The Japanese term ‘Kaizen’ has been co-opted by Western management consultants and lifestyle gurus, and is taken to mean a culture of continual improvement: tiny, incremental changes, day after day that, after a long period, mean success. I vividly remember being shown around a Japanese-owned factory in the UK, where the management had recently presented one of their employees with a reward for having found a way to shave 1.7 seconds off the time it took him to complete one