Super Genba: Ten Things Japanese Companies Must Do to Gain Global Competitiveness

Nearly a quarter century ago, Japanese industry went into a tailspin. The Nikkei now trades roughly where it did in November 1984 when the Dow was at 1,200 and at a fifth of its peak at the close of 1989. In what is the greatest stock market collapse in history, Japanese equity markets have been wiped out. Once-great Japanese export powerhouses that led their industries in innovation are today awash in losses and stagger under collapses of market share as innovators from elsewhere pass them by. Many have earnings that have not recovered R&D expenses in decades. Whole families of products that Japan once dominated like video and still cameras, music players, game consoles, and cell phones have dissolved into non-Japanese products like Apple’s iPhone, leaving Japanese producers with nothing to sell in foreign markets and, more of a problem, no one to whom to sell. Japanese suppliers routinely lose to faster-moving competitors whose products may not be as good. Often, Japanese companies discover markets that their better-informed foreign competitors identified years before and have been exploiting profitably for some time. People talk about Japan’s lost generation. Author Francis McInerney has spent 35 years building and selling his own business and advising some of the biggest companies in the world on how to profit the same way he did. In his view, Japan’s lost generation could have easily been avoided with a few simple management changes. Super Genba is about those changes, the ten steps Japanese managers must take to bring Japan back to global leadership. Japanese companies can put these ten steps to work immediately to get to the top in global markets.