This paper investigates the indirect clerical work which incorporates transactions and flows of information among multiple operating entities, and proposes a framework for analyzing and improving the objective work. Installing information systems based on current work procedure as it is often results in excessive man-hour and cost for for system update and maintenance. This paper depicts the objective clerical work as the process comprised of work steps and information flows between each operating entity.

The paper pays attention to the initial state and objective state of the objective work, and proposes a framework which is comprised of unavoidable transformation steps correspondent to the gap between initial and objective states, supplement transformation steps in which information items utilized in unavoidable transformation steps are created, and other wasteful transformation steps. The paper presents a method to distinguish information flow and operators’ work into three levels on the flow diagram, and clarifies how to identify problems and improvement ideas out of the comparison of these three levels. This framework is practically useful in improving objective work through eliminating wasteful transformation steps, classifying information items based upon their importance, and further designing ideal work comprised solely of unavoidable value-adding transformation steps.

Theodore Levitt argued that organizations can stop their growth because they incorrectly define their businesses. He also claimed that business should be defined in terms of “customer value” (function), not “products”. His argument implies that a company could survive and continue growing, if it properly defined its business by function. In our preceding research, we have proved Levitt’s hypothesis regarding business definition and continuous growth with Japanese electric/electronics companies. In this paper, with the new hypotheses derived from the original, we intend to expand our scope into Japanese chemical companies, and compare the results between these two industries. Based on the evaluation panel, we have evaluated the past business definitions of the companies in terms of “functionality” (magnitude of containing function), which are extracted from public documents such as security reports and annual reports, and statistically analyzed the relationships between the evaluation scores and business performances. Our research results firmly indicate that there is a positive correlation between the functionality and the growth rate (in consolidated net sales) in both industries.

This paper discusses "Success turns to failure" mechanism by “Self-enforcing of Differentiating Mechanism”. The self-enforcing of differentiating mechanism is a circulating process that makes “Differentiating Mechanism”, which is defined as the combination of management resources and the activity systems, stronger through performing the business activities.

The paper has two contributions. The first one is to make a model that describes the mechanism which the market share of the focal company that has grown up is being deprived by the rival that has been leveraged by the self-enforcing of differentiating mechanism of the focal company. The self-enforcing process is not easily stopped even if it makes favorable conditions (situational characteristics) for the rival. Therefore, the mechanism of the market share reversal can be said to be the result of "excessive" self-enforcing process of the differentiating mechanism.

The paper presents a case study of the competitive history between JS-Ichitaro and MS-Word in Japanese word processor software market. This case analysis offers a new interpretation of the mechanism of the market share reversal of MS-word with JS-Ichitaro, which is widely believed according to the monopolistic power of Microsoft Corporation in the market of operating system. The proposal of this new interpretation is the second contribution of the paper.

Modeling has been playing a crucial role in human resource development. It has long been thought that people learn various things from watching responsive actions that serve as models (examples for imitation). This is because people understand and learn the various responses of models as information, and, depending on circumstances, people may even upgrade the responses they have witnessed and retain them in their heads as their own future action rules. However, under the current corporate environmental changes, the condition is such that the conventional approach to modeling is rendered difficult because the grooming of models themselves is not possible.

Based on the knowledge gained through the application of network theory, this study focuses on hubs created within an organization. Unlike the conventional modeling that emphasizes direct learning by observing the model as is, the new way of learning captures the wide variety of circumstances facing the persons regarded as the hubs and their corresponding responsive actions as pieces of linguistic information, and visualize/reproduce them in one’s head, and then, turn them into resources to create one’s own action rules. Based on the aforesaid method, this study presents the effective scheme of modeling for human resource development