Trust and Antitrust in Cross-cultural Alliances: Cross-cultural Management Challenges in Japan

We are going to win and the industrial West is going to lose, there’s not much you can do about it because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves. Your firms are built on the Taylor model. Even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while the workers wield the screwdrivers, you’re convinced deep down that this is the right way to run a business. For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses and into the heads of the labourers. We are beyond the Taylor model. Business, as we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous, our environment so increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that our continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence.1