Management and Leadership

Successes and failures of Japanese cross border M&A (2 – Daiichi Sankyo and Ranbaxy)

In September 2013 the US Federal Drug Agency issued an import alert, prohibiting further manufacture of FDA regulated drugs at one of Ranbaxy Laboratories’ Indian factories, causing shockwaves at Daiichi Sankyo, who had bought 64% of Ranbaxy in 2008. This was the second time an alert had been issued in the past 5 years.

Nikkei Business, in their series on Japanese cross border M&As, draws parallels with the NSG/Pilkington case blogged previously saying that the same mistakes had been made by the Japanese acquiring company, in failing to do enough analysis beforehand.

Daiichi Sankyo thought it had fixed the quality problems which were exposed by the FDA in 2009, by firing the Ranbaxy former owner and CEO and sending a director from Japan as well as a quality control officer from the US subsidiary.

Daiichi Sankyo has not disclosed to the Nikkei the cause of the quality problems – apparently this is not even shared widely within the company. The Nikkei supposes that Daiichi Sankyo lacked understanding of Ranbaxy’s organisational structure and corporate culture. A supplier to Ranbaxy explains that “Indian companies do not work in a team the way Japanese companies do. There is a lack of solidarity, and a lack of trust between the boss and subordinates. There is just the hierarchical link between directors and employees. Orders from above are obeyed unquestioningly, and even if juniors sense there are problems, they do not say anything.”

Another comments “Employees in Indian companies are different from Japanese companies in that if they are asked for data and documentation from the authorities, they do not put the information together very thoroughly. There is also not the atmosphere where issues can be openly disclosed.”

If this is the case, it is therefore difficult to understand what is going on from the outside, and the word of the people on the ground cannot be 100% relied on, notes the Nikkei. What is needed for successful M&A is a strengthening of governance – management must be given the structures to understand exactly what is going on on the shopfloor.

As the Nikkei concludes, another failing of Japanese cross border M&As often lies in not being able to appoint a trusted person who also has the necessary local and industry expertise. The Indian executive, Atul Sobti, whom Daiichi Sankyo appointed in 2009 to replace the CEO/owner had previously been an executive at Japanese car companies, only lasted a year. In my experience, it is often the case that Japanese companies rate familiarity with Japanese corporate cultures over industry expertise when hiring local senior management. However Daiichi Sankyo seem to have changed their mind on this, as the successor to Sobti, Arun Sawnhey, is a pharmaceutical industry veteran.

One reason Japanese companies often give for not interfering too heavily in the newly acquired subsidiary is that they are anxious to retain the existing senior management, recognising that they do not have executives in the Japan headquarters they can despatch who have sufficient local and global industry experience and expertise. At the same time, judging by both the Ranbaxy and Pilkington cases, the local executives complain of a lack of access, support and influence in relation to the Japan HQ to carry out their jobs, and leave, or conversely, are quickly got rid of when problems arise or financial targets are not met.

A better balance has to be found between implementing the necessary changes to governance and strengthening oversight, whilst also ensuring that the senior local executives are given the support and integrated into the network back in Japan HQ to allow them to perform their roles effectively. Japanese executives are too ready to keep non-Japanese executives at arm’s length, so that if there are any problems, Japanese executive hands are clean.

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Does having more women managers help Japanese companies globalise?

The question of whether having more women managers would help Japanese companies to globalise was raised, but not discussed in depth due to time constraints, at a dinner I attended, hosted by a delegation to the UK from Japan Women’s Innovative Network – a Japanese non profit organisation. An impressively large number of younger women (70) had been sponsored by their companies to come to the UK for a week, visiting various UK companies such as British Telecom and AON, to study global leadership and diversity.

My view is yes, it does help Japanese companies to globalise if they have more (Japanese) women managers, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it helps Japanese companies and corporate culture seem less “alien” to Western companies if there are more women in management positions in the headquarters, and secondly, because the adjustments Japanese companies will have to make in order to incorporate a more diverse Japanese workforce (gender or other diversity) will help them be more inclusive of “non-Japanese” diverse groups. Attitudes to overtime and working from home would be a couple of areas needing adjustment I would suggest.

On the first point, the question of the role of women in Japanese companies is frequently raised in the cultural awareness sessions we conduct in Europe for Japanese companies. Japan never does well in surveys of the position of women in society – see the most recent World Economic Forum Gender Gap report , placing Japan 114th out of 144 countries (updated for 2017). While you can question the methodology of such surveys, then along comes another one, conducted amongst Japanese women, showing that 1/3 of them want to be full time housewives.

Which leads me to point out in our training (and in the Advancing Gender Diversity day I spoke at for Hitachi’s European group companies – presentation on SlideShare here) that Confucian values remain strong in Japan – it’s not that women are seen as somehow less capable than men, more that there are expectations around the role they should fulfil in society.

Prime Minister Abe is trying to square a circle with Abenomics, by trying to raise the birthrate but at the same time encourage women to go back to work – aiming to have 30% of senior positions in all parts of society, by 2020, through improving childcare and parental leave. But with the amount of pressure on women to be good housewives and stalwarts of the Parent Teachers Association, no amount of improved childcare and leave is going to counteract this or compensate for both parents doing overtime until late at night.

Although the Japanese government can directly change the economy with the first and second arrow of Abenomics, through fiscal and monetary actions, the third arrow of structural reform requires nudging, or even shaming Japanese companies into doing the right thing – legislation alone will be hard to push through and even harder to enforce. So Abe launched in February the “Nadeshiko” * scheme, recognising firms which are making efforts to improve the working environment for women.

Firms given the Nadeshiko “brand” in February of this year include Kao, Nissan, Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) and Daikin. The scheme is not the only initiative taking place – various other surveys have been done of best places for women to work and the Hitachi Gender Diversity Day was partly inspired by the President of Hitachi, Hiroaki Nakanishi, declaring recently that the company aims to more than double the number of women managers by 2020.

Other recent surveys have named Benesse (no coincidence that the founder of Benesse is also the founder of J-WIN) as the most career friendly for women and companies such as Toshiba, KDDI, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and NTT have all announced targets for women managers. The Nikkei group has also jumped on the bandwagon, with a seminar series aimed at aspiring women managers (and even has a magazine “Nikkei Woman” ) and published its ranking last year of best places for women to work, which put foreign companies at the top (IBM Japan, Procter & Gamble) along with 2 life insurance companies, Takashimaya department store, Daiwa Securities, Sony, Panasonic, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, Fujitsu and Sharp.

* Nadeshiko is a type of pink danthius flower associated with women in Japan. It was adopted as a nickname by the women’s soccer team of Japan on its way to becoming the first Asian team to win the World Cup, in 2011.

The original version of this article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in 2014. An English version of it appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” is available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

The man who turned Hitachi around #5 – globalization of people

As well as the train business in the UK, the other case study that Takashi Kawamura, former President of Hitachi gives as a model of globalization is the data storage business, which was turned into a “solution” business rather than just selling Hitachi’s hardware. Kawamura says the person responsible for starting this change was the CEO of Hitachi Data Systems in the USA, Jack Domme. The key words which changed the business were “disaster recovery” and Domme hired people who weren’t just salesmen, but engineers, who could listen to customers and make proposals.

As well as having a strong local leader heading the UK train business and HDS, Hitachi’s China elevator business is also headed up by a Chinese President. According to Kawamura, all these businesses have switched to being “solution” oriented, to compete with IBM, Siemens and GE – this could not have been done if they were led by Japanese “sheltering under the umbrella” of Hitachi.

3 of Hitachi’s 13 board members are non-Japanese. The executive officers are still all Japanese but Kawamura thinks this needs to change too, so that non-Japanese are heading up Hitachi’s business divisions. “If our European rail business expands, then it might be better to have a British person heading up our transport systems division. If diversity advances in this way, then there will be much more lively debates and innovation, and it will be easier to undertake structural reform”

Hitachi aims to reach an operating profit of 7% (from the current 4.7%) by FY 2015, to close in on Siemens. “What is needed to be a globally excellent company is speed” says Kawamura.

From 2011, around 1000 young employees are sent out each year to work overseas for a maximum of 3 months. This is 10 times more than previously, and represents about a quarter of each cohort. Kawamura says it is done not just because Hitachi can afford it, but to show that the company is serious about globalization and also to act as a wake up call to the young employees about how much further they have to go in order to speak English or other foreign languages fluently, and to create relationships with local customers.

Around 60% go to developing countries – Kawamura says they have to survive some tough challenges, which in some cases have really changed employees’ mindsets.

There are are also top down diversity initiatives to globalize people, through the governance of the company. In 2012 Kawamura increased the number of external directors from 4 to 7 out of the 13 board members, and raised the number of non-Japanese from 1 to 3 and this year added the first foreign female board director, Cynthia Carroll, formerly of Anglo American.

“This diversity should have an impact on the mindset of our employees, but the other effect is to liven up board meetings. Japanese board meetings usually do not have much debate or discussion – the decisions have already been made at the management committee or operational committee level. And in companies like Hitachi which are very vertical, executives do not comment on other business divisions – they feel they are not qualified to criticise.

So our board meetings have become extremely “frank”, actually I feel beaten up by them – they ask why we have not reached 5% operating profit, why such elite Japanese graduates don’t seem to be very motivated, why we are so mild and not competitive. We use simultaneous interpreters in the board meetings, so the comments come bouncing out at us in real time. It’s not just criticisms, but also new business ideas come out of these meetings – new technologies we should adopt or businesses we should collaborate with. We held one of our board meetings in India, to show we were serious about tripling our business there. We are thinking to hold our board meeting somewhere in the USA this year.

George Barclay, who was CEO of 3M is actually British, and the current CEO is Swedish. Although 3M is an American company, Americans are in the minority on the board. Barclay tells me that’s normal if you want to compete globally”

It will also help with structural reform. Hitachi has just completed a global database of 300,000 personnel. This will be used for unified appraisals and global mobility of staff. Kawamura would like to see more non-Japanese in Japan, in team leader or General Manager positions. Seniority based promotion will probably come to an end.

Kawamura finishes the series by saying that he was too old to be President, which is why he handed over to Nakanishi after a year. He sees the role of Presidency as an agent – if there is proper diversity, then the company and the management will be “smart” and “aggressive” and the President does not even need to be charismatic.

The man who turned round Hitachi #4 – globalization and the UK train business

Overseas business accounts for less than 50% of Hitachi’s Y9665 trillion revenues. Domestically Hitachi is seen as a “winner” but globalization is an urgent issue. Takashi Kawamura, current chairman and former President, points out that compared to GE or IBM or Siemens, Hitachi’s market capitalization is still very low. When he became president in 2009 he emphasized that Hitachi needed to look more like a truly global company. “There was a tendency just to compare ourselves to ourselves, so it seemed as if our performance was better, compared to the past, but this was just inward looking.”

Kawamura had experienced the strength of GE and Siemens as competitors when he was in charge of the power systems business, as did his successor as President, Hiroaki Nakanishi, when he was running the hard disk drive business in the USA, competing with the global top 1 or 2 companies. “The people working in Japan for Hitachi don’t feel this pressure, but the Japanese domestic market is shrinking, and if Hitachi does not compete in the rest of the world, it will become a loser.” This is a problem faced by many Japanese domestic giants – most of their employees are focused on the company and its DNA surviving, and globalization does not seem imperative for this, if business is going well domestically, in fact globalization might even risk the long term survival of the company.

Kawamura gives a couple of what he calls “model cases” of globalization at Hitachi – the UK rail business and the data storage business in the USA.

Hitachi competed against Siemens, Alstom and Bombardier in July 2012 to win the bid for the UK’s Intercity Express Programme – the construction and leasing of trains from 2017 for 27 years. Together with a further order this July, this represents 866 carriages, for which Hitachi has invested Y9.6bn in a factory in County Durham.

Hitachi was only known for TVs and domestic appliances in the UK, and had no history of train business in the UK at all. Kawamura says it was not enough just to keep saying that Hitachi’s technology was superb – so at their own cost, they set up their own control equipment in an old carriage and gathered data by running the train at night.

Then with the 2010 election, the new coalition government launched a spending review, and froze the awarding of the contract, so Hitachi Rail Europe made its own proposals on how to cut expenditure and this led to Hitachi regaining preferred bidder status. Kawamura believes their success was due to appointing a strong local leader, the CEO of HRE, Alistair Dormer, formerly of BAE and Alstom, who had been at Hitachi since 2003. A British sales team was put together and given a large degree of freedom too, so that they knew the local market well and were able to address any needs.

Kawamura says that Hitachi changed tack with their 2012 Mid Term Plan, to focus not just on developing countries but also matured markets like the UK, because it was felt that developed markets also had big infrastructure challenges, and this was how Hitachi could build up its strength in solution businesses.

(continued – the man who turned Hitachi around – globalization of people)

The man who turned Hitachi around #3 – trimming the three branches

“I don’t really like it myself, but there is an expression in the Hitachi group “Gosanke – the three branches” – meaning Hitachi Metals, Hitachi Cable and Hitachi Chemical” – explains Takashi Kawamura, former President of Hitachi. The expression is historical, referring to the three branches of the Shogun producing Tokugawa clan during Japan’s feudal era.

The Gosanke are the largest, and longest surviving of the listed Hitachi group companies. Kawamura caused a sensation in 2010 when he appointed Hiroaki Nakanishi as President and stayed on as Chairman, by also appointing Nobuo Mochida of Hitachi Metals as Executive Vice President. “These personnel moves are a way of showing to the outside world what my intentions are. It was the first time that someone from one of the other listed Hitachi companies had been appointed as an executive of the main Hitachi organisation. Up until there was not even much exchange of personnel even amongst ordinary employees.”

Then in 2011, Kawamura made Hideaki Takahashi, who had been an executive officer in the main Hitachi company, President of Hitachi Cable. This was also a rare occurence, and was followed by the merger of Hitachi Metals and Hitachi Cable in July of 2013. This was to signify the end of Hitachi’s vertical mindset.

“I was most concerned about reforming the main Hitachi company. As I mentioned before, it was a donburi – good businesses covering up bad…. There was no sense of responsibility to the rest of the company in each division – for example, if some entertainment budget was left towards the end of the year, then the division would try to spend it all in a mad frenzy.” So in 2009 Kawamura set up an internal company system. There are now 6 groups, with around 30 independent companies, some listed, some not, which report into the consolidated accounts. If the internal rating of a division fell, then the mothership would not lend it any more money. Kawamura also started an annual “Hitachi IR Day”. “The president of each internal company suddenly changed their spots when they realised that each year they would be accountable to investors for the targets they had set the previous year,” notes Kawamura.

(Continues – the man who turned Hitachi around – the UK rail business)

The man who turned Hitachi around – boiled frog, donburi and battleships

The Hitachi group of companies, estimated to be the second biggest company in Japan in terms of employees after Toyota, and 4th in terms of revenue, has turned itself around considerably since 2009, when it chalked up “the largest loss in Japanese manufacturing history” of around $8bn.

It led to the premature ousting of Kazuo Furukawa as President, replaced by Takashi Kawamura as CEO and Chairman, who at 69 was 8 years older than Furukawa and must have thought his career was in a graceful curve towards retirement, as chairman of Hitachi Maxell and Hitachi Plant Technology.

Kawamura handed over the Presidency to Hiroaki Nakanishi in 2010, and continues as Chairman. A series of articles in the Nikkei Business magazine recently describe how he turned the conglomerate around to profitability in two years.

He describes how he saw Hitachi in 2009 as a “boiled frog” whereby each division was fooled by the cosy feeling of the slowly heating water, unwilling to make radical changes until it was too late. Japanese like to stick with things as they are, he comments.

Corporate governance was not working at Hitachi in 2009 he says. All the group companies were run by an Old Boys network from the Hitachi main company. If a younger President had been appointed, and wanted to change things, it would have been difficult to persuade his seniors. As Kawamura was older than most of the other presidents, he was able to push through reforms.

He describes Hitachi as having a “donburi” style of management [donburi is a rice with toppings dish] whereby the loss making businesses were covered by the profitable ones. “Bad businesses should be brought out into the open and a judgement made as to whether they can be reformed or scrapped”. This was forced upon Hitachi by the Lehman Shock but Kawamura was also more able to do it because he had been in a subsidiary of Hitachi.

Employees used to believe Hitachi was the unsinkable battleship. It survived 2 oil shocks without much impact on its financials. Japan’s big three electrical companies – Hitachi, Toshiba and Mitsubishi Electric used to be known as the wandering samurai, the merchant and the feudal lord respectively. A wandering samurai thrives when times are good, but is not flexible about change when it’s necessary.

There was also something known as “Hitachi Time” – whereby major decisions had to take account of so many people, including Old Boys and therefore were very slow to be reached. In 2009, Hitachi was renamed the sinking battleship. Kawamura uses a story he heard about the British Navy,as a metaphor for what had happened to Hitachi. British battleships were taking on about an inch of water a year, which will caused the ships to lose speed, so in the end, they are rusted up and useless. Hitachi had made losses in 2001, 2006 and 2007 as well as in 2009. Apparently the reason the the battleships took on water is that they had become heavier every year. This was due to an accumulation of personal possessions by the staff on board. So the British Navy is now very strict about what personal items can be brought on board.

(to be continued – what Kawamura did to reform governance)

The Emperor of Olympus dies, just before the judgement of Olympus

The instigator of the cover up of Olympus’ losses, Toshiro Shimoyama, died aged 89 of pneumonia, just before a suspended sentence was handed down to his successor, Kikukawa. Kikukawa avoided a prison sentence partly in recognition that he inherited, rather than perpetrated, the fraud which was then uncovered by Michael Woodford.

According to Eiji Furuyama, of the Japan Society for Business Ethics Studies, in his paper “For Whom the Whistle Blows: Olympus Financial Scandal” which I heard him present at the Association of Japanese Business Studies, Shimoyama was known as The Emperor, which gives you some clue as to how difficult it would have been to to expose what he did whilst he was still alive.

Furuyama also predicted that Kikukawa would get at least a partially suspended sentence, as he did not personally benefit from the fraud. Furuyama attended one day of the hearing, and described Kikukawa as surprisingly small in terms of presence, and clearly “a nice guy”. Furuyama has also met Woodford, as have I, and similarly concluded that his motives were good, although Woodford had suspected somebody somewhere was benefitting financially.

Furuyama concluded in his paper that the biggest fraud was Olympus’ – as a “socially responsible, incorporated firm” – decision to trade in speculative and fraudulent financial products in the first place.

Why it matters if Japanese businesspeople are bad at English

The former President of Microsoft Japan, Makoto Naruke, wrote a best seller entitled “90% of Japanese don’t need to speak English” provocatively asserting that learning English was a waste of time and money, no graduate from an international school has succeeded in business, business English conversation is easy and if you’re an idiot, being able to speak English isn’t going to help.

There’s obvious truth in the last point, and Tejun Shin, formerly of Morgan Stanley, now running his own fund and a microfinance not-for-profit Living in Peace doesn’t deny that 90% of Japanese don’t need English in their jobs, but points out in the Nikkei Online(Japanese) that it’s still a big problem that the 10% of Japanese who do need English for their work are pretty awful at English too.

He demolishes various assumptions made that Japanese have nothing to worry about, showing that even amongst 19 Asian countries Japan comes second from bottom after Cambodia on English ability scores and that amongst 15 OECD countries where English is not the native language, Japan is bottom in English ability. Even something that I often assert, that Japanese are better at reading than speaking or writing English, turns out to be wrong.

He gives a couple of excellent reasons that I had not articulated myself for why poor English ability is an issue for Japanese employees.

Firstly, that it will lead to the Galapagosisation of the mind (Galapagos syndrome is often used to describe products which are developed purely for the Japanese market, so like a Galapagos turtle, cannot survive outside that particular environnment). Without input of “world knowledge” – from the internet or TED talks etc – which is inevitably in English, thoughts become entirely inward looking and idea creation incestuous.

Secondly, for leaders in particular, English ability is a must, not only so that they can form alliances with overseas companies to develop business, but also – and this was the real aha moment for me – so that English speaking talent feels comfortable working for them. This is so true – if you are a high flier, you wouldn’t want to work in a company where you have little chance of getting your views heard by the top executives.

Career paths in Japanese companies in Europe

I asked one of the two partners of a local firm of accountants whether he was getting lots of job applications from recently made redundant accountants from the big accounting firms. He said he was, but he had to be careful about hiring such people as his firm cannot offer the career path that the big firms can. “People who are used to big companies get frustrated and quit when they realise there is not much potential for meaningful promotion with us,” he said.

It reminded me of the situation I often see in Japanese companies in Europe. Partly because of the fragmented nature of Europe, unlike the USA, many Japanese companies find the best structure is to have a small office in each country with one or two expatriate Japanese staff in each one. The locally hired staff often have interesting and varied jobs because the small office has to cover a variety of functions and businesses. However there is not much of a vertical structure in terms of people for them to “manage” if they are promoted to a management position.

How, then, should such Japanese companies retain and motivate good quality local staff? The accountancy firm partner said what he did was offer good salaries, excellent benefits and plenty of training. This may not be sufficient to satisfy ambitious people, however, so I have a couple of other suggestions specifically for Japanese companies in Europe.

One is to try to create a pan-European structure so that locally hired staff can have some status within that structure, not just their local one. It may not be possible to have actual job roles like “European Sales Director” but a human network could be created, through pan European meetings and training. Then people can keep in touch afterwards by using an intranet to put their profiles on and exchange information through blogs or wikis. Through getting to know each other and sharing expertise, the high flying staff will begin to gain unofficial status and recognition. People might also become less reluctant about the idea of moving to another location or to take on a “pan European” role, once they know more about other colleagues in other European operations and what they do.

The other way Japanese companies can motivate their ambitious staff is to give them opportunities to improve their status within their profession. This might not seem to the Japanese management as being much of an issue. Many Japanese employees feel they have enough status professionally because their company is so well known and respected in Japan. But often such companies are not at all famous outside of Japan. The kind of opportunities I have in mind are, for example, joining professional associations, gaining professional qualifications, speaking at conferences, writing articles for trade journals etc.

If Japanese companies can support their locally hired staff in gaining recognition and respect inside and outside their companies, they may have more success in retaining motivated, ambitious employees.

The original version of this article was published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and can also be found in “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

A fresh look at governance lessons from the Olympus case

The Olympus Corp. trial has started and Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the former chairman, pleaded guilty to covering up financial losses. Sony Corp. has agreed to take a roughly 11% stake in Olympus, securing the company’s future. So, the worst outcome, which Kikukawa himself feared – that the company would be destroyed, and the livelihoods of many employees lost – has not transpired and it would seem justice is being served.

Reading former Olympus President Michael Woodford’s autobiographical account of the whole incident, I can’t help wondering if there might have been a less nerve wracking way of resolving the firm’s problems. A key moment in the book for me is where Kikukawa, Woodford’s sponsor, realizing that Woodford is in effect asking him to resign and accept responsibility for the cover up, asks “do you hate me Michael?”

The question is incomprehensible to Woodford, who does not see his accusations as personal, but part of his fiduciary duty as a director of the company to make transparent what has happened and ensure the guilty take responsibility.

To Kikukawa, I can imagine the cover up was a desperate attempt to save the company, with no personal gain involved. He is unable to disentangle his own fate and duty as a director with the company’s fate and his responsibility for its employees. An attack on his behavior seems like an attack on his person, by someone who does not seem to care whether the company lives or dies.

Woodford makes it very clear that he does indeed care whether Olympus lives or dies, but believes that the process of exposure, punishment and redemption will allow the company to be reborn. Many executives bred in the Anglo Saxon capitalist world are of a similar mindset – able to distance themselves from the company they manage, and to examine it objectively.

There is a less admirable side to this – a tendency to march into a company, believing that a bold reorganization, a sweep with a new broom, brushing out some of the people associated with the past, and putting in your own men (and it always does seem to be men) will get the results needed. So long as the numbers are good, the shareholders are happy. Casualties fall by the wayside, but can pick themselves up and start again elsewhere.

This is still not the case in Japan, and simply marking this down as a case of inadequate corporate governance ignores the fact that Japan does have corporate governance standards, which can and should be enforced. Furthermore, the Japanese corporate environment has become as tricky as that of the US or Europe. There are regulations governing overtime, diversity and “power harassment” that new foreign bosses ignores at their peril.

There have been too many cases of failure of foreign bosses in Japan for it to be wise for Japanese companies to continue to appoint foreign executives in the hope that this will somehow magically globalize the company. Foreign executives need intensive support and guidance, such as training in the workings of Japanese boards and coaching from those experienced in managing Japanese employees, if they are to make a difference without destruction.

This article originally appeared in the October 8th 2012 edition of the Nikkei Weekly

Category: Management and Leadership