Demystifying Japanese management practices.

In the past few years, many "experts" on Japanese management have isolated distinctive practices that seemingly account for Japan's remarkable economic success. The often-unstated implications of such analyses are that American companies might do well to adopt some Japanese techniques. In this article, however, an American who occupies an unusual position as a senior executive with a Japanese company in Japan exposes a different side of the vaunted Japanese style of management. There are drawbacks as well as advantages to such well-known practices as consensus management and lifetime employment. Indeed, Japanese managers are as eager to learn from the West as western managers are to learn from Japan. INSET: The cultural underpinnings of Japanese management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]