The Strategy Of Japanese Business

After two decades of reinvention, Japanese companies are re-emerging as major players in the new digital economy. They have responded to the rise of China and new global competition by moving upstream into critical deep-tech inputs and advanced materials and components. This new "aggregate niche strategy" has made Japan the technology anchor for many global supply chains. Although the end products do not carry a "Japan Inside" label, Japan plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives across many critical industries. This book is an in-depth exploration of current Japanese business strategies that make Japan the world's third-largest economy and an economic leader in Asia. To accomplish their reinvention, Japan's largest companies are building new processes of breakthrough innovation. Central to this book is how they are addressing the necessary changes in organizational design, internal management processes, employment, and corporate governance. Because Japan values social stability and economic equality, this reinvention is happening slowly and methodically, and has gone largely unnoticed by Western observers. Yet, Japan's more balanced model of "caring capitalism" is both competitive and transformative, and more socially responsible than the unbridled growth approach of the United States.

Between 2002 and 2008, Japan's economy saw constant expansion, a record among the world's advanced economies and Japan's longest period of economic growth since World War II. This remarkable achievement came about because of a transformation of Japanese business practices. This transformation was guided by strategies that enabled Japan's leading corporations, previously diversified to an exceptionally high degree, to become leaner, more nimble, and more competitive at home and in the global economy. In Choose and Focus, the first in-depth account of this strategic inflection point in Japanese business, Ulrike Schaede argues that the emerging practices and attitudes have created a New Japan. Drawing on profiles of several corporations, including Panasonic, Takeda and Astellas, Softbank, kakaku.com, and SBI E*Trade, Schaede explains how the fundamental principles of Japan's economy have been overturned. "Choose and focus" strategies, whereby corporations concentrate on core areas and spin off unrelated businesses, have completely altered the strategic logic of Japan's previous industrial architecture. These surprisingly aggressive moves, Schaede finds, have created new market opportunities for start-up enterprises and foreign investors, as well as a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that have shaken Japanese companies out of complacency. Unlike the advances made by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s, the current transformation is taking root in component and materials industries rather than in consumer products. Because of the relative obscurity of the changes and the overshadowing story of China's ascent, the Japanese corporate revolution has gone largely unnoticed among Western observers. Choose and Focus is required reading for anyone doing business in Japan or trying to understand how contemporary Japanese business works and how Japanese corporations have reinvented themselves to face the challenges—and realize the opportunities—of the 21st century.

The growth of Japanese business to a dominant world position in the post-war era has attracted many Western studies and analyses of Japanese management methods in comparision with those of the West. This is an inside account by leading Japanese experts of the way in which individual Japanese firms came to dominate world markets. The text charts the rise of household names such as Canon and Toyota against the background of growth and restructuring that took place in Japan after the war. It should interest anyone who wishes to understand the strategies by which Japanese business has achieved its success.

Restructuring Japanese Business for Growth consists of eighteen previously unpublished invited chapters by experts on Japanese business. It will attract both commercial and academic interest. Japanese business can be expected to continue to be of great importance in global and Asian economics, especially as the Japanese economy is the dominant economy in Asia, being larger than all other Asian economies combined. Policymakers and business people interested in understanding Japanese financial markets will find this book useful. In addition, this book should be a valuable resource for undergraduate, graduate, and executive development courses in international business, global finance, and Japanese business.

This volume collects eleven essays written by Japanese experts on various aspects of Japanese business management and is a sequel to the volume Industry and Business in Japan. It examines the mechanisms for Japan 's phenomenal economic growth since the Second World War by analyzing Japanese management, business groups, production systems and business strategy.

This collection of readings is intended to serve as a foundation for those expecting to have commercial interaction with the Japanese. The selections--from sources not limited to mainstream business journals--address various aspects of the cultural environment of Japanese business and discuss communication and interpersonal relationships, the institutional and legal environment, management and marketing, and the Japanese approach to manufacturing. Some specific topics: the influence of Confucianism and Zen on the Japanese organization, gift-giving, the ethnography of dinner entertainment, spiritual education in a Japanese bank, women managers.