This book focuses on various business practices to manage ailing companies during economic depression or in the aftermath of man-made and natural disasters. The methods implemented by various Japanese enterprises, such as Japan Air Line, Tokyo Electricity Company, Nissan and Toyota, to overcome their challenges are elaborated in this book. The scope of the book covers: restructuring under government financial support; private turnaround management of huge conglomerates; reorganization of business domains; accounting for risk management, and robust supply chain management in the aftermath of disasters.

Traditionally, innovation has been considered difficult to manage, as it occurs through contingent discoveries and inventions. For effective innovation management, it is necessary to determine what provides new value to customers and achieve this new value efficiently, while solving the technical problems. This book explores how innovation management for industrial revitalization and activation are conducted in Japanese companies. 'Innovation' has diverse definitions, but the editors of this book have adopted the one proposed by J A Schumpeter. The features of innovation management in Japanese companies are considered systematically in the book. Positive analyses using questionnaires and innovation management strategy in individual industries and companies is also explored in detail.

This book explores the challenges faced by the Japanese economy and the Japanese banking industry following the financial crisis that emerged around the turn of the last millennium. The author explores how the Japanese financial crisis of the late 1990s engendered huge restructuring efforts in the banking industry, which eventually led to even more sweeping changes of the economic system and long-term deflation in the 2000s. The discussion begins with an overview of the unconventional monetary policy launched by the Bank of Japan at this time, while banking administrative policies maintained their strict code of governance. The author describes how, just as recovery seemed possible, the twin disasters of the Lehman shock and the Great East Japan Earthquake buffeted the recovering economy, and pushed Japan again into deflation. The book also looks to the very recent past, with the sudden advent of Abenomics in 2013, with its three-pronged approach, which was intended to break the deflationary mindset. Finally, the author projects what the future of the banking industry in Japan might encompass, as looming demographic changes gradually threaten both the economy and the banking industry.

Management Crisis and Business Revolution describes the enormous gap between business theories on the one hand, and the realities of the workplace and uncertainties of the marketplace on the other. In place of reasoned management and disciplined organization John Harte depicts daily disorder, vagueness, and confusion; instead of the logical processes of classroom case histories with rational solutions. He provides tales of an abundance of irrational judgments, personal foibles, and business follies. Once a top operational manager with multinational organizations, Harte applies his hands-on knowledge of the business world to a realistic examination of workplace conditions. He describes methodically how to handle human limitations in the average business enterprise, as well as how to develop management strengths.The author observed superior and inferior management firsthand, and therefore witnessed the painful demise of many companies?some of which, in his opinion, could have been saved. With thirty years' experience to draw on, he analyzes why so many businesses and products fail, while others succeed. He examines the amazing progress of Japan and other Pacific Asian countries; explains the decline of German, Canadian, British, and French management practices; and provides strategies for the marketplace.The business sectors described in this all-encompassing book include: high-technology, fast-moving packaged consumer goods like detergents; manufacturing and retailing consumer durables like furniture and appliances; soft goods; fashion products; service sector industries; manufacturing, wholesaling, and retail trade; and a whole range of new service industries. Harte stresses that while management and trade are timeless, dedication in the West has declined. The challenge is how to manage change by innovating, and replacing senile customs, systems, and institutions with more progressive ones suited to the new business environment. This unusually tough

This book is invaluable for students and researchers studying the economies of Japan and other East Asian countries as well as all those interested in patterns of boom and recession worldwide.

Between 2002 and 2008, Japan's economy saw constant expansion, a record among the world's advanced economies and Japan's longest period of economic growth since World War II. This remarkable achievement came about because of a transformation of Japanese business practices. This transformation was guided by strategies that enabled Japan's leading corporations, previously diversified to an exceptionally high degree, to become leaner, more nimble, and more competitive at home and in the global economy. In Choose and Focus, the first in-depth account of this strategic inflection point in Japanese business, Ulrike Schaede argues that the emerging practices and attitudes have created a New Japan. Drawing on profiles of several corporations, including Panasonic, Takeda and Astellas, Softbank, kakaku.com, and SBI E*Trade, Schaede explains how the fundamental principles of Japan's economy have been overturned. "Choose and focus" strategies, whereby corporations concentrate on core areas and spin off unrelated businesses, have completely altered the strategic logic of Japan's previous industrial architecture. These surprisingly aggressive moves, Schaede finds, have created new market opportunities for start-up enterprises and foreign investors, as well as a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that have shaken Japanese companies out of complacency. Unlike the advances made by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s, the current transformation is taking root in component and materials industries rather than in consumer products. Because of the relative obscurity of the changes and the overshadowing story of China's ascent, the Japanese corporate revolution has gone largely unnoticed among Western observers. Choose and Focus is required reading for anyone doing business in Japan or trying to understand how contemporary Japanese business works and how Japanese corporations have reinvented themselves to face the challenges—and realize the opportunities—of the 21st century.

In this study the views of Japan's leading experts on the globalization of Japanese business, management and industrial relations explain how traditional Japanese-style management is responding to the changes following the collapse of the bubble economy. The areas covered include the changes made in management itself inside Japan and also how it is adapting itself when transferred overseas. The book demonstrates how management is moving towards a hybrid type in overseas operations and towards a western-style in Japan, where contractual principles are beginning to be given greater weight.