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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: RetiredNow who wrote (319679)1/9/2007 12:03:25 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (1) of 1576658
 
"Toyota sure seems to know what they are doing, while GM & Ford are clueless and losing market share fast with yesterday's technology"

Different culture. GM and Ford is dominated by bean counters, not engineers. If you look at some of the prototypes that the two companies turn out, they have some really creative people. Just look at GM's AUTOnomy concept. But they don't make the decisions, the bean counters do. So they are always maximizing profits for the short term. What both companies need is a CEO who does "the vision thing", and who stays around long enough to get it started.

Japan has its own set of problems. Higher education tends to be training for the major corporations. Creativity isn't valued, or at least it wasn't ten years ago. So Japanese universities don't have a great global reputation. In Japanese companies, the saying "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down" is the touchstone. Everything gets done by consensus. Not as much because the Japanese are natural team players, but because if a decision turns out to be the wrong one, and you are identifiable as the one behind that decision, then everyone puts on their unhappy face and you are expected to commit supuku. Because you have just marginalized yourself and are going nowhere. As a result, I have seen Citizen ponder the exact shade of gray for a power cable on a printer for almost a year. Finally they shipped the cable over to us and we picked one. We reasoned that the Chinese manufacturer was unlikely to produce the same shade of gray anyway, so it didn't really matter which one was chosen. Not that the shade was going to matter, who gets worked up over a power cord?
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