Japanese Management: Myth or Magic an Article Review

Japanese Management: Myth or Magic

An Article Review

This paper reviews the core factors involved in the comparison of the Japanese management style compared to the American counterpart to elaborate and see whether it is fairy tale or the supernatural especially in the section of productivity, lifetime employment, quality control circle, consensus building and labour/management cooperation in order to see the factors highlighted by the author James N. Ellenberger of the article further require another point of view to make it concrete or justification.

Productivity

In this article pop scholars like Ouchi states that Japanese have increased their productivity at 400 percent the rate of the United States in the post-war years. If that rate of productivity continued in the Japan economy, Japanese would have been the global dominator by this time.

According the latest publication by The Conference Board, Canada, 2013 productivity brief –key findings, it reveals that In the United States, the growth of labor productivity (measured as GDP per hour) in 2012 showed a dramatic drop to only 0.2 percent for the year, down from 0.8 percent in 2011, Despite a slight improvement in GDP growth from 1.8 percent in 2011 to 2.2 percent in 2012, total hours growth gained more traction as it doubled from 1 percent to 2 percent.

However, the labor market improvement was offset by dismal productivity performance. The 2012 productivity growth performance is one of the slowest observed during the post-World War II period in the United States – output per hour only grew slower than 0.2 percent in 1974 (-1.0 percent) and 1982 (-0.8 percent). The slowdown in labor productivity growth is due to a combination of slow investment growth, held back by low business confidence in part related to the fiscal crisis, and few efficiency gains (as measured by total factor productivity growth at 0.2 percent)1 account for most of the productivity slowdown in the United States. While the...