How the least dignified product in Swiss history rescued the most dignified industry in the worldIn the late 1970s, Swiss watchmaking was engaged in the most refined form of suicide available to a mature business - dying while being entirely certain it was right. The numbers were not subtle. Employment in the industry fell from roughly ninety thousand in 1970 to under thirty thousand by the mid-eighties. Something close to a thousand firms simply stopped existing. Seiko, Citizen, Casio and Timex were selling watches that kept better time than a Swiss chronometer costing forty times more, and the Swiss response...