Discover how Japan’s new leadership model has transformed its top companies and created a new paradigm for business success
In Resolute Japan, Waseda University’s Jusuke J. J. Ikegami and the Wharton School’s Harbir Singh and Michael Useem reveal a new leadership model that has led Japan’s corporations to make a stunning comeback. In the process, they share what they have learned from interviews with more than 100 CEOs and top executives of Japan’s largest and most influential companies, including Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, NTT, and Panasonic.
In this book, you will discover:
+ How Japan’s new leadership model has led to superior performance in the stock market and beyond;
+ The core principles and practices that characterize Japan’s new leadership model and how they differ from the old models;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model enables companies to balance multiple and often conflicting objectives, such as shareholder value and social responsibility, short-term results and long-term growth, and agility and stability;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model fosters innovation, resilience, and competitiveness in a rapidly changing global environment;
+ Why, even in an environment of macroeconomic stagnation due to economic policies at the national level, individual companies can achieve sustainable development through this new leadership model; and
+ How Japan’s new leadership model can inspire and inform business leaders in the West and elsewhere who are facing similar challenges and opportunities.
Resolute Japan offers a rare and insightful perspective on the new corporate fabric of Japan, one that is sure to both challenge and enlighten leaders around the world.
Arvustused
"This book unveils the management realities of resurgent Japanese companies through a collaborative study involving leading institutions in the U.S. and Japan. It explores various dimensions, including corporate governance, business portfolio management, business strategy, human resource management, and leadership. In today's dynamic business landscape, leaders must manage sometimes conflicting factors such as diverse stakeholder interests and short-term and long-term business results. Resolute Japan delves into how forward-thinking top executives in Japanese companies tackle these challenges and introduces an extremely thought-provoking and fresh leadership paradigm." (Reiko Akiike, Managing Director & Senior Partner, Co-Head of BCG Japan) "Large Japanese corporations are staging a remarkable comeback. With in-depth interviews of their leaders, Waseda University's JJ Ikegami and Wharton's Harbir Singh and Michael Useem identify their new leadership engine for innovation and competitiveness. Japan's business revival offers an inspiring model for company managers everywhere, and Resolute Japan compellingly tells the story." (Ram Charan, Advisor to Boards and CEOs, Business Consultant, and Coauthor, Execution and The Leadership Pipeline) "Resolute Japan did a superb job of reigniting my steadfast commitment to leading with 'strategic ambidexterity' as I ponder the future of Progressive. Through the detailed company examples, this book confirmed the direction we are on as far as both exploitation of current businesses and having the courage to explore new products and services as we think about the near-, medium-, and long-term health of the business." (Tricia Griffith, President & Chief Executive, Progressive Insurance) "Through interviews with top leaders of more than 100 of Japan's best companies, Resolute Japan reveals in concrete terms the reality of various management reforms. The book also provides companies around the world with a useful reference for business portfolio management that utilizes ambidexterity and balanced stakeholder management, which are currently the focus of much attention in Japan. The exemplary Japanese companies and leaders profiled in the book may serve as an opportunity for Japan, which has long been somewhat mired in pessimism, to objectively reevaluate its situation and give it courage." (Yuka Tanimoto, Executive Director, Managing Editor, Forbes JAPAN Web Editorial Team) "I've experienced firsthand the authors' understanding of leadership and management through classroom engagements and through my own study of their research on corporate governance, leadership, and change management. It's no surprise that their new book is grounded in academic rigor and practical insights combined with an ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and engaging way. They offer invaluable tools for current and future global leaders." (Janet Foutty, Former CEO and Chair, Deloitte Consulting, and Coauthor, Arrive and Thrive) "Resolute Japan is a must-read for anyone looking for a research-grounded book that distills some nuanced and distinguishing features of leaders who have transformed their organizations. Based on detailed interviews with more than 100 CEOs, Jusuke J. J. Ikegami, Harbir Singh, and Michael Useem provide practical and actionable advice that emerges from the experiences of this exemplary set of leaders." (Ranjay Gulati, Harvard Business School Professor and Author, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies)
Muu info
In Resolute Japan, Waseda Universitys Jusuke J. J. Ikegami and the Wharton Schools Harbir Singh and Michael Useem reveal a new leadership model that has led Japans corporations to make a stunning comeback and they share what they have learned from interviews with more than 100 top executives of Japans largest and most influential companies.
Toyota Overtakes GM as Bestselling Auto Maker
Wall Street Journal, 2022
During a congressional hearing in 1953, General Motors president Charles
Wilson, nominated as U.S. Secretary of Defense, sought to blunt questioning
from a senator implying that the CEO's business leadership could compromise
his public service, and place corporate interest ahead of national interest.
Wilson countered that his firm's welfare actually "goes with the welfare of
the country," and what "was good for our country was good for General
Motors."
There was some truth in Wilson's hyperbole. GM had emerged as America's
premier car producer in the 1930s, and by the 1950s, the company and the
country indeed seemed geared to prosper from one another's prosperity.
General Motors assembled more than half the cars sold in the United States,
making it the number one automaker in the world's number one auto market.
It came as a shock, then, when a Japanese competitor eclipsed General
Motors' American production in
2021. "Toyota Overtakes GM as Bestselling Auto
Maker," headlined the Wall Street Journal. While General Motors sold 2.2
million vehicles in the United States that year, Toyota retailed 2.3 million,
up from zero when Wilson sought to defend his integrity.
Who would have ever anticipated, then, that such a reversal of fortune would
come to America one day? Especially since Japanese companies had hit a wall
in the 1990s, in what became known as the "lost decade." Prices deflated,
shares flattened, and companies contractedfrom great growth to the great
retreat.
That Japanese expansion fell well behind other nations was doubly
surprising, since Japan had until then been so far ahead. Six of the world's
twenty largest banks were headquartered in Tokyo, Japanese investors owned
Rockefeller Center, and Sony owned consumer electronics. Harvard sociologist
Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number 1, published in 1979, became a bestseller, and
UCLA business academic William Ouchi explained why: In stark contrast to the
American way of cost-cutting and profit-taking, Japanese managers placed
their faith in consensus building, quality manufacturing, and forward
thinkingand it worked.
The Japanese model had become so compelling that it attracted its own
labels, like quantum mechanics in physics. Professor Ouchi formulated one tag
that especially appealed to observers outside Japan"Theory Z"and it emerged
as a global benchmark.
Though the Japanese way had come to be seen as a global standard for modern
capitalism in the 1980s, it caved dramatically and enduringly during the
1990s. The Tokyo stock market shifted into reverse for two decades, Sony
devices gave way to Apple, Japan's #1 moniker vanished, and thought leaders
turned elsewhere for exemplars. General Motors' Mary Barra, Apple's Steve
Jobs, and Alibaba's Jack Maand not the CEOs of Fuji, Sony, or even
Toyotacame to grace magazine covers. From 2004 to 2021, Google searches for
"Japanese management" plummeted fivefold. Of the world's fifty largest banks
by assets in 2023, just four were still headquartered in Japan (topped by
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, and Mizuhuo
Financial Group).
Note: 225 large, publicly owned companies in Japan; end of trading days,
19492024, Macrotrends
2024.
That was then, however, and in consonance with Toyota's triumph in the
United States, we have now found that many Japanese firms have been staging a
comeback. Investors in Tokyo's traded shares have signified well Japan's
reversal of fortune. After flatlining for nearly two decades, the Nikkei 225
Index quadrupled in value from 2009 to 2024, from ¥9,346 to ¥40,061. On March
22, 2024, the Nikkei Stock Average reached its highest level ever. The "winds
are blowing Japan's way," wrote the Wall Street Journal. One might "think"
that Tokyo "was the capital of a fast-growing Asian Tiger economy the way
American CEOs are flocking" there, said the Journal, including the leaders of
Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Intel, and OpenAI. Bloomberg piled on:
"Japan overcomes long-term stagnation and becomes the envy of G7 countries."
By way of a more short-term comparison, America's S&P 500 index rose 10.1%
during the first six months of 2023but Japan's Nikkei 225 Index rose 43.4
percent. Hinting at a development at the center of this book, the New York
Times reported that the Nikkei 225's "far outstripping" of the gains of the
S&P 500 could be attributed to "a significant shift in how the country's
corporations are run." It should be noted that Japan's GDP slipped behind
that of Germany near the end of
2023. But many large companiesour focus
hereand their valuations and earnings continued their comeback. By 2024, the
Nikkei Index had topped its peak of 34 years earlier on the eve of the
deluge.
Two economists wrote in mid-2023 that akin to Japan's post-war economic
miracle, over the "past decade, and with little international attention,"
Japan had "achieved a second economic miracle." The same for operating
profits of Japanese companies in the Tokyo Stock Price Index, based on some
2,000 of the largest companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Their
total operating profits more than doubled from ¥21 trillion in 2012 to ¥43.6
trillion in
2022. The Economist concluded in 2023 that Japan "is awakening
from its decades-long torpor" and global "investors are giddy about Japan
again." The Wall Street Journal declared that "Japan is the most exciting
market in the world" because "the shift toward market capitalism ought to
lead to better-run companies that are worth more." Its revival came with "the
new shareholder friendly approach of government, stock exchange and corporate
boards." Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe baldly declared: "Japan is back."
Academic observers have reached much the same conclusion. Ulrike Schaede,
professor of Japanese business at the University of California at San Diego,
wrote in 2020 that Japanese firms have reinvented "their strategies,
operations, and financial markets" while preserving "an alternative, more
balanced model of capitalism." Investment bank Morgan Stanley reported that
Japan has been undergoing "a great process of reinvention" that is "the most
interesting and underrecognized turnaround story in global equity markets."
What Is Driving This Resurgence?
To understand what has created this turnaround, we interviewed more than 100
Japanese business leaders from 2019 to
2023. To these interviews, we brought
our decades of experience as professors and researchers, and our deep
interest in global leadership styles. Jusuke J. J. Ikegami is a professor at
the Waseda Business School of Waseda University; Harbir Singh is a professor
of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; and
Michael Useem is the Director of the Leadership Center at the Wharton School
of the University of Pennsylvania.
What we discovered is that business practices at some Japanese firms are
morphing into what can be deemed a new model, retaining what has long been
conventional, and at the same time adopting what had once seemed heretical.
We share here what we have learned about this new modela new leadership
model we call Resolute Japan, or Model RJ.
Resolute Japan has come as a quiet, even hidden revolution among Japanese
enterprises, and one that is sure to both challenge and inform the West,
after decades of corporate retreat in Japan and neglect abroad. Japan's
resolute leaders, we have found, have a longer-term focus on enterprise
agendas than in the West, combined with a nearer-term discipline in their
execution. At the same time, they are riveted on a host of beneficiaries, not
just the institutional investors that have so dominated the United States.
They are doubling down on fresh talent and nimbleness in deployment. They are
remixing their portfolios to better advantage. And they are more
ambidextrous, simultaneously serving diverse constituencies and varied
agendas: shareholders and stakeholders, short-term gains and long-run goals,
and stability and agility.
In this book, we profile a host of Japanese business leaders and the
distinctive capabilities that they bring to their leadership (their given
titles are those they held at the moment of the interview). As these leaders
demonstrate, Model RJ is exemplified by the ability to
combine traditional Japanese management methods with more innovative
agendas;
redirect their governing boards from passive overseers to active
partners;
move away from seniority in their work ranks in favor of more active
talent development and deployment; and
strengthen their personal impact as enterprise executives.
And in so doing, they are transforming their enterprises and driving a
corporate comeback. In
Chapter 1, we look at this new leadership model and
what we learned from our research and interviews about them.
Chapter 2
examines the key components of the resolute way in Japan, including its
companies' human-centered leadership and balancing of stakeholder interests.
Chapter 3 identifies the engines and architects that have driven the move
from habitual to resolute leadership.
Chapter 4 identifies how company
leaders have both exploited their present advantages and successfully
explored new arenas.
Chapter 5 reports how company boardrooms have changed
along with company leaders, becoming resolute promoters themselves.
Chapter 6
characterizes the executive shift from prioritizing work security to prizing
human talent.
Chapter 7 identifies how Japanese business leaders are further
strengthening their resolute leadership for the challenges ahead. And the
final chapter identifies what companies everywhere can learn and master from
Japan's corporate comeback.
Jusuke J. J. Ikegami is a Professor and Dean of Waseda Business School. He is also Director of Waseda Blue Ocean Shift Institute and Deputy Director of Global Strategic Leadership Institute. He received his MA in International Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; an MBA from the Judge Business School, Cambridge University; and a Doctor of Business Administration from Hitotsubashi University, Japan. His working experience includes Boston Consulting Group, Mars Japan, Director of New Business Development for Softbank EC Holdings, Chief Venture Capitalist at Nissay Capital, one of the largest institutional investors in Japan, and independent director at Toyo Inc. SC Holdings. Ikegami has chaired and served on various committees of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. He is the author of Situational Strategy and editor and co-author of Inbound Business Strategy, Inbound Renaissance, and Blue Ocean Strategy in Japan. Harbir Singh is the Mack Professor of Management, co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, and faculty director of the Huntsman Program for International Studies and Business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He served as vice dean for Global Initiatives at the school. He focuses on the development of capabilities and of sustainable competitive advantage, and his interests in research and teaching lie in strategic leadership, growth and innovation via alliances and acquisitions, and the evolution of competitive strategy. Singh is the author of books on strategy and leadership in a global setting, including The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management,and Fortune Makers: The Leaders Creating China's Great Global Companies. He teaches and directs customized programs for companies and associations around the world. He has been a visiting faculty member at London Business School, Bocconi University in Milan, and the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He is a founding faculty member of the Indian School of Business. Michael Useem is Faculty Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management and McNulty Leadership Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He works on leadership development, general management, and corporate governance with companies and organizations in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. He is the author of The Leader's Checklist, The Edge: How Ten CEOs Learned to Lead, The Leadership Moment, Executive Defense, Investor Capitalism, Leading Up, and The Go Point. Useem is also co-author and co-editor of Learning from Catastrophes and co-author of The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management; Leadership Dispatches: Chile's Extraordinary Comeback from Disaster; Boards That Lead; The Strategic Leader's Roadmap; Fortune Makers: The Leaders Creating China's Great Global Companies;and Mastering Catastrophic Risk: How Companies Are Coping with Disruption.
