It's because Japanese society frowns on entrepreneurism, which means innovation needs to be attached to an existing company.
Why Japanese companies do so many different things
361–370 of 439 posts
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#362The core of the article is buried 60% down: > you have a firm that has lots of lifetime employees who can’t be fired, and whose skills are tailored to what your firm needs rather than to a particular occupational category transferable to any employer > the system only makes sense if the company is also insulated from outside pressure > the J-firm [Japan-style company], run by its employees and largely indifferent to…
One other interesting fact about Japanese companies is that their CEOs get paid far far less than Western companies. Checkout this article that talks about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/2010/07/5-lessons-of-ja... edit: added article.
Japanese might value status more than money. That is, status confers them higher societal 'value'. Some people are motivated by status, some by money, and some by a combination of both. These can be fine-tuned. If you can cheaper CEOs for a lot less money, why not? If you want to think about it, the top bureaucrats in any country command massive empires and budgets. They work for the power/status, not a whole lot of money.
One interesting thing about US is that money is worshipped, sure, the super rich billionaires live differently, they can have massive mansions with domestic staff, drivers, live life large, but they are completely outside of society. For people in the 0 - 100m+ range who are forced to interact with each other, there is no big high-status attached to the rich, their lives are a little bit better, but people aren't talking/treating them special. Compare this to a third world country like India, everything is a status marker, if you have a car you are treated a lot better than someone without a car. The outward displays are wealth/status are critical for day-to-day interactions.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#363> This is very different from how most wealthy countries operate. American firms, for example, tend to prioritize focus above all else It hasn't always been like that. Western companies, including US companies, used to have lots of diversification as well (maybe not as much as the Japanese, but much more than today's companies still: not that long ago a company like IBM used to make mouses and keyboards, in addition…
Apple and Microsoft make keyboards and mouses. Both trillion dollar companies.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality. Quite the opposite - for me, anyway. FWIW, as a Westerner, I find the Mondragon Corporation to be fascinating and something I've read a lot about because there's no way we've figured out the ideal sort of setup for a business (or…
Same thing, being Spanish the Basque Cooperatives movement is fascinating. Do you have any recommended read about it?
I had a couple of eye-opening conversations about this the last time I was in San Sebastian. Not everyone there loves Mondragon as much as we think, some see it as a closed club that makes it arbitrarily hard to get a job with them depending on your connections. I met some workers unhappy of their hiring practices and I think their starting working conditions. No idea if they were fair or just resentful.
I still admire Mondragon and wish there were more companies like it, but now I try to remind myself that most characterizations from the outside are surely lacking in nuance.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#365i agree with you
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing, being Spanish the Basque Cooperatives movement is fascinating. Do you have any recommended read about it?
Probably whatever George Orwell wrote after he picked up a gun and fought on their behalf.
In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell narrates just how little fighting there was. It was trench warfare where both sides had precious little ammo and guns that couldn’t shoot straight. He sat in the mud at the front rotting with the rest. Apart from a few days in cities, hospital recovery, and a desperate last few weeks.
He had to flee the country because his chosen party was purged. He survived a street battle. Then made a final visit to many of his comrades in prison.
Don’t presume that his views were shared with those who had influence.
He had admiration for his comrades in arms, especially the mess hall staff. He was on the workers side, but he was in the banned party, of the losing side of the war.
Above all, Orwell saw through the propaganda at home and the rest of the worlds deliberate misunderstanding of the whole situation. For instance, he saw that France had a tacit agreement with the Soviets to slow-walk supplying arms to the Nationalists, to ensure French financiers had protected investments in Spain’s railroads. And every newspaper outside Spain reported like Fox News.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by pro…
Not being a single-party, notionally communist dictatorship may be helping with the image too? I don't know, spitballing here. I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.
Laugh in Plaza Accord and 80s anti Japan scare.
At one point American was more concerned with Japanese economy than Soviet lmao/
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how Westerners idealize Japan Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere. They present cherry-picked aspects of both countries that make China look bad and Japan look good. In reality every country has its good and bad aspects. This is just part of the propaganda machine and what politicians want you to believe, in an effort to align their populations to be s…
I really don't really think there's much political or propaganda interest in getting Westerners to idealize Japan, at this point. Now back in the 80s? Back in the 80s, despite being aligned with the West, they were perceived a lot like China is today. Everyone was scared that they were going to start eating the West's lunch and various negative stereotypes and exaggerations started to bubble up: it was a futuristic l…
> little shoebox apartments the size of a Western bathroom
You mean, American bathroom.
Apartments in major Europe cities aren't that much bigger than Japanese but for sure the bathroom sucks.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you see how Japanese CEOs live, they live a far more deprived life on the backs of their employees than any billionary CEO in the USA. Japanese companies are centered around treating most employees like indentured servants in a sweatshop so the few bosses can have giant expense accounts, vacation houses, company cars, etc.
Japanese CEOs have a Toyota Crown in their garage and spend each Friday night at a kyabakura/hostess bar with a few employees. They take a trip to Hawaii twice a year. American CEOs are on the board of 8 companies but spend 5 minutes a year combined at the offices of those companies. They spend their weekends at private islands off the coast of the US Virgin Islands with other billionaires. They fire employees who as…
Depends on the scale of the company;
At the biggest ones you start to see branches of the organisation dedicated to c level services... Things like a driver awake and ready to go 24/7 (for the whole family), purchasing or even building apartments.
All available in the west, but the distinction is who directly pays for these things.
Re: Why Japanese companies do so many different things
#370> Even a country like Germany, which matches Japan in its depth of high-precision firms, has nothing like Japan’s corporate diversification. Only a few large conglomerates, like Siemens, have anything approaching the lateral breadth of the Japanese firm.
Oh we had that level of conglomerates. Deutsche Bank and Allianz as capital providers, Siemens, AEG, Thyssen, Krupp, Mannesmann and a bunch of others formed the so-called "Deutschland AG" [1] - a web of interconnected very large companies, that also had very good ties to politics.
It was a better time.