Summary |
This book is addressed to non-Japanese who want to understand the Japanese business insider’s point of view, but its invitation to look at the world through the eyes of Japanese middle managers must be accompanied by a warning. A foreigner who discusses any set of ideas about Japanese corporate culture with Japanese business associates is quite likely to hear that, at their companies, things work in a somewhat unique way. It is very Japanese to distrust ideologies, to focus on the exceptions when moving from abstract concepts to concrete cases. How and why this happens is a central theme of this book. Expect to be told about exceptions. Then use the intuitions developed from reading this book to analyze what mechanisms might account for them. In other words, treat this volume more like an auto repair manual than like a cookbook. The ideas presented here are not recipes for reconstructing “typical” Japanese business behavior; instead, they are tools for diagnosing why things happen in Japanese companies that consistently puzzle outsiders.
The uniqueness of this book is that it represents a collaboration between a midlevel Japanese manager and an American steeped in western ways of thinking about organizational behavior. We believe it is the first to provide the reader with an insider’s view of how Japanese managers put business behavior in context. It could not have been written without the gracious cooperation of the more than fifty Japanese executives we interviewed. Because their companies would prefer them to remain anonymous, we cannot thank them individually; however, we trust that their frankness will help westerners achieve a deeper understanding of the way their contemporaries think. We would particularly like to thank noboru’s countrymen in the Johnson graduate school of management’s class of 1993 for their unstinting support of his efforts
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