Success Quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Kanter’s line is a quiet rebuke to an older American fantasy: that the country can win by grinding costs down and squeezing workers harder than the next place. She frames “cheap labor” as not just undesirable but strategically obsolete, then pivots to “brain power” with the confidence of someone speaking from inside boardrooms where competitiveness is constantly being redefined. The syntax does the work: a hard stop on what won’t save us, then a crisp assertion of what will.

The subtext is both aspirational and slightly prosecutorial. It flatters the U.S. as a nation of innovators while implicitly scolding leaders who treat wages as the primary lever of economic policy. “Brain power” is a morally cleaner rallying cry than “higher margins,” but it’s also a managerial ideology: invest in talent, R&D, design, systems, and organizational learning; compete on ideas, not exploitation. It’s a way of aligning ethics with strategy without sounding like a sermon.

Context matters: this is the language of late-20th-century globalization and post-industrial capitalism, when manufacturing disperses, supply chains stretch, and the U.S. leans into tech, finance, and knowledge work. Kanter’s bet is that the comparative advantage of a high-cost country must be productivity and innovation.

The tension is what she leaves unsaid: “brain power” isn’t automatic. It requires education, immigration pathways, worker training, and institutions that reward long-term invention over short-term cost cutting. Otherwise it becomes a slogan that comforts elites while the labor market keeps getting cheaper anyway, just through different mechanisms.