Haruka Nishimatsu

There was an amazing interview on CNN recently with Haruka Nishimatsu, the CEO of JAL, Japan Airlines. The interview could have been a primer on how to be an ethical CEO who cares about his people and his company more than he cares about his own compensation. According to the report, when JAL slashed jobs and asked older employees to retire early, Nishimatsu cut every single one of his corporate perks, and then for three years running slashed his own pay. In 2007, he made about $90,000 U.S., less than what his pilots earn. In Japan, says Nishimatsu, there’s less of a pay gap between the top and the bottom. “We in Japan learned during the bubble economy that businesses who pursue money first fail. The business world has lost sight of this basic tenet of business ethics.”  Read the rest of this post

In the 1950′s, Solomon Asch, conducted a series of experiments designed to understand the phenomenon we know as conformity. In his experiments, a group of participants were seated around a table and asked to examine a series of vertical lines. They were then asked to tell the group which vertical line, A, B, or C, matched the test line. The vertical line series looked very similar to these:

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When you think about startup companies what comes to mind? Vision, focused vision. Energy, lots of energy. Small teams. No rules. The Beginner’s Mind. The Art of the Possible. Now, think about the huge, established, multinationals. What images do they conjure up? Bureaucracy. Heavy process. Big teams. Tried and true. Conservative. Dull. Perhaps you came up with other descriptors, but that’s what I think of when I think about startups versus big established companies.  Read the rest of this post

Toyota Production Line

Do you know how many hourly jobs GM has laid off from 2006 to July 2008? Take a guess. How about 34,000? And now, they’re talking about another 5,500 layoffs. And they’re asking you and your government for a bailout to end their troubled, outdated, low quality, wasteful production system. But, let’s not focus on fixing GM’s problems with an infusion of cash. There’s something even deeper going on here that’s really wrong.  Read the rest of this post