Failing Like Japan
By Bill Mann
November 11, 2008
In 1990 I spent a heady summer living in a very rural part of Japan. It was an incredible time to be there, the dawning of the age of Japanese hegemony. Japanese land, which comprised less than .1% of the world, was being valued at an estimated US$20 trillion dollars, or 20% of the world's wealth. Business leaders the world round were flooding into Japan to study the "Japanese Economic Miracle," and sought to implement its keiretsu and zaibatsu corporate structures.
We were in the middle of nowhere, but all around our little town, land was being chewed up to build golf courses, which offered memberships primarily to businessmen from Okayama and Osaka (both of which were a multi-hour ferry/train ride away). The cost of membership ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was a waiting list.
It didn't last.
The trouble with the Japanese miracle was that its basis wasn't management superiority -- though the country had some of the most admired companies in the world, including Toyota (NYSE: TM) and Sony (NYSE: SNE). Rather, the miracle in Japan was based upon over-loaning from the government to industrial conglomerates, which led, inevitably, to a bubble.
More at link...
http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...g+like+japan&vstest=search_042607_linkdefault
By Bill Mann
November 11, 2008
In 1990 I spent a heady summer living in a very rural part of Japan. It was an incredible time to be there, the dawning of the age of Japanese hegemony. Japanese land, which comprised less than .1% of the world, was being valued at an estimated US$20 trillion dollars, or 20% of the world's wealth. Business leaders the world round were flooding into Japan to study the "Japanese Economic Miracle," and sought to implement its keiretsu and zaibatsu corporate structures.
We were in the middle of nowhere, but all around our little town, land was being chewed up to build golf courses, which offered memberships primarily to businessmen from Okayama and Osaka (both of which were a multi-hour ferry/train ride away). The cost of membership ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was a waiting list.
It didn't last.
The trouble with the Japanese miracle was that its basis wasn't management superiority -- though the country had some of the most admired companies in the world, including Toyota (NYSE: TM) and Sony (NYSE: SNE). Rather, the miracle in Japan was based upon over-loaning from the government to industrial conglomerates, which led, inevitably, to a bubble.
More at link...
http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...g+like+japan&vstest=search_042607_linkdefault