(FORTUNE Magazine) – SOMETIMES a simple question can direct a whole era's business agenda. Management guru Peter Drucker blew executives' minds in the 1970s by asking, ''If you weren't already in this business, would you enter it today?'' Lots of managers realized the answer was no and spent the 1980s restructuring and swapping assets. For the hypercompetitive, global 1990s, here's a new question that the most successful managers will contemplate every day: Are you as good as the best in the world? You'd better be. GE chief Jack Welch warns, ''If you can't meet a world standard of quality at the world's best price, you're not even in the game.'' Ram Charan, a consultant to many of the world's largest companies, including Citicorp and Du Pont, goes further: ''If you're not better than the best on a worldwide basis, you're not going to make a living.'' Hyperbole? Think about it. The term ''globalization'' simply expresses the ease with which the world's best competitors can enter almost any market at any time. Why shouldn't they eat your lunch? If you're not already nose to nose with the corporate equivalent of an angry Norse thunder god, you probably will be before long. World standards have already arrived: Consumers in Bombay and Kiev demand Sonys and Levis, just like everyone else. Same goes for industrial products and services, from AT&T's $5 million telephone switches to GE's $100 million large steam turbines. Among those shocked by this situation are the executives managing many major U.S. companies, who came of age in the anomalous glory years after World War II. With major overseas competitors bombed to rubble and domestic demand surging after years of privation, markets for products from deodorants to power tools supported ten or more competitors, which sorted themselves into distinct bands of price and quality, from Cadillac down to Beetle. Everyone but the real bozos got rich, at least by world standards. Consumers thought it was normal to see countless brands of laundry soap on supermarket shelves. The game changed suddenly when Japan and Germany returned to the fray in the 1970s. By offering superior cars at modest prices, Honda and Toyota taught buyers that high quality could be affordable. This revolutionary idea, which has since spread to almost every industry, destroyed the rationale for market stratification. A No. 5 position, even if still profitable, began to look like a death warrant. Carried further, the same idea then messed up the world market for luxury cars, as Lexus and Infiniti began offering better quality than Mercedes and BMW at a 40% discount. The two German marques have since lost one-third of their U.S. market share. Next consumers began to wonder why they should pay extra for a Lexus or Infiniti, when a mid-priced Camry or Maxima offered every luxury a reasonable person could demand. According to Maryann N. Keller, car industry expert and author of Collision: General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and the Race to Own the 21st Century, manufacturers are losing money on luxury cars. With global champions ranging the world seeking opportunity, many competitive advantages no longer last long. Today Chrysler is admired as the world leader in new-car development: It brought the small, affordable new Neon to market in just 31 months at a cost of $1.3 billion, peanuts by industry standards. But Keller believes that all major carmakers will soon catch up. She says: ''That standard is going to be a given for everyone, and I doubt there'll be significant advantage in getting it down 5% more. The enduring advantages will come from making better use of people.'' She nominates Saturn's dealers and Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, plant workers as examples of the kind of competitive advantage that will last: whole organizations of carefully picked, highly motivated people determined to make customers happy. For all its virtues, Chrysler can't yet match that. Says Chrysler CEO Robert Eaton: ''I agree ((with Keller)). We're not anywhere near world class at a lot of these things. The only way we can beat the competition is with people. That's the only thing anybody has. Your culture and how you motivate and empower and educate your people is what makes the difference.'' The need to ask whether you're as good as the best in the world applies to national economies as well as businesses. The leading candidate for reengineering is Germany, which, as a Volkswagen executive puts it, has ''the highest unit production costs on the face of the earth.'' The typical hourly wage for automotive employees there is $21, vs. roughly $16 in Japan or the U.S. The country's famous social contract has become a nightmare: a 35-hour workweek, six weeks' annual vacation, typical absentee rates over 20% -- and at Daimler-Benz until very recently, free First Communion frocks for workers' daughters. VW's response: eliminating 30,000 jobs -- 25% of the total -- and proposing a four-day workweek and a 20% wage reduction. Let's face it: Few people anywhere can say they're as good as the best in the world. Regard that fact as a large opportunity. It's just that you have to take advantage of it -- because quite soon, being as good as the best will be a matter of survival.