Japanese firms take "people power" to a new level

Citation

(2001), "Japanese firms take "people power" to a new level", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 5 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2001.26705cab.008

Japanese firms take "people power" to a new level

Japanese firms take "people power" to a new level

A number of Japanese companies have earned worldwide admiration for developing and refining world-class manufacturing techniques. At the same time, many have also gained reputations as "stodgy" organizations – bound up in autocratic systems that stifle individual creativity.

However, some leading Japanese firms – including Toyota Motor Co. – have been shaping a new "human-based" business model that stimulates creativity and innovation and supports efforts to achieve agility – the ability to rapidly react to all kinds of change.

A key underlying ingredient is known as "Ba" – a cultural framework that harnesses the "shared feeling between people that develops when they share human space", explains Jinichiro Nakane and Scott Meza, authors of an overview article on the topic in a recent issue of Target magazine, the quarterly journal of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME).

Simply put, Ba is "an advancement in the power of people", they explain."Well-honed, Ba extends beyond the structured teams of Western companies or the group consensus methods of Japanese ones. The essence of Ba is spontaneous group formation and activity. Ba groups wholly or partially self-organize to accomplish a mission."

Within Toyota, for example, the corporate culture promotes the existence of an informal organization in addition to the company's traditional hierarchical structure. Today's informal organization makes it very different from most other Japanese companies. It is unusually free, unstructured and flexible. Temporary project teams and task forces "just form", organized by employees of any formal rank, open to anyone who wants to join", observes Nakane, a professor at Waseda University, Tokyo, and Meza, a graduate student at that university.

"No one carries any baggage from the formal organization into a project team – where every member is equal", they point out. As a result, there are no procedural "sacred cows" and anything that inhibits the fast flow of a value stream can be challenged.

"The essence of human Ba", the Target article points out, "is a cooperative, collaborative attitude, a willingness to collectively get things done and to jointly discover and develop ways of doing them – creativity, not stultifying conformity". As a result, the whole becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

Conversely, the absence of Ba is "like watching an all-star team in any sport play together the first time. Individually, each one may be the best, but if thrown together with no time to practice, communicate, and understand each other's weaknesses, more often than not the outcome is a performance that does not live up to its potential."

Since it is a cultural phenomenon, Nakane and Meza emphasize, management cannot "order" people to have Ba. However, management can stimulate the conditions that allow it to blossom.

Elements of a Ba culture include: common ownership of information (no secrets), willingness on the part of management to trust employees, and company policies that minimize the functional "silo" syndrome – curbing the ability of functional specialists to stymie improvement initiatives. It also requires clear direction from the top.

Management, the authors note, also must ensure that all employees understand the company strategy: "When they clearly understand a strategy, Ba groups will form spontaneously to support it". AME is a volunteer-run organization for manufacturing executives, academics, and others interested in improving the performance and competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Headquartered in Wheeling, IL, its workshops, seminars, conferences, publications, and video materials help members keep abreast of leading-edge techniques and trends in operations and management. For more information about AME, visit its Web site at: www.ame.org