Combining Western and Japanese management skills to transform your company:
In the U.S. marketing drives product development, where in Japan engineering drives product development. That leads to a “Be the best at what you do, forever” mentality. Develop and present two budgets, one to stay where you are and one to increase market share. A budgeted loss can be considered an investment, while an unbudgeted loss is a big problem. Anything that depletes cash flow is a potential danger, because companies only fail when they are out of cash. Japanese management priorities are market share and new products rather than ROI and increased shareholder value.
Coaching management style: an eighty percent consensus with twenty percent effort and time. Delegate authority, not responsibility. Built-in job shifts every three years for employees to improve and add value rather than stagnate in a position for twenty years. Celebrate small wins on a frequent and modest basis. Establish a six-month planning/budget cycle.
While these are helpful methods to employ in management, copying the Japanese may aid in building great companies, but logically there is no long-term best approach where are all the five hundred year-old companies? Where are the one thousand year-old businesses? I will credit the Japanese with building great products, and although the Japanese economy continues to suffer for over twenty-five years I think Japanese companies will continue to survive in a sustained economic downturn. They do too many things right. So, the alchemy of a leader itself arises, not from management, but from huge markets but the author of this book, published in 1994, was nearly oblivious to the rise of China as a superpower with leading economic development. And it happened with nothing but millions of people forging ahead to serve underserved markets, not practice educated MBA activities or follow Japanese management techniques. Now that the fog has cleared from 1994, there is a huge mountain of advancement and economic activity and even skilled outsiders didnt get the golden keys to the Middle Kingdom.