the drive (cause) variable.
c. focus on root causes, not solutions — encourages objective analysis of causes (“what caused
the delays”), not jumping first to solutions (“what can we do to improve?”).
According to TQM, because every product or service is the outcome of a process, the effective way
to improve quality is to improve the process used to build the product. The corollary of focusing on
process is that the focus is not on the results — results are the dependent variable. The results
come from whatever process is followed —process drives results.
This practice differs significantly from the methods used in most U.S. non-TQM companies, where
60
Ibid, pp. 35-37.
41
the emphasis is on objectives. TQM teaches that objectives alone cannot produce sustainable
results. The value of objectives is to help decide what process needs to be put in place to produce
the desired results. That process (and the way you follow it) then determines the results61.
d. Connection with reality
The weakness orientation is the most important component

of problem identification for improvement. For this
approach to work, however, management (e.g., middle
managers) must be supportive. Workers want to reveal
weakness to improve quality; they may say, “Let’s discuss
last week’s problem.” However, managers may say, “Our
factory is perfect,” “Why not choose another problem?” or
“When we have problems they are small and we can easily
solve them.” Also, senior managers see reality through the
middle managers. Thus, if a middle manager does not encourage and support workers who want to
reveal weakness, the weakness will remain hidden from senior management. Senior management,
in turn, must encourage a weakness orientation. If a senior manager blames the middle manager
for revealing a problem (“Why was that allowed to happen?”, “Why wasn’t that fixed sooner?”),
the middle manager will never show another problem.
The key point is that workers should be encouraged by all levels to reveal problems. CEOs must be
patient and refrain from blaming people about problems; they must encourage exposure of
weakness. If CEOs don’t encourage exposure of weakness, everyone will hide problems62.
e. Does not favour self-interested “embellishment” of reality
For example, if the CEO gets angry at a presentation of quality improvement teams (QITs), QITs
can easily next time create a story and data to make the CEO happy. If they do this, improvement
and TQM will fail. In Japan, when a weakness is discovered, they tray to say, “This is very good.”
Say it again and again; constantly encourage a weakness orientation. To get permanent good
results, you have to define the problem in terms of weakness when selecting a theme63.
61
Ibid., p. 45.
62
Ibid., p. 77.
63
Ibid., p. 78.
42
3. The Third Revolution in Argentina
After achieving an extraordinary development and refinement in Japan, the new management
system initially proposed by Deming and his colleagues first bounced back, as could be expected,
to the United States, from where it came to Argentina causing a boom in the eighties. Once the
fad was over, Japanese management, as a concept, entered a stage of relative oblivion, partly
because of the tarnishing of the “Japanese miracle” —after the burst of the economic bubble at
the beginning of the nineties— and, partly, because the Japanese concepts and tools became
included in terms such as Total Quality Control, Total Quality Management, Continuous
Improvement, Lean Manufacturing, etc. This generalization of the new management practices
was highly beneficial, however, since today the set of ISO norms and the guidelines of the
National Prize to Quality serve as guide and inspiration for improvement to many Argentine
companies.
Japanese Management, however, continues to be, by far,

the most efficient management system in the World.
That is why it is convenient to retrieve those aspects
that are typical of the Japanese style. Organizations like
JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) or AOTS (Association for Overseas Technical
Scholarship) represent a good opportunity for the re-launching of those practices, adapting them
to the current local reality. The case of AOTS in Argentina is very interesting because, warning
about the difficulties of a “literal” transfer of the Japanese management system, it promotes a
hermeneutical review of all its value system in order to better “translate” its philosophical
marrow to the economic, social, political and cultural conditions of present-day Argentine
corporations. Private consulting companies like JDS (Japan Development Service, Inc.), SSJ
(Streamline Strategy Japan, Inc.) or organizations like The Overseas Technical Scholarship
continue to provide an important contribution for the improvement of Argentine industry.
As a leitmotiv for this section, we will take the Okita Report I and Okita Report II 64 into
consideration, since in their analysis and recommendations they reflect the fine criteria, the
common sense and the simplicity, typical of the management style we are studying. Let’s learn
about its genesis:
In 1985, by request of the Argentine Government, the Japan International Cooperation Agency sent
a study mission presided by Dr. Saburo Okita, special advisor of the Japan International
64
Okita Report I: The First Study on the Economic Development of the Argentine Republic. Okita Report II:
The Second Study on the Economic Development of the Argentine Republic.
43
Development Center and former minister of Foreign Affairs, who carried out a meticulous survey of
Argentine economy between August that year and December 1986. The study focused on (a)
industrial activation and (b) the promotion of exports, two crucial issues of management,
considering that (c) “the Japanese experiences in the rapid post-war development could offer
something useful, especially in relation with the different policies and measures implemented for
industrial promotion and external trade”. The Japanese experts recommended realistic goals,
consistence among the plans of different industrial sectors, statistical control and analysis,
cooperation with the private sector and modernization of administrative processes. They insisted
on the importance of market mechanisms and on the lowering of the deficit, simultaneously
warning about the need to evaluate adequately the potentially harmful side effects of
privatizations. They also noted that “some of the suggestions about policies encompass a period
that extends to the next century” 65, our twenty first century.
It is not difficult to recognize among the mentioned recommendations the basic criteria proposed
by Japanese management, for example: eclecticism instead of ideological schemes, common sense,
realism, consistency, integration of immediate needs with a medium and long term perspective,
synergy between the government and the private sector, in consonance with a criterion that avoids
the dualism of two-valued thought (Baka), impossible goals (Muri), inconsistency (Mura) and waste
(Muda.)
Among the recommendations for industrial

activation, the Okita Report privileged the
improvement of quality, productivity and
competitiveness, pointing out that, for example,
privatizations are not “just a means to reduce
governmental deficits but a way to improve the
efficiency of the economy”. At this stage, for
reasons that should be studied impartially, the
Argentine government neglected the above recommendations, perhaps for ideological reasons,
perhaps for immaturity, perhaps because it didn’t like the recommendations… Thus, among other
things, a whole year and a half of a formidable team of experts and scientists, including Okita
himself, were wasted. It was the Argentina Japan Association who took the responsibility of
divulging this valuable work to the general public66.
The matter is of major importance because Argentina suffers chronically of the consequences of
her lack of vision and of her poor management capacity, both at the political and economic level.
In that sense, it would be very productive to study our failures with a Japanese-like “weakness-
65
Auctores varii, Estudio sobre el Desarrollo Económico de la República Argentina (Informe Okita I),
Resumen Ejecutivo, Introducción, Buenos Aires 1987, Agencia de Cooperación Internacional de Japón (JICA).
66
KOKUBU MUNZÓN José María, "El management japonés y el Informe Okita" en revista Temas de
Management, Volumen VII, noviembre de 2009, edición especial sobre Management Japonés, Buenos Aires,
Universidad del CEMA.
44
orientation” approach as a catalyst for improvement. Japanese management points out that
most of the failures are produced because the managers don’t know how to diagnose the
defective processes, whose main key for solution is “the identification of the weakness” 67 .
Unfortunately, our leadership model is immature and strength-oriented. Of course it would be
foolish to take pleasure in the weaknesses. On the contrary, what we are seeking through the
discovery and acceptance of our weaknesses is to achieve a real strength, as opposed to the
illusion of strength.
As a complement of what has been said, and in order to reinforce

the importance of Japanese management for Argentina, let’s
remember a classic Argentine motion picture, Plata dulce, where
the penuries of a family company, “Los dos cuñados” a plant (a
big workshop, actually) that produced medicine chests. Year
after year they kept making the same kind of products with a
marked product-out philosophy. When the first Taiwan-made
medicine chests appeared in the Argentine market, more
inexpensive and, perhaps, more functional, the company
discovers that it can no longer compete with the imported goods
and that it is now doomed to extinction, what eventually
happens.
Enraged by the failure, we can, together with one of the main characters, Federico Luppi, curse
out: “¡Arteche y la puta madre que te parió!” or claim that Martínez de Hoz’ economic regime
had an immoral basis. Another option, more mature, would be to roll up our sleeves, leave
behind the irremediable and start to do things a little better, improving our competitiveness
without repeating the errors of the past.
Therefore, the central question is if we can afford to waste time in theoretical debates about
the lack of ethics of the global liberalization of trade started by Videla’s dictatorship, just as if it
were possible to undo the road already trodden. In fact, with or without justice, for good or for
evil, today, the world has become much more globalized than in the times of the film and it is
getting more and more difficult to protect our local industry from foreign competition. From the
viewpoint of the Third Revolution, an erroneous option would be to reinstall the fundamentalist
dichotomy between free market and state intervention, since common sense indicates that the
67
45
clever play between the two sectors of the economy is indispensable. Another dichotomic trap
would be to aspire to establish supremacy for the production of raw materials over
industrialization, confronting the latter with the farming and livestock sectors. In all senses, the
Okita Report is eloquent when proposing collaboration between the State and private industry
and when recommending industrialization based on our competitive advantage for the
production of raw materials and foodstuffs.
The only road towards development is to learn how to become competitive and, here, the only
effective formula is to have our companies and public administration adopt a good management
system. Much has been said about what ought to be done, of what was ethically just. But reality
imposes the notion that, as we have said in the prologue, much more than a question of ethics or
principles, it is a matter of survival. The option protectionism vs. free market has become more
and more difficult to sustain, especially in peripheral countries like Argentina. He or she who
does not understand this fact is doomed to follow the misfortunes of the medicine chests of
Plata dulce. Let’s examine what our friends Shiba, Graham and Walden say on this respect:
Corning provides the following analogy to this increased pace and change in society and the need
for business to keep up: For centuries, running a four-minute mile was believed to be impossible.
In the 1950s, Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes for the first time. Today, running a
four-minute mile is a basic requirement for any competitive miler. The business situation is similar.
Companies that pioneered in achieving total quality have raised the standard for competitive
performance. Today, unless a company is achieving total quality, it is, or soon will be,
uncompetitive68
4. Liberation or dependence?
Approaching the end of this work and adhering to the 200th

anniversary of the Argentine May Revolution, let’s consider some
reflections regarding the three revolutions in human thinking that
we have related with The Marriage of Figaro, anticipating 1789;
with Mi noche triste, in 1917; and with Deming’s trip to Tokyo, in
1950.
The relation between the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and
68
46
the independence of Argentina is clear. All those were liberation movements. Closer to our days,
“liberation or dependence” was a slogan that was much in vogue at the times of the ideological
polarization of the seventies. The option was clearly dualistic: one or the other, with
impossibility to choose with an autonomous criterion. It was dualistic also because there were
“good” things and “bad” things, which responded to exclusion machineries (centralists or
federalists, civilization or barbarianism,) to notions such as “to the friend, everything, to the
enemy, not even justice”69.
Let’s contrast this with the Japanese management considerations on dualistic thought:
People have a strong tendency to use two-valued or 0-1 thinking (“It’s a hot day,” “Boston Harbor
is polluted”). The two-valued scale is very gross, ant it is unclear what the boundary between the
two values means.
Two-valued thinking or speech, if used carelessly or deviously, can be a tool for rhetoric or
demagoguery. It simplifies the situation to the point of non reality, and people often use it for the
purpose of dominating others or deluding themselves (“our product is the best on the market and
doesn’t need improvement”)70.
On the contrary, Japanese management proposes multiple-valued thought, which
is the tool of those trying to understand a real situation and initiate effective corrective action
(“our product has three features customers said they liked, two that they didn’t like, and two to
which they are indifferent”)71.
The hidden issue is that dualism and its twin sister, the
compartmentalization of knowledge, are at the same
time a profitable business and a tremendous tool for
dominating other people. In Argentina, that tool is
boosted by our tendency to find refuge in the ideals, in
the ideologies, in what things should be like and by the
reluctance to face reality in its unpleasant aspects72.
Indeed, some classical polarizations have been great businesses, such as the option between
centralists and federalists, Braden or Perón, capitalism or communism, military or guerrilla,
Florida or Boedo, etc. Dualism seduces with an infinite range of options for the artificial creation
of conceptual conflicts.
69
“Unitarios y Federales”, “Civilización y Barbarie”, “Al amigo todo, al enemigo, ni justicia”.
70
Ibid., pp. 168-169.
71
Ibid., p. 169.
72
Note the constant recurrence of Così fan tutte’s theme.
47
Let’s now take up again the ethics-aesthetics dichotomy, applied to the leadership models. In
the history of the Orient (and in our pre Socratic antiquity), the top leader was such just because
he could and because he wanted to; because he had ambition for power and because he had the
moral and physical strength to prevail over the rest. The people, finally, accepted him because
society always needs a hierarchical organization of some kind in order to prosper. We can say
that they were aesthetic leaders. In the West, instead, there was a strong tendency to resort to
ethical justifications. Those ethics, elaborated ad hoc, were subsequently applied for domination.
The thirst for power used to be embellished with rationalizations, excuses and idealistic
messianisms. Alexander the Great went for the union of the nations. In the case of Napoleon, his
justification was that of fighting for the revolutionary ideas in all of Europe, and to impose them
by force: liberty, equality and fraternity by obligation. Hitler also justified his actions with “his
struggle”. Stalin and Mao relied on a formidable system of thinking: the Marxist theory. But in
the end, all those ideological discourses usually end by emptying themselves because in the
upper leading levels there are no ideologies, there is only convenience and pragmatism.
Coming back to Argentina, it is important for us to become

aware of our double cultural insertion in the post-Socratic
civilization and in the native pre-Columbian reality of
Argentina in order to fully understand the foundational
dichotomy of “civilization or barbarism” that has bled
Argentina and remains unresolved. Indeed, the twenty first
century found us still divided and without a clear road to unity.
Today, the dilemma seems to be “government or opposition”
and we continue to be confined in a desert of ideas. Therefore,
if we want to check the origin of our problems, it will be
better to search into the main causes and the processes that
drove our country to sink into today’s reality with good
management criteria. What is preventing us from applying a weakness-oriented overcoming of
dualism? Why can’t we contextualize our reality in a wider perspective?
Many of our clichés about the independence are revealing. One example is the tendency to
individualism shown by our neglect of the intercontinental context of our wars of independence.
From the point of view of idealization, we tend to believe that heroes like San Martín or
Belgrano sprung forth like mushrooms. And, of course, that they were perfect. Strength-oriented,
we like to think that we could defeat the Spanish empire just on our own, ignoring the
international factors that worked in our favour. We feel uncomfortable with the fact that South
48
American ideologists and liberators were not totally original but had been, in reality,
indoctrinated at the European lodges. We hate to think that we became independent from Spain
only to become an economic colony of the industrialized countries. We think that by changing
the name of George Canning Avenue we can delete our past of cultural, political and economic
dependence. We think that by decree we can become a “World power”73. We take pride on the
quality of our beef without acknowledging the contribution of the European breeding techniques.
We think that invading the Malvinas Islands —ignoring once again, with frightful childishness, the
international context and the work of the international political and economic interests— we will
become able to recover our sovereignty rights. We like to think that, suddenly, while a ruler
whispers lies into our ears, we can join the first World only because some external forms may
produce that illusion.
We are sons and daughters of the Holy Roman Empire, of the Spain of the Reconquest and of
Counter-Reformation, of the Illustration, of the Incas, of the unruly indios of the South, of the
English lodges, of the ships loaded with immigrants from everywhere in the world. Rivadavia,
Alberdi, Sarmiento… The challenge now is the integration of the parts, the emancipation from
extremism. If not, we will continue to be agents of our own dependence, concealed behind the
smoke screen of sterile arrogance. Meanwhile we can comply obsequiously with the purchase
orders of the Chinese, who will have the power to arbitrarily decide whether to buy or not to buy
our soybean oil…
What happens when we want to impose an ideal model to reality,

and at any cost, force it into pre-established moulds? We stay
caught in a series of pendular movements that are nothing but
opposite errors. For example, we can consider Sarmiento, at the
level of the ideas, and Facundo Quiroga, at the level of reality. The
sound neutrality of the WV model is not possible in a wildly ionized
context. The reality of barbarism was not up to the standards of
Sarmiento’s illustration. Therefore, from his idea of “civilization”,
Sarmiento advised: “Don’t try to economize any blood of the
gauchos. Their blood is a good soil fertilizer that has to be made useful for the country. Blood is
the only aspect they share with human beings”. From the logics of “hard” power, from
authoritarianism, we started from a priori theoretical models; we imposed them by fear, by
pressure, by obligation and taking advantage of guilt. Just like Adam and Prometheus. I say this
without detriment of Sarmiento’s extraordinary civilizing work.
73
“Argentina potencia”.
49
But the dualistic imposition also brings about ignorance and intolerance. In confirmation of how
the absolutist model worked in our country we can read an article by Luis Ini, published in La
Nación newspaper, entitled “Mate is forbidden”. Let’s extract some ideas that show how the
dialectic cage of dualism-rationalism-idealism goes together with the prejudices of messianic
authoritarianism.
On May 20, 1616, the governor of Buenos Aires, Hernando Arias de Saavedra, better known as
Hernandarias, proclaimed an edict through which he prohibited yerba mate for any use.
“Clear suggestion of the devil”, “Drinking yerba several times a day with a great amount of hot
water is an abominable and dirty vice” that “makes men lazy, that is the total ruin of the earth,
and, being so strong, I’m afraid it won’t be possible for us to remove if God doesn’t. In this way
the custom of drinking mate was referred to around 1610, when the habit had already spread
among the inhabitants of Buenos Aires and had even been reported before the tribunal of the Holy
Inquisition in Lima.
Hernandarias ordered that “From now on nobody can send indios to get yerba from any place
whatsoever. In case yerba is found it will be burnt in the town square”.
The rational plantation of yerba mate started only at the beginning of the twentieth century, with
industrial purposes74.
It is interesting to note that Hernandarias, in many aspects, was a good ruler and a well-meaning
person.
But by the blindness of dualistic culture and of strength-oriented leadership, we have bled in
internal wars, we have wasted time in useless arguments and we have kept the country divided
by artificial options. We have managed to exclude a huge proportion of our people, first, for
being barbarians, and then, for having dark skin, for being ordinary or for being members of the
“zoological flood”75.
In spite of all, the Centennial of the May Revolution found us in 1910 dreaming of promises
cherished by everyone:
It was quite foreseeable that the feeling of plenitude that filled the leading élite, residing in their
stately French-like palaces, would be contagious to the proud and cultivated Porteños that
accompanied their plans for the country, but it was less expected that the same consensus should
74
INI Luis, “Prohibido el mate”, La Nación newspaper, Buenos Aires, 20 May, 2009.
75
Aluvión zoológico.
50
be repeated at the conventillos crowded by immigrants, at the anti-establishment heart of the
anarchists, and even at the world of vagabonds that lived in the district known as Barrio de las
Ranas, the first slum of the city, built on the lands where the rubbish was burnt in Parque Patricios.
The Porteños lived in the belief that they were all building the Euroamerica of the South, a nation
of stubborn Latin roots, which was the fertile territory for the encounter between the old
European civilization and the young sap of South American culture.
The project was as ambitious as the Argentine spirit of that time, and it included a long list of
buildings and events, which main goal was to present before the international society the vigorous
nation of the La Plata River. In that moment of success, Buenos Aires thought herself as the most
precious jewel and sought to be recognized as the Paris of South America76.
What happened since? We all bought the illusion but the poor immigrants, from Galicia, Poland,
Russia or Italy remained marked by the stigma of the mongrels, despised by the Barrio Norte.
Florida despised Boedo, laughing at how the newcomers carefully

tried to pronounce their newly-acquired Spanish. Borges would
write “mitá” instead of “mitad” reflecting the contemptuous pride
of the locals who mastered the codes. But the Establishment left
the popular flank unprotected. And (how could it not be foreseen?)
Hipólito Yrigoyen accessed the presidency. Although they managed
to oust him they remained stubbornly unable to realize that half
the country was being put behind, immigrants, workers, who would
seek self expression and respect. Then Perón came, also ousted;
Lonardi, Aramburu… So, from a revolutionary logic, the model of
man that in the France of 1789 was a “citoyen”, in 1917 became a “tovarich” and, and in the
Argentina of 1950, a “compañero”. Henceforth, pendular movements were succeeded one after
the other only to culminate in the dichotomy of “liberation or dependence” that lends the name
to this section. Ideas can certainly be guiding but they must constantly be confronted with
reality, as recommended by the WV model. If not, we soon get to the stratosphere of entelechies
or to the horror of absolute violence. Cámpora to the government, Perón to the power, the
Ezeiza massacre, Perón dies, the beardless youth remain, Isabel, López Rega, the AAA, the ERP,
the Montoneros (Aramburu dies), Videla… Liberation or dependence, the Argentines are right and
they are human77, Galtieri harangues the crowds at Plaza de Mayo, las Malvinas son argentinas,
76
POLI GONZALVO Alejandro, “De 1910 a 2010. El cometa se sumó al festejo”, in diario La Nación, Buenos
Aires, 19 March, 2010.
77
Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos.
51
Nicolaides, Bignone, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo…
Why is it that we find it so difficult to be shrewd instead of just quick? We thought that
liberation could be acquired by means of yells at the university, bombs at the streets and guns in
the combat action. We were unable to realize that the confrontation between the military and
the guerrillas did not only respond to the pure ideas of their protagonists, who were acting as
proxies for the powers confronted in the Cold War. We believed that it was licit to grab power by
force and crush the enemies. We thought that it was licit to take the arms in order to defend
certain progressive ideas, without asking people if that was what they really wanted. Why ask, if
we were the owners of the truth? Why ask, if we were saviours, messiahs, heroes, sons of
Prometheus…? From the theory of autocracy, we understood that Marxism was harmful and that
was enough to justify the tortures, the flights of death and the millstones…? In that way, didn’t
we only perpetuate the absolutist model? Let’s be sure that if we don’t change, absolutism,
disguised as liberation can be replicated ad infinitum, keeping us as permanent hostages in the
dialectic cage. It is worth reviewing what Karl Barth said on this regard: “… the absolute
revolutioner, who rebels against the first, whom he considers violator or even thief of his rights,
and forces out from him the power that he had unlawfully held. Thus, inverting the roles, and
because it’s him now who holds the power, the second takes the place of Louis XIV and says after
him “I am the State”78. In such a way, “the portions of society that have taken hold of power
determine as they like what is just for the whole, because they know (don’t they?) what is of
right. Being that so, how can anybody hinder them from declaring that right as valid for
everyone? That new minority repeats what the ancien régime did within the same vicious circle
of actions and reactions”79.
How long shall we continue to rely on this kind of formulae? Let’s complement Barth with what
Enrique Valiente Noailles says:
What shall we celebrate at the Bicentennial, even if this may not be a proper term? Shall we
continue applauding the braking of chains? There could be reasons for Argentina to celebrate if,
after two hundred years, the country could show not a breaking off with its origin, but a collective
adhesion to a common goal. And that’s what we don’t have, what makes of our independence a
mere formal act, because the lack of a goal makes the idea of liberty irrelevant, and the
wandering around one’s own destiny generates fertility for intermediate authoritarian experiments.
In a word, if to the breaking of chains we don’t add a collective purpose, a strategy for the future,
a common will of getting somewhere, it is most probable that we will end by inventing new chains
for ourselves. This is what has been actually happening. Indeed, what the country has been
78
BARTH Karl, Images du XVIIIe siècle, Neuchâtel 1949, Delachaux & Niestlé S. A., p. 36.
79
Ibid., p. 39.
52
showing is a successive mutation of different shapes of authoritarianism. If in other times of our
history, authoritarianism was concentrated, now it is interstitial, and is being sprayed every day as
a defoliant onto our democracy80.
But we believe ourselves either the best or the worst. We are either Amadeus or Salieri, geniuses
or mediocrities. We are hostages of the dualistic thinking, a factor of unreality, a factor of
backwardness. Let’s face the facts: Argentina is not a “developing country”. It is, for the
moment, an underdeveloped country, because our horizon does not show a true project for a
realistic construction of the country.
In effect,
A powerful gravitational force anchors Argentina in the vices of its past. It is as if the leading class
were immunized against learning, as if they had a thick silicone coat in their conscience that
hinders reflexive absorption. We have gone through many recombinations of “sixties-ism”, “forties-
ism”, and now, as economists like Santángelo warn, conceptual “eighties-ism” is penetrating the
economy […] at the cost of throwing more and more people under the line of poverty. This is the
repetition of an error in an aggravated context, like the current one, that shows potentially worse
consequences. […] However, why are we experiencing this collective difficulty to construct a new
country? The basic problem always remains in society itself and its incapacity or lack of will to
demand a new style of leadership81.
The first temptation would be that of trying to find the guilty

people, this or that ruler, this or that economic model, this or that
ideology, this or that “ism”. On the contrary, the Third Revolution
proposes a new type of leadership that shifts the attention from
the persons to the processes, from the theories to practice. From
this new viewpoint, it is easier to understand the factors that have
brought us to this situation of decay, reducing the necessity to
search for scapegoats, present of historic, in order to purge our
national frustrations.
Then, from the new viewpoint of common sense, we had better avoid our obstinacy on the
dualistic-idealistic perspective. For that purpose, it is important that Argentine people in general
learn about the problem-solution methods that are typical of Japanese management, because
80
VALIENTE NOAILLES Enrique, “¿Qué festejará el Bicentenario?” in La Nación, sección Enfoques, Buenos
Aires, 11 april, 2010. The underlining is mine.
81
VALIENTE NOAILLES Enrique, “Dificultades para construir otro país” in La Nación, sección Enfoques,
Buenos Aires, 14 March, 2010.
53
Our society tends to naturalize the problems rather than to solve them. It tends to adapt or over-
adapt its conscience to them, instead of declaring them unacceptable and demand their
immediate solution. We are over-adapted to an obsolete style of leadership and to the lack of
respect of our representatives towards the population. We are also over-adapted to poverty, and
years ago over-adapted to corruption. None of this generates a deep rebellion, but only a
descriptive attestation, as if it was a natural catastrophe that has come from the outside and has
become irremediably constitutive. Perhaps the core of the question is that our society feels it has
little authority to demand that their élites produce long-term consensuses and public policies, and
that they keep a correct behaviour. Perhaps it doesn’t feel that it still has sufficient moral
authority to censure in the public sphere those things that are collectively practiced in the private
sphere82.
The Okita Report has proposed many ideas to launch a development program. It suggested an
improvement in the capacity for the commercialization and production of high value-added
goods and services, resting on the competitive advantages we have for the production of primary
goods. It also recommended the opening to the Asian markets that are complementary with our
economy. Japanese management, on its side, provides us with the necessary tools to achieve the
goal. In other words, while the Okita Report tells us “what”, Japanese management tells us
“how”. The recommendations are good and feasible; we only have to apply them.
EPILOGUE – Chiquilín de Bachín
Theatre is revealing of human behaviour and of its permanent conflicts. For example, it’s easy to
notice the importance of Sophocles’ piece, Oedipus the King, for Psychoanalysis. Musical theatre
is doubly revealing as could be seen when browsing Mozart’s theatre works, where some
revolutionary changes in the thinking of his time were presented. Considered from a macro point
of view, also the great political revolutions respond to the dramatic interaction of countless
characters and interests, which at some moment finds its resolution in some social and political
cataclysm that expresses them in the scene of History. The relationship between that theatre
with the absolutist and authoritarian man was also proposed in the passages of Amadeus that we
could just read.
The motto of the Association for Overseas Technical Scholarship is “Linking the World through
Human Resource Development”. In that phrase, ethical, linguistic, conceptual and political
issues are posed. So we have to ask ourselves some basic questions such as: “What do we
82
Ibid.
54
understand by ‘human’?”, “What do we understand by ‘resource’?”, “What do we understand by
‘development’?” or “What is the purpose of developing Human Resources?” Here is where it
becomes vital to plunge into the basic humanistic issues, for it is impossible to think of the total
participation promoted by the Third Revolution if we do not first agree on those vital items.
Indeed, the differences in the management styles are the result of different ways of
understanding man, work and the social relationships in a totally opposed fashion. They are the
expression of another kind of humanism. Here lies the richness of Japanese management, which
provides new oxygen to our traditional conception of a wishful-thinking, self-sufficient, almighty
and autocratic model of man. By contrast, Japanese management is shrewd, systemic,
interactive and promoter of learning. The company behaves in an organic way, developing
sensors that react to the most diverse stimuli, external or internal, promoting total participation
and societal networking.
Similarly, the rapprochement to tango can also be a

good vehicle for assuming the reality of our country
and for better understanding who we are. For example,
the Porteño waltz Chiquilín de Bachín bears witness of
the desolation of a poor young boy who deeply moved
both Astor Piazzolla, one of our best musicians, and
Horacio Ferrer, one of our best poets. At the moment
of its composition, poor kids like the one portrayed in
the song were part of the urban landscape in a country plagued with social unbalances. But since
that day, young boys wandering at the streets of Buenos Aires have proliferated in an
exponential way. That “one thousand old child” would now feel privileged amongst the gangs of
drugged, hopeless, begging children, who shame our helplessness at the streets of today’s
Buenos Aires. We find the most dignified of them messing up with the garbage in search of “pan
y tallarín”. The rest are just learning how to become better criminals…
What happened to us? Who did things wrong? Who is to blame? Did the recipes fail or was it the
systems? Was it the ideologies or the persons? How can it be that Argentina should have had such
a capacity to fail in her original intentions? Was it the wickedness of the leaders? Was it the
foolishness of the people? Was it the neo-liberal recipes? Was it the socialist recipes? Did we
think that, confusing appearance with reality, by destroying a villa miseria with a bulldozer were
we going to solve the problem? Did we think that adhering to some political or economic ideology
we would become owners of a magic wand that would help us solve all difficulties? Did we think
that, in our navel-minded childishness, Argentine reality was isolated from the great World
tendencies? The thing is that day after day there are more and more “chiquilines de Bachín” and
55
the tendency to their multiplication seems to get sharper. Perhaps we missed the focus. Perhaps
we gave too much importance to the ideas and to the individuals, neglecting reality and the
processes that take part in it.
That is why it is urgent for our leaders to start thinking the other way
round, following the revolutionary idea of Total Quality Management.
It is high time for accepting that men fail, that systems fail and that
reality never fits into any ideological mould. From that realistic and
weakness-oriented position, we must design processes that work,
ideas that bring about efficient systems. From an aesthetical approach to management, we can
motivate people and generate technical safeguards against human weaknesses, without
appointing ourselves as severe moral judges. It is time to accept that the external revolutions
such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or the May Revolution, understood only
from a formal point of view, are similar to furiously allopathic-symptomatic treatments that
suppress fever and soothe cough while neglecting septicaemia. The real cure is only possible if
we get to understand the aetiology of the evil. In terms of management, we have to pursue the
understanding and the improvement of the processes.
Also, of course, while we study Deming or Ishikawa, listening to Mozart or Gardel can serve as an
inspiring balsam in our way back to common sense, to modesty and to mutual respect. But it is
not only that: Mozart and Gardel are natural associates of Total Quality Management because
they were able to articulate ethics with aesthetics, theory with practice, ideals with reality,
liberty with limits, equality with hierarchy and fraternity with respect. Because, through an
exquisite refinement, they managed to simplify things in order to liberate their essence; because
they could overcome in their own way the alienation of modern man; because they chose the
delight of their customers as the supreme reason of their lives and final purpose of their toil; and,
finally, because they continue to offer quality to our lives, daily.
Buenos Aires, 25 May, 2010
56

Mozart, Gardel and The Third Revolution

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Mozart, Gardel and The Third Revolution

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Mozart, Gardel and the Third Revolution

A new Leadership for the generation of wealth

Considering music as the ultimate mirror of

At night, with your dirty face

1789 – EUROPE-USA (Mozart): The First Industrial Revolution

1917 – ARGENTINA (Gardel): The Second Industrial Revolution

1950 – USA-JAPAN: (Deming): The Third Industrial Revolution

PROLOGUE – A new Humanism for a new Management …………………………..………………….3

CHAPTER I - 1789 EUROPE-USA (Mozart): The First Industrial Revolution

CHAPTER II – 356 BC EUROPE-ASIA (Alexander): Western authoritarianism

2. Cultural models of the absolutist man………………..……………….……………………….18

CHAPTER III - 1917 ARGENTINA (Gardel): The Second Industrial Revolution

a. Imitation vs. analogy

a. Liberation from dualism

CHAPTER IV - 1950 USA-JAPAN (Deming): The Third Industrial Revolution

1. The Third Revolution in the World……………………………………….….……..….…………32

2. How does it work? ......................................................................37

3. The Third Revolution in Argentina.………………….………………………………..…………..42

4. Liberation or dependence? ............................................................45

EPILOGUE – 2010 ARGENTINA: Chiquilín de Bachín.………………………………………………………53

It is common knowledge today that Total Quality Management is a

1. The enhancement of profitability, productivity and quality.

2. The opening of Asian markets for Argentine high-value-added products.

1. Lack of presence in East Asia

In the same way earthquakes are external manifestations of

Although I only mention three examples, this number is

The emergence of the string Quartett in the last half of

However, the Mozartean Revolution was even more radical

Another feature of that new aesthetic capacity was the

a. In The Marriage of Figaro (1796), we learn about the

c. Così fan tutte (1790,) shows a decisive moment in Mozart, in which he

Descending from the ideal being to

Samuel Johnson, in the preface to Shakespeare’s dramas, stated that these

Following Socrates and Plato, Western thinking recognizes Aristotle as

The ideologies of the 20th century will respond to this

The dualistic way of thinking constitutes a truly

2. Cultural models of the absolutist man

Bonno: Bello! Bello, Barone. Veramente.

Van Swieten: What?

Von Strack: Govern your tongue, sir! How dare you?

Beat. All look at the Emperor.

From the musical point of view, we know that Tango

In order to understand how deep the Gardelian Revolution was, we

When human voice participated, it did so just as one more

For Tango, the evolution from a principle of imitation to a principle of

b. Possibilities of tonal music

When a popular musician takes a guitar and plays —or invents—

The Gardelian Revolution overcame dualism in many

b. Accessibility to the masses

Industrialization also comprised music,

Also, as we saw earlier, with the addition

c. Orientation to weaknesses and acceptation of limits

1. The Third Revolution in the World

Just like the two revolutions described in the terrain

The European and North American influence in

The result is well known: for the

In order to better understand the nature of the

In the Oriental garden,

Indeed, “Zen, together with most of the Buddhist schools and a

2. How does it work?

It is indispensable to practice a new type of management, led by people interested in and

The Third Revolution is the revolution of total participation.

implicit in the four revolutions of management thinking is