DISCUSSION 3: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
Discuss the article: Why the West Will Lose. Critically examine and comment on both your own and other people’s perceptions.
“Why the West Will Lose” K. Matsushita
Extracts from remarks made by Mr. Konosuke Matsushita of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, Japan to a Group of Western Managers. Industrial Participation, Spring, 1985, p. 8. Quoted by Terry Hill in Manufacturing Strategy, 2nd Ed. Irwin, p 220, 1994.
We are going to win and the industrial West is going to lose: there is nothing you can do about it, because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves.
Your firms are built on the Taylor model; even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking, while the workers wield the screwdrivers, you are convinced deep down that this is the right way to run a business.
For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses into the hands of labor.
We are beyond the Taylor model: business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive, and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day to day mobilization of every ounce of intelligence.
For us, the core of management is precisely this art of mobilizing and pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm. Because we have measured better than you the scope of the technological and economic challenges, we know that the intelligence of a handful of technocrats, however brilliant and smart they may be, is no longer enough for a real chance of success.
Only by drawing on the combined brain power of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today’s environment.
This is why our large companies give their employees three to four times more training than yours; this is why they focus within the firm such intensive exchange communication; this is why they seek constantly everybody’s suggestions, and why they demand from the educational system increasing numbers of graduates as well as bright and well-educated generalists, because these people are the lifeblood of industry.
Your “socially-minded bosses,” often full of good intentions, believe their duty is to protect the people in their firms. We, on the other hand, are realists and consider it our duty to get our own people to defend their firms, which will pay them back a hundredfold for their dedication. By doing this, we end up being more “social” than you.