Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior

Written by an experienced Japanese manager and an American scholar of organizational behavior, this book presents a series of apparent contradictions in Japanese business conduct. The authors show why behavior that appears inconsistent to the Westerner is perfectly congruous to the Japanese way of framing the context of the situation or using a particular model to guide behavior. The book is organized around six puzzles about Japanese business behavior that perplex outsiders. The authors unravel each puzzle in a systematic way to demonstrate why, from the Japanese perspective, the behavior is in fact appropriate and consistent. For each puzzle, the authors generate a set of specific insights that can be used in everyday business practice.