Word: japanization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eventually adopted a more international point of view and, in the 1960s, began to speak of issues, such as encouraging free trade by reducing tariffs and other barriers, that many Japanese businessmen had been reluctant to discuss for decades. He represented, very vocally, the business community of Japan, a country that had during the 1970s become the No. 2 economy in the world and could no longer be ignored by the major economic players. Some controversy resulted when he was listed as co-author of a book in 1989--The Japan That Can Say No--that suggested that other countries...
...Morita was asked by Gaishi Hiraiwa, then chairman of Keidanren, to be his successor. Keidanren is the most prestigious business association in Japan, and all CEOs in Japan would like to hold an important position in the organization. Until this time, Morita had never really been accepted by the Japanese establishment as Sony was a relatively small company and didn't come from the traditional strong houses of steelmaking, public utilities and heavy industry. In the Japanese economic circle, becoming chairman of Keidanren is likened to the succession of the Emperor. As it turned out, the day of Morita...
This would have been a wonderful thing for Japan in 1993, a time when the country was about to collapse into sustained recession. Morita had already been thinking about reforming Japan, and he organized discussion groups of politicians, business people and bureaucrats to talk about what would be needed. People say that Japan's current economic situation might have been very different if someone like Morita had been in a position to speak on behalf of the entrepreneurs and the dynamics of business--as opposed to begging the government to rescue industry after industry. I also believe this...
...pond doesn't help if you're in the wrong pond. Some people have the idea that Microsoft is fated to dominate technology forever. They had this same idea about IBM, once admired and feared nearly as much as Microsoft is today. They had essentially the same idea about Japan's technology sector back in the 1980s and early '90s. It isn't quite fair to compare Microsoft to a large country yet. But Japan was on a roll and looked invincible--once. (Or, if you go back to Pearl Harbor, twice...
...beginning of the 1980s, 45-year-old Jack Welch became CEO of another giant, General Electric. Farsighted, incisive--and controversial--he recognized the threat of competition from Japan and elsewhere and had the intellectual and emotional strength to deal with it. He set the tone for U.S. industry. GE became highly productive by undertaking a complex reorganization that simplified the company into one with dominant positions in its carefully chosen businesses. Welch then remade GE into a boundaryless organization that encouraged, and got, participation from employees at all levels. He extinguished turf wars and the not-invented-here syndrome that...