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Executive Overview For more than two decades Japan has ranked as a market of unusual complexity. Japan's distribution system permanently baffles; negotiation is as if with alien beings; its long-term approach to business disconcerts; choosing market intermediaries is an art in itself, while securing a business foothold and market presence entails massive costs. Prescriptions for how to do business with Japan are largely the same that dominated Western thinking in the 1980s, as if Japan has not moved on. If our company had applied the conventional thinking, our strategy for entering the Japanese market would have floundered. But we refused to follow the standard wisdom. We proceeded on the assumption that our best chance lay in a novel approach: we would co-create the market with our Japanese business partners through a synergistic process of knowledge sharing. In its planning and implementation our strategy turned on its head much accepted marketing wisdom. Perhaps most strikingly we learned that it is po...

Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book The Knowledge Creating Company is one of the most influential in the field of knowledge management. The famous SECI Model, representing the four modes of knowledge creation (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) seems to have been accepted by the knowledge management community as universally valid in conception and in application. This paper argues that the model must be seen first and foremost as a product of the environment from which it emerged, namely Japan. It is contended that each of the four modes can only be understood with reference to their embeddedness in Japanese social and organizational culture and related value systems. Thus the model should be used with caution. It should be seen as a map rather than a model; or perhaps as a special kind of mirror, which allows us to see ourselves and our knowledge management practices in new ways for directing change. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.