What mechanisms are behind the cases of women being promoted within companies to become representative directors and recover corporate performance in Japanese listed companies?
In this exploratory qualitative study based on two interviews with women as president of a traditional Japanese manufacturing company, we identified the factors.
The results suggest that the presence of statistical discrimination against women in a long-standing, underperforming company is associated with independence from the core of the organization, with departments and managers with old-fashioned business practices.
In Japan, the absence of women in the central network of a company is considered to be a challenge for the promotion of women to management positions, but in this study, rather, having a network of research departments outside the company in new fields and obtaining research funding from outside even without a budget, led to the breakaway from ailing central business units, especially to the appointment of a representative director and president.
This was an achievement that led to her appointment as representative director. After becoming president, she had an impact on the company’s reforms and performance improvement, transforming the board of directors into a substantive discussion forum and reorganizing subsidiaries.

The report derives the hypothesis that open innovation on the sales process could provide the higher profit margin of Japanese pharmaceutical companies. Based on the case analysis of Takeda, Chugai and Shionogi, which represent Japan pharmaceutical industry, the relationship between the rate of openness on the sales process and the return on sales confirmed a positive correlation. The study also found a positive correlation between the openness on the sales process and the closure on the research process.
In the context of changing drug discovery technologies and scale of markets, Japanese pharmaceutical companies are inferior to global mega-pharmaceutical ones in terms of their sales processes on a global scale. Japanese pharmaceutical companies have another strategic option of open innovation on the sales process for improving the efficiency of value acquisition in a globally competitive market.

Based on event system theory, critical events in business markets may strongly influence performance, survival and development of firms. However, if firms may change into customer centric organization, they are likely to recognize and respond to market and environmental change effectively and find their new developing way. Analyzing a representative case of the Resort Trust in the Japanese resort hotel industry, this paper attempts to examine how this firm could easily recognize, respond to rapid change in market and environment, and develop after critical events during 1980s and 1990’s, when it transformed its organizational process into customer-centric way, with forming frequent communication with their customers, shifting to customer centric organizational culture and innovating new services for emerging customer demands.

Procurement activities are generally assumed to be simple, routine tasks, such as managing deliveries and costs, and this has been in prior academic research as well. However, procurement also engages in strategic activities that affect the requirements and elements of business strategy considerations. Strategic procurement activities are innovation-driven in a way that triggers innovation by new materials and the products by using those new materials. This is the positive aspects of strategic procurement activities. However, the author encountered cases in which strategic procurement had a negative impact. The case is that of Japanese manufacturers in the solar panel industry. In the three Japanese manufacturers, the strategic activities of procurement contributed to the prolongation of their business without a fundamental review of their business strategy, with the effect of a certain level of cost reduction, while weakening the product differentiation that was originally at the core of each company's business strategy. In other words, strategic activities in procurement had a negative impact in the form of prolonging the life of ill-conceived business strategy. Thus, When the reverse functionality is occurring, it becomes necessary to suspend strategic procurement activities implemented in a partially-optimal manner, and to fundamentally review the business strategy itself.

This paper is a study that empirically examines the antecedents of M&A from the perspective of uncertainty in the business environment. In recent years, interest in corporate management under uncertainty has increased, as events that have a significant impact on the business environment of a wide range of companies occurred. Despite the recognition of the importance of M&A as a strategy to deal with environmental uncertainty, previous research has not shown clear results. Especially, there has been little research analyzing the M&A type selection by Japanese companies in relation to environmental uncertainty. Therefore, the research question of this study was set as “How does environmental uncertainty affect M&A implementation, diversification, and deal size?”. The analysis of M&A deals announced between 2004 and 2018 in which Japanese companies were the buyers suggested that when the uncertainty of the industry environment increases, small-scale M&A tends to be actively implemented. Based on the lean startup theory, when uncertainty is high, the speed of response is emphasized, and simple investment behavior takes precedence. The contribution of this study is that it adds new empirical results on the M&A type selection in an uncertain environment.

The aim of this paper is to examine the management systems of foreign-owned Japanese subsidiaries. When entering the Japanese market, foreign-owned companies need to acquire the social capital to become collaborators, but this requires a great deal of effort. This is because domestic rivals have already established relationships with such external actors. This paper examined the management system that foreign-owned Japanese subsidiaries have in place, how it functions, and how they utilize social capital. The research method is based on a organize and analysis of publicly available secondary source. The target of the research is Johnson & Johnson. By unraveling a case study of their business expansion into the Japanese market, I examined whether a hybrid U.S.-Japanese management system functions and acquires resources that belong to social capital. As a result, I argued that foreign-affiliated Japanese subsidiaries can utilize the social capital necessary for business expansion through their unique management system that combines the “characteristics of capturing and meticulously responding to external information” of Japanese companies and the “characteristics of targeted and rapid investment” seen in American companies.