The New Japanese Approach to Management

By: Carola Pozo Cortez

Management studies of North American companies detected the decline in their competitive capacity and their displacement of many world markets by Japanese products that with overwhelming force introduce a new management approach.

For several years beginning in the 1960s, scholars, managers, and entrepreneurs began to eagerly read and study the foundations of the Management Japanese in a clear attempt to incorporate concepts that allow them to compete and be as efficient as they are.

Teachers from Harvard and other leading business training centers went to "study" the Japanese miracle in unequivocal recognition of their state of bewilderment and frustration.

Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
How is the Japanese Management?

Let's see some of its concepts:

• Its efficiency is based on economic and social reasons.
• Excellent level of savings (close to 20%), allowed for levels of capital reinvestment in the order of 20% of gross domestic product.
• The investment was oriented towards the modernization of the manufacturing plants, demolishing the obsolete ones and achieving a very high rate of building-manufacturing renovation; in the same way.
• Invested in equipment and industrial robots that allowed a permanent growth of 8% per year in productivity, measured by the ratio of investment in equipment per worker.

The employment relationship: Person - Company

• The bond between the staff and the companies lasts a lifetime, the worker knows that when he joins a company he will be in it for as long as he lives. In general, the tradition continues of his father or his siblings.
• The company knows this and counts on each person who joins the organization to perform with loyalty and fidelity similar to the one they keep at emperor and his homeland.
• Salaries and promotions are based on seniority and are planned in such a way that, far from discouraging the most capable young people, they lead them to contribute their talent to the management of their superiors and to learn from them, assimilating wisdom and experience, training with time and patience for the moment when their chance.
• The management structure and the workers respect each other and far from competing or having conflicts they know that Each one of them are only a part of the company and that, this, needs both of them to achieve efficiency and utilities.
• The managerial work is carried out as a team and part of the assumption of the systematic participation of all the individuals who fulfill functions. This participation is carried out by levels, giving each superior a synthesis that everyone has analyzed, until consensus is reached, but having in the meantime considered all positions and evaluated all risks.
• In short, the success of Japanese Management is focused on capital investment for its technological growth but fundamentally in their human resources, because, they contribute to the companies, their experience and knowledge, but fundamentally your loyalty.

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