Passage 7

In 1985 when a Japan Air Lines (JAL) jet crashed, its president, Yasumo to Takagi, called each victim’ s family to apologize, and then promptly resigned. And in 1987, when a subsidiary of Toshiba sold sensitive military technology to the former Soviet Union, the chairman of Toshiba gave up his post.

These executive actions, which Toshiba calls “the highest form of apology, ” may seem bizarre to US managers. No one at Boeing resigned after the JAL crash, which may have been caused by a faulty Boeing repair.

The difference between the two business cultures centers around different definitions of delegation. While US executives give both responsibility and authority to their employees, Japanese executives delegate only authority— the responsibility is still theirs. Although the subsidiary that sold the sensitive technology to the Soviets had its own management, the Toshiba top executives said they “must take personal responsibility for not creating an atmosphere throughout the Toshiba group that would make such activity unthinkable, even in an independently run subsidiary. ”

Such acceptance of community responsibility is not unique to businesses in Japan. School principals in Japan have resigned when their students committed major crimes after school hours. Even if they do not quit, Japanese executives will often accept primary responsibility in other ways, such as taking the first pay cut when a company gets into financial trouble. Such personal sacrifices, even if they are largely symbolic, help to create the sense of community and employee loyalty that is crucial to the Japanese way of doing business.

Harvard Business School professor George Lodge calls the ritual acceptance of blame “almost a feudal way of purging the community of dishonor, ” and to some in the United States, such resignations look cowardly. However, in an era in which both business and governmental leaders seem particularly good at evading responsibility, many US managers would probably welcome an infusion of the Japanese sense of responsibility. If, for instance, US automobile company executives offered to reduce their own salaries before they asked their workers to take pay cuts, negotiations would probably take on a very different character.