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Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
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Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
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What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
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Groupthink
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Critical Thinking: Structured Reasoning
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For decades, the prevailing narrative surrounding the Japanese economy has been one of stagnation. But according to Ulrike Schaede, this story is incomplete. She argues the so-called “lost decades” were a period of profound reinvention for Japan’s leading companies, a transformation that is now reshaping the global economy.
As a Professor of Japanese Business at UC San Diego and author of the book, The Business Reinvention of Japan: How to Make Sense of the New Japan and Why It Matters, Schaede has identified a strategic pivot where premier Japanese firms became indispensable global suppliers of high-tech materials and components—a concept she calls the “Japan inside” strategy. This was achieved through a unique approach termed “Caring Capitalism,” which balances economic growth with social stability.
Following her seminar in Düsseldorf, “The Business Reinvention of Japan: Lessons for Europe,” GLOBIS Europe sat down with Professor Schaede to discuss this quiet transformation, how Japanese firms now dominate critical links in the global supply chain, and what lessons this holds for business leaders worldwide.
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Tell Us About Yourself
Ulrike Schaede: I’m Ulrike Schaede. I’m a professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego, at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. I studied Japan and have dedicated my entire research career to the study of Japanese business and economy.
I actually grew up in Germany, and I got into Japan when Japan was in the roaring bubble economy. In the early 2000s, I got interested in excellent Japanese companies because we had so many bad analyses like “Japan is down,” “the Ice age,” and “the lost decades,” etc., and I got interested in companies that were doing exceedingly well in those hard times.
One of the main findings of this research is that the three “lost decades” were not lost, or at least not all lost. In fact, for the leading companies in Japan, those years were a period of transformation, and the results are beginning to show now. We see it in the stock market, we see it in Japan’s role in the global economy. So it’s time to take another fresh look at Japanese business.
What is “Caring Capitalism?”
Schaede: I was looking for a word that describes a different type of capitalism from what we see in the United States, which has become sort of a global standard where profit above everything is what matters, and shareholder value is all that matters. There’s a dog-eat-dog quality to that, and we all know that America is hurting now. And so there’s a search for alternatives.
Without a major design just for what it is, I believe Japan has found an alternative path. This alternative is a system of capitalism that is somehow able to balance economic growth with social stability, technological progress with sustainability, and also the arrival of technology with human well-being.
I think some of that has gotten lost in the U.S. and is beginning to get lost elsewhere, including in Japan. And so this is a moment to look at what Japan and Japanese businesses are doing and take a new lens to understand why Japan has been moving so slowly, which is something that it is often accused of.
Is Japan Stagnant? Or Is It Steadily Advancing with Social Stability?
Schaede: The first decade after the bubble burst in the 1990s was, in fact, a really difficult time in Japan. The reaction to that crisis was that companies were held back in the speed at which they could reform. It wasn’t that there was one person who did that; it was that the law was such that it was difficult to lay people off, similar to Europe, but a little bit different in the Japanese setting.
There was also a reputation effect. Companies that dismissed people would face the challenge of possibly experiencing a consumer backlash. So companies were treading very carefully, and the transformation that was needed took a lot of time.
I remember vividly in those years that the public outcry about corporate behavior was not that they were slow; it was that they were hiring temporary workers instead of lifetime employees.
The public wanted slow. They wanted lifetime employment to be preserved through these hard times. The hard times actually were kind of over in the early 2000s, and there was a moment for these, what I call the front-runners, to start changing.
There’s another reason why it took a lot of time. These companies were very large and complex, and even in the United States, it took IBM ten years to pivot. So for Hitachi to take ten years to pivot is just very normal. Right now, from an American perspective, this took a very long time. There were all kinds of American pundits who claimed that Japan was stagnant and lost.
My response to that is that slow does not mean stagnant. It means steady. We have a saying for that, that steady just takes longer. It’s a trade-off. Slow is the price that Japan was willing to pay to preserve social stability during a period of great transformation.
Which Japanese Companies Are Front-Runners, and What Makes Them Stand Out?
Schaede: The way I designed that research project that I’m currently writing about, I had a strong focus on manufacturing simply because that made it easier to compare data. There are front-runners in non-manufacturing industries, but allow me to talk about manufacturing for a moment, then maybe we can go to the non-manufacturing side.
Japan has long had core competencies in assembly, the Toyota Production System, and the whole theory that goes behind that. In Japan, it is called monozukuri, the ability to make very complex things at a very high level of quality and yield.
The other advantage that plays into what I observe is Japan’s leadership in the chemical industry, especially as it comes to materials and very complex and difficult chemical solutions needed for manufacturing.
What I see right now is that there are a lot of Japanese companies that have very high global market shares in input materials, for example, in semiconductor production, things that you would never know about unless you’re a semiconductor expert. You might not know about photoresist or the mask that goes into the machine, or the very complicated material that is needed to package the semiconductor once it’s produced and before it can actually function.
At these ends of semiconductor production, there are a number of Japanese chemical companies that have dominant global market shares, and they get better and they keep getting better and better. As a result of that, there are now trade dependencies within Northeast Asia, because Japan makes the materials that then go to Taiwan and South Korea for part production, which goes to China for end-product, consumer end-product assembly, and is then sold in the United States. So, chemistry, chemicals, and materials are very good examples of what I’m talking about, but they’re not the only ones. Hitachi is an outstanding example in the construction machinery industry. I don’t know whether they will be successful in the end or not, but what they’re doing is very interesting. They’re doing a real pivot away from a large conglomerate that was doing everything from rice cookers to nuclear power plants, towards a smart city connector. I don’t have a good word for it, but there’s something about smart city and energy and communication and transportation, and there’s a new sort of focus and vision around being that one thing.
And so they’ve exited rice cookers and hard disk drives and all of that, and they have instead pivoted into more leadership in the connectivity of it all. And with their Lumada system, and then also the trains, of course, are very important for smart city transportation and connectivity in terms of communication, IoT, industry 4.0, and that sort of thing.
How Did Japan Pivot from Invisible to Impactful in End Products?
Schaede: What’s interesting about this pivot is that it’s difficult to see. It used to be that Japan was quite visible. You would walk into somebody’s living room and see products from Sony or Panasonic. Today, you walk into somebody’s living room, and most of the appliances are no longer Japanese. Many people conclude that this means Japan has lost it. I am saying it took Panasonic and Sony way too long to get out of the living room and pivot upstream, where they are now making things that power the end products. I call that the Japan-inside pivot.
If you buy a Windows computer, it sometimes has a little sticker on it that reads “Intel inside.” There is no sticker that says “Japan inside” on your cell phone, your car, your thermostat, your toothbrush, your microwave, yet all of these things would actually not work without some Japanese input technology, production machinery, or material to bond the semiconductor.
What Can Global Companies Learn from Japan?
Schaede: There’s something I call the Mainoumi strategy, which refers to a sumo wrestler of the early ’90s who was known as the department store of techniques.
So there’s nothing Japanese about the Mainoumi strategy. I just labeled it after a Japanese sumo wrestler because I was studying Japan. The larger implication of the strategy is that as countries develop and become technology leaders, they will have to move upstream or downstream because the arrival of, in the case of Japan, the arrival of South Korea and Taiwan, and then China, in the assembly space of the global value chain means there is no more profit to be made there.
And that’s true for German companies, Dutch companies, and Swiss companies all the same. And indeed, we see that. Some of us may remember Philips in the Netherlands as a company that made bulbs and extension cords and kitchen utensils, and now they do medical instruments and, you know, very complicated things.
This pivot towards the high-tech, difficult-to-make, difficult-to-copy part of the value chain, I think, is something that we see in Europe as well. The learning there might just be that it takes time to do that if you want to do it the right way. The American cowboy approach would be to let a company go bankrupt and let a startup fill that gap. But that’s wasteful in so many ways.
The “think piece” here is how we can design a new system of capitalism that allows companies to do this in a methodical, deliberate way that protects the company’s intellectual property and assets, and allows the company to switch into becoming a new type of competitor.
I think Europe actually has a little bit of that already, with the labor protection being very strong here. Sometimes, what I hear in Europe is that because our labor protection is so strong, we can’t do anything. I think that’s not quite the right attitude. You can pivot; you just have to take your employees with you and design a new system around where to put that talent.
So I would say there’s a minor pivot in all companies, and maybe the Japanese experience and the European experience are closer than we might think.
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