Any manager who tries to create a strategy out of worn-out clichés and unexamined nostrums is dismissed. Yet in the United States and other Western countries we have grown comfortable with the government following outworn nostrums about free trade. We have elevated the economic theory of free trade to the status of a national theology, and we follow its simple dictums as if they were immutable laws. We appear prepared to follow the precepts of free trade wherever they lead us, even if that means plunging lemminglike to our economic ruin.
A version of this article appeared in the September 1986 issue of Harvard Business Review.