Busn427

Panasonic and Japan’s Changing Culture

Summary

Based on the article, Panasonic’s company experienced dramatic economic changes since 1920 both good and bad. Japanese businesses were extremely confident to offer employees guaranteed lifetime employment with Panasonic being one of the businesses as a part of their traditional way of doing business. Guaranteed is a strong word to use especially in a business setting. According to dictionary.com guaranteed is “a promise or assurance, especially one in writing, that something is of specified quality, content, benefit, etc or that it will perform satisfactorily for a given length of time (www.dictionary.com, 2010)”. The good thing is Panasonic was one of the last companies to turn its back on the Japanese tradition. The bad thing is Panasonic’s business leaders didn’t have a good business strategy in place to think they could offer employees guaranteed lifetime employment to all employees along with other Japanese business owners. Throughout the years Panasonic had to reevaluate to the traditional way of doing business as promised to tenured employees to maintain a profit to the business. As the end result there wasn’t good business planning strategies in the Japanese culture which in the end caused businesses such as Panasonic to have major layoffs.

Questions

1. What were the triggers of cultural change in Japan during the 1990s? How is cultural change starting to affect traditional values in Japan?

Answer: The trigger of cultural change in Japan during the 1990s is when workers decided they did not want to be tied down to a company for life to be a salary man. The cultural changes started to affect the Japanese traditional ways of doing business and had to layoff older workers and effectively abandon employment guarantees.

2. How might Japan’s changing culture influence the way Japanese businesses operate in the future? What are the potential implications of such changes for the Japanese economy?

Answer:...