日本在過去近十年的不景氣下，日本企業並沒有浪費時間，在經濟開始復甦之際展現了一種東西融合的經營管理模式，將日本企業的競爭力再度提升。
大部分人都認為，不景氣會將日本企業本來最重視的企業倫理及忠誠流失，但，日本企業不僅加強他們和西方的競爭力，但仍保留了日本企業的傳統。日本企業改革的能力令人驚奇：留下好的，改革應認改革的。
（台灣企業能嗎？）
In Japan’s front offices, a new fusion of East and West
By Patrick L. Smith International Herald Tribune
Published: August 30, 2006
Now that Japan is emerging from years of sluggish growth, its corporations appear to have produced something few executives or analysts expected even a few years ago: a management method that incorporates lessons from American companies while preserving the practices that once made Japanese companies famous.
Until very recently, it was widely expected that recession and the mounting pressures of global competition would force corporate Japan to surrender traditions like loyalty to employees and suppliers and responsibility to shareholders. Prominent analysts in the Tokyo offices of firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were among the most enthusiastic exponents of this view.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Japanese recovery. What was almost universally written off as Japan’s ”lost decade” has left this nation’s leading companies stunningly competitive while still holding to the corporate ethos for which they have long been known.
”A lost decade? Nonsense,” said James Abegglen, chairman of the Asia Advisory Service and an expert on Japanese corporate organization. ”A painful transition? Yes.”
”Companies have done what had to be done to redesign themselves,” Abegglen said. ”They’ve retained basic values while changing what had to be changed.”
With Japan recovering, what is emerging is a hybrid management strategy that is partly Japanese and partly Western - a kind of ”third way” in the corner office. Executives, management experts and consultants say this is producing a reinvigorated corporate sector that is more focused on primary businesses, better able to make the most of human capital, more dedicated to advanced technologies like robotics and second to none in cost-effectiveness.
The corporate ideal as this hybrid takes hold is Toyota, the leading Japanese automaker. Company executives, notably the chairman, Hiroshi Okuda, have long been known for their cutting- edge management methods even as they espouse Japan’s traditional corporate principles. For Toyota therefore, emerging from the recession has been a matter of endurance and improvement, rather than change, which was the case for many Japanese companies, like NEC, an electronics giant, and Matsushita, maker of the Panasonic and National brands.
Okuda said often during his just- ended tenure as head of Nihon Keidanren, the leading business association in Japan, that companies are social institutions with obligations to the communities in which they are embedded.
Toyota confounded many skeptics by adhering to this philosophy during the recession years.
”We used to hear all about Japan as No.1 and the virtues of Japanese management,” said Shin Kanada, Toyota’s senior managing director. ”Then, in the 1990s, the pendulum swung the other way. I’m a little jaded at this point. Of course culture and tradition are factors, but what determines management strategy is what has always determined it, and that’s competition.”
With aggressive overseas expansion and shrewd product development, Toyota weathered the years of sluggish growth at home as well as or better than any other Japanese company. In the fiscal year that ended on March 31, the company increased capital investment by 41 percent to ¥1.53 trillion, or $13.1 billion. Return on such invested capital, excluding financial transactions, was 9.9 percent for the year to March 31, just short of twice as much as four years ago.
Among major Japanese companies, the report card is consistent, according to several broad statistical measures, including these:
Debt as a proportion of equity has been reduced from about six to one at its peak during the ”miracle” years to less than one to one, according to Goldman Sachs figures.
Cash flows are at record levels. From an average return on equity of 0.4 percent in 2001, corporations reported returns of 9.2 percent in the fiscal year that ended March 31, the highest figure in 20 years, according to surveys by Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the Japanese business daily.
Private-sector capital expenditure is forecast to rise 14.5 percent in the current fiscal year, the surveys indicate. This would be the third consecutive year of double-digit increases and the highest figure since 1989, when such spending reached 15.4 percent.
Cross-shareholdings, which long protected companies from hostile takeovers but also encumbered them, have been reduced from about 20 percent of issued equity in the 1990s to less than 5 percent, according to data gathered by Nippon Life, the Tokyo insurance company.
In addition, Japanese companies are now significantly more transparent, chiefly because new regulations no longer permit them to hide losses in the books of subsidiaries, as many once did. Since April, at least half of a company’s auditors have had to be outsiders.
The companies are also slimmer. Overtime and twice-yearly bonus payments, both typical during the years of plenty, have been cut significantly and contract employees have in some cases replaced full timers, reducing payrolls without reducing staff. Companies have also disposed of many illogically diverse subsidiaries and subdivisions, in some cases hundreds of them, to concentrate on core businesses. Mitsui Busan, a major trading company, has dropped half of about 800 subsidiaries. NEC, has merged, sold or publicly listed 58 units in recent years. Matsushita is still restructuring; it just announced plans to reduce 300 production units to 170.
In many respects, Japanese companies had no choice but to make these changes. They ended the bubbly 1980s with large debts and excessive payrolls. It was also clear that Japan was shifting from decades of high growth into a mature economy, one that would grow at 2 percent to 3 percent yearly - half or less of the rates during the 1980s.
”Japanese firms were overloaded at the beginning of the 1990s,” said Hiroyuki Itami, a professor of management at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. ”They had to do something about their resources, the debt loads and the people. Does this mean they changed their management thinking, their method? Not too much.”
Fujio Mitarai, the president and chief executive at Canon, who recently succeeded Okuda as the head of Keidanren, is noted for drawing a distinction between the global and local aspects of corporate management. The new-look Japanese company, according to Mitarai and other executives, accepts world standards in terms of balance sheet and cash flow management, transparency and cost controls while preserving Japanese practices in areas like employment and close ties to suppliers.
No executive in Japan argues that Japanese companies were obliged to maintain unrealistic employment levels as a matter of social responsibility. But many assert that they limited the suffering among employees, at home if not always abroad, and persevered in circumstances in which many American companies would simply have closed.
Almost all job cuts during the recession years, for instance, came through attrition or early retirement plans, not layoffs. Equally, while large companies were unquestionably rigorous during the recession in passing on new competitive pressures to suppliers within what is known as the keiretsu system, long- term ties were by and large undamaged.
”Ruthless treatment of suppliers? There must have been a few cases, but I doubt many,” said Itami, the professor. ”The intent is to toughen suppliers so the keiretsu and the suppliers can both compete and keep growing.”
Many analysts say they expect Japan’s emerging management model to have a significant effect on its presence in world markets. ”Coming out of this are highly sophisticated companies that will keep Japan a manufacturing nation far longer than, say, the United States or Britain,” said Abegglen, the chairman of the Asia Advisory Service.
Others suggest that the management hybrid that has developed here could prove influential in other respects. They note, for instance, the increasing focus on corporate social responsibility among international companies.
”Global corporations are looking for a new direction,” Hori said. ”I expect to see a new age among these companies, and it’ll involve a hybrid of some kind, with some elements taken from U.S. and European companies and some from Japanese.”
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