Resolute Japan - Harbir Singh

. .

Résumé :

Toyota Overtakes GM as Bestselling Auto Maker
-Wall Street Journal, 2022
During a congressional hearing in 1953, General Motors president Charles Wilson, nominated as U.S. Secretary of Defense, sought to blunt questioning from a senator implying that the CEO's business leadership could compromise his public service, and place corporate interest ahead of national interest. Wilson countered that his firm's welfare actually goes with the welfare of the country, and what was good for our country was good for General Motors.
There was some truth in Wilson's hyperbole. GM had emerged as America's premier car producer in the 1930s, and by the 1950s, the company and the country indeed seemed geared to prosper from one another's prosperity. General Motors assembled more than half the cars sold in the United States, making it the number one automaker in the world's number one auto market.
It came as a shock, then, when a Japanese competitor eclipsed General Motors' American production in 2021. Toyota Overtakes GM as Bestselling Auto Maker, headlined the Wall Street Journal. While General Motors sold 2.2 million vehicles in the United States that year, Toyota retailed 2.3 million, up from zero when Wilson sought to defend his integrity.
Who would have ever anticipated, then, that such a reversal of fortune would come to America one day? Especially since Japanese companies had hit a wall in the 1990s, in what became known as the lost decade. Prices deflated, shares flattened, and companies contracted-from great growth to the great retreat.
That Japanese expansion fell well behind other nations was doubly surprising, since Japan had until then been so far ahead. Six of the world's twenty largest banks were headquartered in Tokyo, Japanese investors owned Rockefeller Center, and Sony owned consumer electronics. Harvard sociologist Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number 1, published in 1979, became a bestseller, and UCLA business academic William Ouchi explained why: In stark contrast to the American way of cost-cutting and profit-taking, Japanese managers placed their faith in consensus building, quality manufacturing, and forward thinking-and it worked.
The Japanese model had become so compelling that it attracted its own labels, like quantum mechanics in physics. Professor Ouchi formulated one tag that especially appealed to observers outside Japan-Theory Z-and it emerged as a global benchmark.
Though the Japanese way had come to be seen as a global standard for modern capitalism in the 1980s, it caved dramatically and enduringly during the 1990s. The Tokyo stock market shifted into reverse for two decades, Sony devices gave way to Apple, Japan's #1 moniker vanished, and thought leaders turned elsewhere for exemplars. General Motors' Mary Barra, Apple's Steve Jobs, and Alibaba's Jack Ma-and not the CEOs of Fuji, Sony, or even Toyota-came to grace magazine covers. From 2004 to 2021, Google searches for Japanese management plummeted fivefold. Of the world's fifty largest banks by assets in 2023, just four were still headquartered in Japan (topped by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and Mizuhuo Financial Group).
Note: 225 large, publicly owned companies in Japan...

Biographie:
an MBA from the Judge Business School, Cambridge University...

Sommaire:

Jusuke J. J. Ikegami is a Professor and Dean of Waseda Business School. He is also Director of Waseda Blue Ocean Shift Institute and Deputy Director of Global Strategic Leadership Institute. He received his MA in International Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK...