Is Mr. Kobayashi just a voice crying in the wilderness? Consider two areas in which Japanese management has been slow to change: Lifetime Employment and Multicultural Management.
On the surface, Japanese companies have tried hard to hang on to the idea of a "job for life," doing anything to find new jobs for redundant personnel. In companies like XYZ it is even possible to find male managers serving coffee in place of the traditional office ladies.
To avoid having to sack people, companies are cutting back on bonuses, preventing workers from doing so much overtime and freezing recruitment. Nissan used to take between 1,500 and 2,000 new recruits a year; it hired only 55 in 1995. Nowadays, Japanese graduates anxiously study the age-profiles of companies, which are published annually, to see if they have any chance of a career.
Yet there is movement. Western-style assessment procedures are creeping into big Japanese firms, and jobs are not as safe as they used to be. Despite their loyalty to the concept of "lifetime employment," firms are redefining what they mean by the phrase, arguing that it applies only to a proportion of workers, and whittling down that proportion as far as they can. A few are introducing "voluntary" early retirement for their lifetime employees.
As for the problem of dealing with foreign staff, the best Japanese companies have certainly begun to talk like "multicultural multinationals." NEC is putting all its products "into a global perspective in order to determine the most appropriate locations for design, manufacturing and sales."
Matsushita, once one of the biggest defenders of its home base, has now decided that it is a "multi-local" and talks about being a "global network manager." Nissan is keen on creating a "global team spirit" and talks about using the entire world as a "knowledge base."
There are signs that this is more than just talk. More blue-chip Japanese companies are bringing foreign managers to Japan. Toyota now has shareholder meetings outside Japan. Toshiba is reorganizing every bit of its work, from accounting to technology management, on a worldwide basis, partly to get rid of duplication but also because there is no longer any such thing as a purely Japanese business problem.
The Japanese are also establishing global networks, in which people from "third countries" act as missionaries for Japanese management. Toshiba sends workers from Thailand to its plant in Malaysia, which has been operating for 20 years, in order to introduce them to Japanese production techniques. The two-way flow of ideas is already producing results. Both Canon and Toshiba, for example, have produced breakthroughs in audio technology by setting up laboratories in Britain.
One of the leaders of the multicultural approach (and another ally of Mr. Kobayashi and Mr. Ohmae) has been Minoru Makihara. Mr. Makihara, who was born in London and educated at Harvard, spent 22 years serving abroad and speaks perfect English. He is so at home in the United States that his two children work for American companies and he is known by a nickname, Ben. In 1992, he was drafted from abroad (an unusual move in a Japanese company) to become president of the Mitsubishi Corporation, the biggest of Japan's dozen or so trading companies.
In the past, a trading house could survive as an importer-exporter, acting as an agent for foreigners in Japan and for Japanese firms abroad. However, as markets open up, this role is dying. Mitsubishi's future, if it has one, is as a more proactive global deal maker, using its contacts and its people to set up things like power stations and cable television networks around the world.
Ever since Mr. Makihara's surprise appointment, he has tried to force his colleagues -- not always successfully -- to think in the same way that he does.
One of his first moves was to ask all his senior managers to submit letters of resignation (so that he could use them if necessary). Mr. Makihara has also tried to promote non-Japanese. And like Mr. Kobayashi, he is a keen supporter of letting Western thinkers into the company. But it is a hard slog. Western employees at Mitsubishi complain that they are on short-term contracts, while their Japanese colleagues have jobs for life.For the moment, people like Messrs. Kobayashi, Makihara and Ohmae remain the exceptions rather than the rule. But they have three things going for them. First, Japan's economy is becoming ever more global. Second, their strongest supporters are among the younger, more flexible generation of Japanese managers, who were bred on Disney and Nintendo and are now coming to the fore. And, finally, they are offering something new. Japanese management can change without merely becoming Western. That in turn means that there is plenty for the outside world still to learn from Japan.
To learn that see my future post (Part-8) "What Japan Can Still Teach the West"
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