Working in a company that is more than a hundred years old in Japan really gives you an idea about their importance of taking the long term view.
I’ve seen business decisions made today because of the possibility of future business 50 years (!) from now. Companies in Japan have to work well with the other companies that they deal with, and in a small country like Japan, word gets around. If you treat another company poorly, other companies can’t help but notice.
Another student told me about a golf tournament that is sponsored by one of our customers. Since they are the customer, our company is obliged to send a president or vice president twice a year to participate. I off-handedly asked how long that has been going on… it sounded like a pain to send executives so often to keep a customer happy. My student thought about my question for a little while, and then he said that the tournament started about 40 years ago. Wow!
Things in Japan change very slowly. The inertia of things here make it far more common to just do things the same as last year, because it seemed to work fine then and why shake it up? You see it with company management styles, holidays, and consumer products. Even the fax machine is still a trusted business tool here.
Today I had to smile when I read that Sony decided to stop making Betamax video cassette tapes. Betamax? Tapes? It’s hard to believe that they still have been producing these. How many people do you know that use Betamax tapes? Or even VHS tapes? The article went on to say that they would be phasing out the tapes slowly, with the tapes finally stopping production in March of next year. Even stopping production is a slow, gradual process.
This kind of phenomenon is fascinating to see, especially after working at fast-moving nimble companies in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com bubble. Now I feel like I’m working on the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
