(FORTUNE Magazine) – In a rare burst of unity and energy, America rallied all its human and industrial resources 25 years ago to achieve what seemed an impossible dream: landing a man on the moon. Now what's required is a similar heroic effort to pull together the nation's talents and knock down all the barriers to reach another goal: to make America the world's most globally competitive nation -- by far. That's the challenge posed by the manager who may well be America's most consistently successful CEO, Stanley Gault. This square, straight Midwesterner, who sure doesn't look his 68 years, has had terrific careers in not just one but three big companies. He has seen it all as senior vice president of General Electric, CEO of Rubbermaid (which he helped transform from a little-known maker of dustpans to a $3-billion-a-year manufacturer of 4,000 different products), and, since 1991, chief executive of Goodyear. When Gault took charge of the debt-laden tiremaker, it was losing money like air from a blowout and skidding toward the abyss. Last year, after his rigorous restructuring -- Goodyear sold off noncore businesses, reduced staff, and wheeled out more new products than ever before -- it earned more money, $388 million, than all other tiremakers in the world combined. That's competitive. What does the driver of America's biggest tire company think about the shape of U.S. business now? The surprising, rather unsettling answer from the usually optimistic Gault: We're coasting, just coasting. We need to do a lot more to become champions of competition. Gault is disappointed with both the speed and the breadth of the current economic expansion. He thinks the Federal Reserve is exaggerating the threat of renewed inflation and that its recent moves to raise interest rates might prematurely choke off further growth. "Certainly any inflation is bad," he says. "But I think we can accommodate 2.5% or 3% without facing runaway inflation." To Gault's mind, the erratic recovery is a sign that business people are highly uncertain -- and they are particularly uncertain of what will come out of Washington. "There's great apprehension throughout the business community," he says, "because of the unpredictability of the Administration and some of the outright confrontation we've had with it" -- beginning with the battle over the abortive proposal for a BTU tax and going downhill from there. He warns about being overconfident, because so much of America's economic gain lately has resulted from exuberant exports, largely due to the weakness of the dollar, a trend that could quickly reverse. Too many U.S. companies have used the dollar's decline not to retake market share abroad, he argues, but to increase prices; they will be clobbered when the dollar rises again. Even the relatively robust unemployment statistic -- 6.1% -- "is grossly misleading because it doesn't include the people who have given up and are not looking, and the millions and millions who are underemployed. We're seeing the continuing erosion of the middle class, which was really the manufacturing class. The loss of high-wage, high-skill manufacturing jobs is widening the gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' in our society. These people today are working near the minimum wage -- six, seven, or eight dollars an hour -- and they are not buying cars, appliances, clothing the way they used to."

GAULT SEES THIS as a terrible waste. "If we only unleashed our talent -- as we did a generation ago to send a man to the moon -- we could make quantum gains." But how to do that? Says he: "Put every government rule and action to a litmus test: Will it help or will it hurt our ability to compete? And that includes everything: regulatory reform, legal reform, enforcing trade laws, removing outdated export controls." Take product liability. Because of laws and regulations that are unique to the U.S., manufacturers in our "sue 'em" society can be hit with huge penalties in an accident -- a total of $117 billion last year -- even if the cause was largely human error. The system inhibits innovation, Gault maintains, forcing manufacturers to spend time and treasure fighting suits that they could better use creating products. It even forces some companies out of business. Says Gault: "Today there is only one domestic maker of vaccines for measles, hepatitis, and polio. Only two make whooping cough vaccine. Since 1982 the cost of these vaccines has gone from 50 cents to $11 -- and $8 of that goes into a liability fund because the companies can't get insurance coverage." Of all the liability suits, he says, "It's a tremendous penalty on business." Then there are export controls. Fully 40% of America's exports -- from chemicals to computer software -- are still subject to these relics of the Cold War, which regulate and restrict any products or processes that could conceivably confer military advantage. Get rid of them, says Gault, "on everything except classified items for national defense." Export controls (excluding weapons) cost U.S. business an estimated $24 billion last year, and every billion dollars of lost export sales costs us 20,000 to 25,000 jobs. Next on Gault's list is to enforce our trade laws and fight even harder to lower barriers abroad. Despite the strong yen and weak dollar, the U.S. still is exporting next to no tires to Japan, because, argues Gault, the distribution system -- with all those cozy deals among incestuous Japanese companies -- continues to be hard for outsiders to crack. Heavy local taxes also keep American tires out of South Korea. As evidence of what free trade can accomplish, Gault points to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sales of U.S. cars and trucks to Mexico have surged -- and 40% of them have Goodyear tires. It's more important than ever, he says, for Washington to do whatever it can to help small business -- which he defines as companies with fewer than 500 employees. "Job creation is not going to come from the Goodyears and the GMs and the GEs of this nation. Look at Goodyear: We constantly have to improve productively in order to compete, so I don't see employment rising here for a long, long time, if ever." He thinks many big businesses are part of an endangered species, noting that 151 companies that were on the FORTUNE 500 five years ago are no longer there. , Says he: "We should do everything to encourage the growth of small business, which can be competitive and where virtually all the job creation of the future will be." Instead, he says, many of our laws and regulations are stacked against small business. He cites unrealistic and costly environmental and OSHA regulations, the lack of tax incentives, and banking regulations that encourage banks to stress high-yielding credit cards and home equity loans rather than small-business loans. But even if small business does generate new jobs, people won't land them unless they have the right education and training. "We keep sweeping under the rug that our basic education system is not globally competitive," says Gault. Business must get more deeply involved in schools to narrow the widening gap between what is taught and what is needed in the workplace. Gault's prescription is as basic as the three R's: Shift some money out of entitlements and into education. Transfer funds from those among the old who are well off to those among the young who need it. "Why should affluent people like me ever collect Social Security?" he asks. Get rid of the bloated administrative bureaucracy in schools. Lengthen the school year; American children go to school about 180 days a year, Germans attend 236 days, Koreans 250 days. Adopt tough, globally competitive national curriculum standards in math, science, computer literacy, and languages.

IN RUBBERMAID'S HOMETOWN of Wooster, Ohio, where voters had rejected two school bond issues in a row a few years ago, Gault showed what business can do. He got the company to promise to buy land for a new high school if the community would pay for the building. Then he and his wife pledged $500,000 for an indoor swimming pool and community fitness center to be built next to it. That did it. Voters passed a $32 million bond issue, and just last month the new complex opened. Now he's aiming for much the same in Akron, where Goodyear has its headquarters. Gault intends to put Goodyear's influence behind the cause of school reform, and he talks of enlisting many other corporations to donate training, other services, and money. He is trying to make Akron, like Wooster, serve as a model of what a people committed can do. And the essential initial step to reaching the moon this time? "First of all," says Gault, "we have to assume that we're not going to let things continue as they have been, because we just can't afford it if we are to compete in the new economy."