How the Management Is Done in the Land of Raising Sun

In past decades the Japanese economy had expanded rapidly and the country's annual gross national product became one of the largest in the world. A contribution to this growth is said to have been the cold war threat, during which the former leading countries mostly the United States and the Soviet Union were putting a tremendous amount of money to their armament, while Japan under peace Constitution was able to concentrate its efforts on the economy. During this period managers and renowned university professors were trying to find the key to the Japanese success and the "Japanese challenge" became a buzzword for nearly thirty years. Many comparisons between Japanese and American management practices were made, many books related to this topic were written, much research took place and the Japanese management theory soon became an object of wide admiration. This period is already gone. The Japanese economy showed steady growth till the late 80's, when Japan entered a prolonged period of relative stagnation so-called "bubble economy", and started experiencing a serious recession. By the beginning of the millennium, the Japanese model once held up as an example to the world is clearly running its course and now is badly in need of complete restructuring. Despite this fact, the Japanese management has become an essential part of the integrated management theory and is still considered to be one of the most significant and noteworthy approaches to this area.

To gain a deeper understanding of the Japanese management, we have to describe some of the many cultural differences of this nation, which yield high influence on Japanese society and as a result also on the Japanese business.

First and foremost to be mentioned is a strong sense of belonging to a group. The reason for the Japanese group behavior and collective values sharing is definitely the basic unit of society in Japanese minds - "house", meaning group that bind people together, such as families, companies, schools, unlike the West, where emphasis tends more on individuals. This is the basis for the lifetime employment system in most companies, where the belonging feeling is basically required and employees identify themselves with the organization, which in fact means loyalty and devotion for common corporate goals. This system requires recruitment right after finishing the school and retirement at the age of fifty-five ; the graduate comes to a low position, his career path is non-specialized (he rotates through almost all jobs in the company) and is promoted and evaluated according to the length service, unlike in Western companies, which employ workers on annual basis and the promotion and evaluation is based on one's performance. The group principle can be also found in the collective decision making based on consensus of everyone involved, and its result - collective responsibility.

Another specific feature of the Japanese society is its high emphasis on the human factor (in fact the only resource Japan has), which stems from both historical concept and underlying social and cultural process, and results in the companies' holistic concern for their employees. This implies that the Japanese organization forms an inclusive relationship with the worker, provides a social, emotional, and economical support and takes part of the responsibility for the employee; to say it clearly: becomes his second family. In order to achieve this, the maintaining of healthy social and working relationships does not allow for any conflicts and refusals, which would disturb the harmony of the working process, and that is why the Japanese are known for not expressing their opinions, non-committance, and for having double standards, which is in this kind of society considered to be a necessity in order to solve problems without hurting anyone.

A specific characteristic of the Japanese approach is also a leadership by influence, which means a leading process without formal authority involved. The manager has to know how to motivate people, how to win them for his idea and intention, which he achieves by using his charisma and personal qualities instead of his formal designation.

A last but not least Japanese management practice, which I would like to mention is more technical in nature: the Japanese quality control and lean production also known as "just-in-time" or Kanban, the main goal of which is the cost reduction. The quality control is a process, which never allows defective units to flow into and disrupt a subsequent process by making every employee a quality checker, responsible for spotting errors as they happen and correcting them immediately or stopping the production line completely. The "just-in-time" method is used to obtain needed parts in needed quantities when they are required, which eliminates unnecessary large quantities of inventory hanging around for months.

This was a short list of some of the Japanese management practices, which contributed to the magnificent reconstruction and development of the post-war