Business managements have become hostages to cost-cutting, squeezing expenses out of their systems in every way possible, trusting to luck that what works under normal conditions will continue to work when the outside world goes haywire.One is just-in-time production, which spread like wildfire from Toyota, where it originated in the 1980s, to the rest of the automobile industry and eventually to the manufacturing sector generally.The dream of a production line “inherently flexible, inventoryless, even computerless, replenished by infinitely responsive suppliers” was too simple, Uday Karmarkar, an expert in manufacturing strategy and technology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, observed as long ago as 1989.Only since that crisis erupted have manufacturers recognized that they need to move away from just-in-time to just-in-case — that is, keeping more parts inventory on-site and more workers, with better training, on call.The next-generation aircraft came in billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule when it finally began to fly commercially in 2011, in part because Boeing farmed out more of the work to foreign contractors."