Japanese Management Techniques

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, , language: English, abstract: Japanese Management Techniques

Alzadjali, B. (2009)

2 - 10

There is no doubt that every person from all walks of life is indeed using a

Japanese product or technology in his daily life, whether it is cars, pens or paper. Indeed,

Japan provided the world with many successful global companies and brands such as

Sony, Fujitsu, HP and Toyota. These global Japanese brands did not only affect Japanese

economy, it also affected the world economy and trade. These industrial revolutions put

Japan on one of the six big industrial countries alongside the United States, United

Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy. It is not the manufacturing elements that made

Japan reach that, but there is also a great management system. The success of their

approaches was not by adopting a fixed accounting system or by Activity-based costing

ABC, but by using systematic flexible systems (Patel and Russell 1994, pp.64-65).

In the last 50 years, Japan brought to the world a successful management style starting

with a government model in the early 1950s, to a corporate model in the 1980s (Porter et

al. 2002; Whitehill 1991). The root of the modern Japanese management goes back to

post Second World War, when Japan started its economic recovery. Japan started a

phenomenal revolution management system (Porter et al. 2002; Whitehill 1991). Towards

the 1970s, research showed that the United States and some European countries used a

similar system (Hayashi 2002). In 1980s the time came to challenge just how these

systems would work out under the Japanese corporate management systems.

Professor William Ouchi's book, about the Japanese management system entitled Theory

Z: how American business can meet the Japanese challenge (England 1983; Hayashi

2002). The book became a standard management system practice in the United States for

more than 20 years. During the last century, there were many theories which appeared on

the table based on Japanese model from theory X to Z. However, the American

companies did not found any productivity value on this model system and the theory Z

management application became unlikely used among American companies and

businessmen (England 1983; Whitehill 1991; Jeremiah J, 1992) perhaps because of

differences in the environment or the culture. However, the Japanese culture has played

an important role in the Japanese management system. In fact, the Japanese firm

management system was based on two functions; columns economy and culture.