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Unlike big business in the United States, business in Japan is not in an antagonistic relationship with the government. Unlike the British government in Japan, it is not overburdened by the problems of the sleeper state-owned enterprises. It is more preoccupied with issues of structural change in industry.
The emergence and framing of management as a science, as a field of scientific research, was partly a response to the needs of big business, and partly an attempt to take advantage of the technology created during the Industrial Revolution, and partly the achievement of a small group, a handful of inquisitive people with a burning desire to discover the most efficient ways of doing work.
In Japan, as the Japanese themselves say, there is only one wealth: the people. It is by relying on them that the country’s ruling circles expect to win the hurdle race. The present book, in our opinion, can give a well-known insight into how Japanese big business tries to do this. Written in the genre of popular science essays, the book certainly does not pretend to cover all sides of this complex process. At the same time, the reader will find in it a lot of information about the motivational forces of the Japanese worker, about personnel management in production, about quality groups. Special chapters of the book are devoted to the role of Japanese managers in personnel management, their training and evaluation.
To imagine the role of the sphere of personal consumption in Japan, it is enough to take into account the fact that consumer spending in this country accounts for 53-55% of the volume of gross national product, and taking into account the social and cultural funds – about 65%. The reserves hidden in this sphere are regarded by Japanese specialists as an important pledge of further economic growth of the country, as a necessary condition for the realization of an optimistic forecast that promises the Japanese serious successes in the field of scientific and technological progress. Japanese entrepreneurs have done everything to boost demand for personal consumption goods, thereby making consumers themselves work for big business. The facts prove that they have really succeeded in this matter. But one very important detail should be kept in mind: the Japanese model of encouraging consumer demand has produced very sophisticated consumers, and it has put a mark on the whole system of relations between them and the producers.
However, the purpose of this preface is not at all to enumerate all the cases in which its author’s point of view does not coincide with that of the book’s authors. The Soviet reader will easily discover them himself and give them an independent assessment. But what seems most desirable is to inform the reader of the latest factual material, which the authors of the book, completing their work in about the middle of 1974, of course, could not have, but which in the most recent years has been produced in abundance by the rapid development of events in the world of oil and without which the idea of the largest business today would be incomplete.
Almost nothing they have done in the past or will yet do in the future can contribute to their popularity. At a time when the expression big business has become almost a swear word, the oil industry is not only big, but the biggest business.
