In contrast to the United States, where he informs us, “there have been many cases of executives being arrested for economic crimes,” in Japan there is little need to worry about dishonesty “because of our closed-circle society.”Ībout the only fault Morita can find with Japan is that the Japanese have been slow in dismantling trade barriers. executives who vote themselves huge bonuses and quotes himself telling Harvard students to choose engineering over law because there is too much litigation and too little production in America today. As to why the Japanese have been able to succeed where Americans have failed, Morita stresses the importance of motivating workers, not just with high salaries but with membership in a warm, familylike company organization. Morita also points out that Japanese electronics companies are manufacturing TV sets in the United States at a time when American makers have just about stopped doing so. trade deficit on the one hand, and import billions of dollars worth of Japanese goods to sell under American brands on the other. Morita pokes fun at Americans who blame Japan for the U.S. Fuji, his Toyota sports car, his Lincoln Continental with its personalized license plate that he keeps in the United States where he has two apartments, one in New York and another in Hawaii.įor all the self-advertising, and for every time Morita finishes an anecdote with “and I was right,” there are many sections of the book that will strike a sympathetic chord with Americans critical of their business leaders. Then there is the blue Mercedes he takes to his chalet near Mt. Trade Representative Bill Brock, and so on all the way down to an unidentified member of the Rothschild family, whom he chastised for believing that he, the chairman of the Sony corporation, might be wealthy.īut just in case the reader may think Morita is poor, there are several references to the U.S.-built corporate jet and the French helicopter at Morita’s disposal. Most of the remaining 250 pages, however, consist of recollections of what the author told President Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, ex-U.S. Reona (Leo) Esaki, a senior researcher at Sony, invented the diode for which he later won a Nobel Prize in physics. It was in those early days when Sony was attempting to commercialize the transistor, that Dr. The magnitude of Sony’s later successes in selling high-quality home appliances is all the more impressive when one finds out that among Sony’s first products was a primitive heating pad, a rice cooker that did not work, and a tape recorder that used paper tapes because quality plastic was unavailable. One of these is a 50-page section devoted to Sony’s early days.
But “Made in Japan” is not without redeeming passages.
0 kommentar(er)
