In my own research into quality management I, like many others, was intrigued by the apparent dominance of Japanese companies.

All the studies I came across in the early 1990s emphasised the importance of understanding how Japanese companies had successfully learned the lessons of implementing improvement based on teamwork, using statistical process control, obsession with customer satisfaction and constant development of products and service through innovation.

The lexicon of management started to include expressions such as excellence and the quest to become 'World Class'. Significantly, commentators acknowledged, as far as the latter was concerned, it was Japanese companies that dominated any list of the top companies.

The message to others was that you must get better or get beaten and that Japanese companies had cracked the secret of success.

Recent announcements by two Japanese companies, Toyota and Sony, show that success is never permanent and that you have to work hard to remain 'the best'.

In the case of Toyota there is a belief that after a number of recent crises it is well on the road to recovery and will continue to be regarded as one of the world's most successful car makers.

However, Sony's misfortunes seem to be continuing and it has just announced record losses. Sony has discovered that the dominance it once enjoyed has gone and that competitors are outpacing it in terms of innovation and excellence.

What has gone wrong and what does it tell us about the relevance of Japanese management techniques that were once proposed as a sure-fire way to achieve success?

The world is constantly changing. This is perhaps an obvious statement. The question is therefore not whether change exists but the pace at which it occurs and, crucially, whether we are able to embrace it.

So, take two very British 'brands', Weetabix and snooker. Anyone who grew up in in Britain in the 1970s and, especially, the 1980s will probably have been exposed to both.

The announcement last week that a majority stake in the makers of Weetabix has been sold to Bright Food, China's second largest food company will probably come as no great shock. It is part of a growing trend for cash-rich Chinese companies to buy western brands.

The news that South Korean company Samsung is believed to have surpassed both Nokia and Apple become the largest mobile phone manufacturer demonstrates the importance of being able to offer technology that is, as well as being innovative, is perceived to be value for money.

For example, Samsung's galaxy handset is acknowledged to offer better technology than Apple's iPhone but at a lower price.

As Francis Jeronimo from analyst IDC comments, why would you buy the iPhone, which has a five megapixel camera, if you can purchase a Samsung that has an eight megapixel camera and a better (brighter) display for less money?

Notably, Samsung's rise has been achieved from roots that gave no indication of the current pre-eminence it enjoys in electronics. Indeed, Samsung is a company that has learnt to adapt, diversify and innovate in a way that demonstrates the importance of being both agile and creative in terms of both strategy and technological development.

The history of Samsung is instructive for any organisation that wishes to innovate its way out of the current economic crisis.

Today's profit announcement by Tesco provides some food for thought; no pun intended!

Any business that can achieve a 5.3% increase on it overall group pre-tax profits (to £3.8 billion in the year to February), cannot be doing too much wrong.

However, it is in UK sales that there is disappointment. These were £2.5 billion which is a 1% fall when compared with a year earlier.

As a result Tesco's chief executive Philip Clarke announced an intention by the company to spend £1 billion on store improvement and hiring more staff.

So what has gone wrong for a retailer that, in the UK, has become a behemoth? Interestingly the answer is something of a paradox. Tesco has been able to do what other retailers find difficult; being successful overseas. However, achieving the overseas success has resulted in senior management losing focus on the UK operation.

Today's announcement that the chief executive of Kraft Foods, which owns Cadbury, Irene Rosenfeld will receive a total package of almost £14 million (a rise of 13.5% on last year), once again focuses the question on how much any person should be paid.

I don't intend to address the appropriateness of Rosenfeld's salary package. However, in receiving what is for the vast majority of people, a total package that would be like winning the lottery, it raises the point about whether companies have appointed people capable of taking strategic decisions about the future.

Crucially, what does the future hold, and what should the companies do to anticipate development and change in markets? Indeed, what should senior managers such as the extremely well paid Rosenfeld be considering in order to deal with any potential changes?

A recently published paper by the McKinsey Global Institute may assist them. In this paper, Help Wanted: The future of work in advanced economies, there is examination of how future employment patterns will alter and, significantly, what the influences will be.

In the new edition of The Harvard Business Review (April 2012), Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs; The Exclusive Biography (Little Brown, 2011), provides a distillation of the reasons why the influence of one man was so crucial in making Apple currently the world's most valuable company.

As Isaacson describes, the rise from founding Apple in his parent's garage in 1976 to its current success has been incredible. There can hardly be anyone in the developed world who can claim to be unaware of the influence of Jobs through his products.

Isaacson states that under Jobs leadership seven industries have been transformed: personal computing, animated movies, music, mobile telephones, tablet computing, retail stores and digital computing. Consequently, Isaacson believes, Jobs 'belongs in the pantheon of America's great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Walt Disney'.

So how did Jobs do it and what can we learn?

The resignation letter sent to The New York Times by ex-head of Goldman Sachs' equity derivatives division in Europe, Greg Smith, in which he criticises his former employees of ripping off their "muppet" clients, has caused some amusement and, I would imagine, consternation by his former employers . Will this herald a new era of honesty in business? Sadly, I doubt it.

Let's not forget that Mr. Smith has resigned so he can say what he likes. I have no idea whether he signed a confidentiality clause. But I would imagine that the fact that he was an ex-derivatives manager probably means that he is financially secure. This means that it makes it much easier to be honest when you are not financially dependent upon your employers.

Whether Smith's gripes about the veracity of what he says he witnessed at Goldman Sachs - an organisation that Rolling Stone Magazine curiously described as "a vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity" - are actually true is probably not that important. The publicity will not be welcome.

Let's remember that Goldman Sachs is an organisation with 'form'. It agreed to pay $550million (over £350million) to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US to settle fraud charges for misleading investors in 2010. Additionally it was fined £17.5 million by the UK Financial Services Authority in this country for not declaring that it was under investigation in America.

In teaching students what organisations do, most particularly in terms of strategic decision-making, you are ultimately faced with the problem of providing theory that enables understanding of the key issues, so that assessment of learning can take place, but which facilitates questioning of wisdom and logic.

There is a balance between simplicity in explaining fundamental concepts and the appreciation of the dilemmas and complexities that contemporary organisations face.

This blog is not intended to be a treatise of the worth of theory or an examination of teaching methods; that is simply too difficult! Rather, it is a reflection on what the current (and future) generations of managers need to consider to attempt to make sense of the world in which they and their organisations exist within.

The Harvard Business Review published an article in December's edition by seminal author Gary Hamel titled 'First, let's fire all the managers'.

Hamel describes how Morning Star, a leading food processing company, has dispended with the traditional hierarchy that relies on top-down decision-making and power being vested in those who have seniority.

Instead, Morning Star has created an organisation that has a sense of flexibility and is customer-centric so that it can respond rapidly to any alterations in preferences exhibited by those who buy their product.

As Hamel argues, traditional hierarchy is wasteful in terms of money and effort.

There is an adage that says you can make a small fortune out of football, provided you start with a large fortune. The recent announcement concerning Glasgow Football Club tells us many things about what is frequently referred to as 'the beautiful game'; not the least of which is that it is a sure fire way to lose money.

In this blog I want to make some comparisons between football, the future of the Economic Union and reform of the National Health Service. The connection, I suggest, is the dilemma that will inevitably occur between the desire to invest in the dream of success and the reality that a supply of funds is never limitless. Much as we want the best, we sometimes have to either compromise or, worse, stop spending and give up.

So in the case of football, success is simple. You secure the services of the best, and usually most expensive, players and, hey presto, you cannot fail. Try telling that to the Glasgow supporters. If a team as big as this can go into administration then so can any other. No football club has an automatic right to exist and, I fear, more will fail.

The Economic Union is qualitatively different to football. But, as a very recent blog explained, the objective was the creation of a collection of diverse countries collaborating in the pursuit of consistent economic objectives. With sufficient investment from the rich (largely northern countries such as Germany), poorer countries (mainly Mediterranean - Spain, Portugal and Greece) would achieve success.

Similar to investors in football clubs, those providing funds for the failing 'PIIGS' economies (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are asking, 'What is the point?' A consensus is emerging that if the dream of a United States of Europe is to survive it would be better off without the likes of Greece.

Which brings us to the NHS? Under New Labour a tremendous amount of money was invested to create a 'world class' system of health provision. When times were good we could rack up increased debt due to this investment because, compared to GDP, which was growing, the ratio didn't appear to be a problem.

Since the global financial crisis, our economy has faltered. Our GDP is, at best, stagnant and could easily become negative. If we cannot create more growth through, for example, exports all that any Chancellor George can do is to cut expenditure on the public services such as the NHS; just like the Greeks are being asked to do - again!

So, like football clubs and bankrupt economies such as Greece, we may have to accept that idea that the NHS may no longer exist in the way that they were originally intended. Reform through rationalisation and inclusion of private providers is argued to be the only way to ensure that they survive.

The desire to reform the NHS is not new. New Labour tried and, in large part, failed. Given the size and complexity of the organisation this is not surprising. It size is staggering; it employs over 1.43 million people and has a budget in excess of £100 billion.

However, because of significant increases in the costs of providing free care to an ageing population it the HHS needs even more money to pursue the dream of eradicating illness in order to make us a much healthier nation.

The trouble is that we don't have the money and, instead it is expected to make savings of £20 billion by 2015 and increase productivity by 4% each year; something that it has never achieved. If it doesn't it will follow Glasgow FC and Greece and become so bankrupt that its continued existence is questioned.

So what to do? The trouble with the NHS is that the dream is still worth pursuing but that the strategy is incoherent. The NHS bill appears to be a hotch-potch of ill-considered plans to achieve efficiencies that may be, at best, illusory. For instance, take the reform of the railways in the 1990s.

Private providers do not automatically solve your problems and we are still trying to improve a system that, to be fair, seems to have worked in the nationalised British Rail days by a 'make do and mend' culture and dedication of employees who had a passion for the organisation.

The prevailing zeitgeist is austerity. However, if in the process of achieving survival we lose expertise and undermine professionalism then that potentially creates something worse and not necessarily any less expensive. It also may leave a legacy that subsequent generations will not thank us for.

The football players at Glasgow may be assets of the club to be sold to pay debts but they will not face poverty; unlike many Greeks. If the changes being made to the NHS mean we can continue to enjoy a level of service that means everyone is entitled to the service we have become accustomed to, especially those most in need (the poor), then that is laudable.

But once you start disentangling a system as complex as the NHS, you do so at your peril. Football clubs may come and go but no one will die as a result. Greece will survive though I have no doubt it will be tough for many of its people. The key question is what our NHS will look like in the future, and how much we as a nation are prepared to invest in it?