Читать книгу Business Guide to Japan - Boye Lafayette De Mente - Страница 15

MANAGEMENT BY INTUITION

GIVEN THE cultural conditioning that results in the Japanese often assigning more importance to feeling than to reasoning, it is not surprising that such things as haragei, or the “art of the belly,” and ishin denshin, or “heart-toheart communication,” play a key role in Japanese management. But on the more refined levels of management in Japan one encounters the ultimate in “managing by intuition.”

The Japanese word used to express the idea of managing by intuition is kongen (kone-gane), which means “root” or “source” in relation to the universe—and may sound like pretty heav y stuff to foreigners who have MBAs instead of MBBs (Masters of Business Buddhism).

Kongen refers to the energy-wisdom that, in Buddhist thought, fuels the universe. According to Buddhist belief, it is accessible to man through meditation, which allows one to tap into the stream of wisdom and energy and make use of it.

Japan’s best-known proponent of kongen was the legendary Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the Matsushita empire (National, Panasonic, etc.). Matsushita attributed his extraordinary success to regularly tapping into the intelligence of the universe and decreed that all Matsushita managers would spend a part of their work period tuned in to the universal mind.

While Matsushita was the most prominent modern-day practitioner of managing by intuitive intelligence, it is the key to the management success of all Japanese companies—although I am tempted to label it “Japanese cultural intelligence,” since it appears inseparable from the Japanese mind-set and traditional social system.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, many Japanese companies made an attempt to convert their management system to the American paradigm. All of the attempts failed, some of them with tragic results, forcing the companies to go back to the traditional Japanese ways of managing a company. Some of them failed entirely and disappeared.

Many Japanese companies then attempted to follow in Matsushita’s footsteps, but what they were doing, regardless of how it was labeled, was following the traditional Japanese way of organizing and treating people and getting an awful lot out of them in the process.

In any event, when the foreigner in Japan runs up against something he thinks doesn’t make logical sense, he has probably had an encounter with kongen. If he is inspired to go out and buy himself a cushion to meditate on, he may learn something.