 My name is Helen McNaughton, and I'm chair of the Japan Research Centre here at SOAS. And I'd just like to mention that tonight's seminar is also a joint seminar with the Japan Economy Network, or JEN, J-E-N. And that's hosted at SOAS by my colleague Uli in the Economics Department. So Japan Economy Network is an informal network for academics as well as non-academics, think tanks, private organisations, NGOs, etc. Anybody interested in networking and events particularly focused on the Japanese economy. So we're co-hosting this event tonight. So if you're interested in the Japan Economy Network, you can find information on our SOAS website about it. But it's my absolute pleasure to welcome tonight's speaker, Ulrika Scheider, who is professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego. And she's very kindly joining us in the middle of her teaching in the admin day, it's 11 o'clock in the morning in California. And she's very kindly making use of a one week gap in the global calendar where we've gone off summertime and she's still on summertime. And we were actually, it was the only week that we were able to schedule the seminar at this time. So delighted that she's joining us from sunny California while we're now officially in winter in the UK and in Europe. So she's going to be talking to us about Japan's business reinvention. And it really follows on, it's based on her latest book, which is normally I would be holding up the book, but I don't have it in my, I'm not in my SOAS office. I haven't been able to get into my SOAS office since March, so I just printed it out. But it's the Japan, the business reinvention of Japan and how to make sense of the new Japan. And this has been published this year and it follows on from a previous book that she wrote choose and focus. So Japanese business strategies for the 21st century, which was written, which was published back in 2008. So she's going to talk us through her ideas, particularly the latest book, of course. The structure that we're going to follow tonight is that Ulrika is going to give us about a 30 minute presentation. And then Ulrika and I are going to have a little chat, delve a bit deeper into some of the topics that she raises. And then we'll open it up to the audience Q&A, and you can type into the chat to your question and comments for Ulrika once we start the audience Q&A. So welcome, Ulrika. I'm delighted that you can join us. Feel free to upload your presentation. I'm just going to switch off while you do that. Yeah, thank you for this great introduction. Thank you and thank you everybody for joining. I'm excited to be here. I would be even more excited if I could actually be in London, a city I love, and I hope that we can, we can make that happen at some point in the future. So not too far. And so let me start with my PowerPoints so that we can give you a brief run through what I mean by the business reinvention and why I wrote this book. So there we go. So the book is going to be very positive. And we'll talk about how Japanese companies have reinvented themselves and our forceful competitors. And when I give this talk, there are usually many doubters. So, you know, Japan's 20 years of stagflation and deflation, an aging shrinking society, isn't there absolutely in the regions? What about the government debt and unlimited role of women and the inefficiencies and so forth and so on? I usually can already, I can tell you that the project was not increasing. It's not a correct claim that Japanese companies are not no longer innovative is also a wrong claim. But the other things are true. They're absolutely true. And, and if you're interested in them, please go to the bookstore. I'm sure you can find a very good analysis of what's happening in that part of Japan. But there's also that but the question I'm interested here is actually the opposite. My question is, how can it be that if this is all so bad that after 20 years of bad news from Japan, Japan is still the third largest economy in the world, as measured by by just absolute GDP. And, and in fact, Japan does this with a workforce of about 65 million people, which is, you know, roughly the size of China's three largest cities. So what is going on there. And, and the answer is that that while we were not looking and while we were talking about the lost decades. Japanese the leading Japanese companies that I'm going to talk about today have reinvented themselves and, and they had to do that. Because they had to do that by by assuming a strategy that I will label the accurate niche strategy. And they have done it also internally by changing their internal management processes. So if I had only only two minutes to give you sort of the elevator picture of what this book is about. I would say the book is about how Japanese companies have responded to the rise of China and the globalization of supply chains. So basically the change in the global competitive environment over the last 20 years. And they've done so by moving upstream to dominate a series of critical input markets. And that is the aggregate niche strategy that I will explain in the slides that are to follow. The upshot of this is that Japanese companies now anchor many Asian supply chains. And this has created very interesting new dependencies in the East Asia competitive set. This is often misunderstood. I think it is a misunderstanding to say that Japan has lost it in Japan is slow and so forth and so on. The reason it's misunderstood is that it is done in ways that are different from what American or even European observers might expect. And in fact it is done very slowly, but that slow is for a reason and slow does not mean stagnant slow is the price that Japanese society is willing to pay for a reorganization process that is that that is done while social stability is maintained. And so the final point is that that is interesting for us because Japan is not a way to balance social stability with economic success. And Japanese companies are showing us that reorganization and restructuring does not have to be messy. It does not have to come at a high social cost. And so Japan is, is, is maintaining an important alternative system of balanced capitalism that we might not. So that's the, that's the book. Now, you might say, Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, how can you be so positive and yet say that it's true that there is faculty shrinking and aging and all of that. And the answer is that this is a situation of the of the 2080 rule, you may have heard about this rule and basically it says that that 80% of outcomes are explained by 20% of inputs. And so it is here. There are many inefficient Japanese companies and then efficient parts of the Japanese economy. Okay, what I want to look at is the 20% of Japanese companies that account for 80% of the economic performance. I want to look at the good athletes, not the poor athletes and I think that's important because if we only look at the poor athletes we missing out on a very important story. Okay, so, so here's the book. It has 10 chapters, you know, begin with an introduction and talk about business culture which I'll do a little bit later on in my presentation today. And then there are chapters on Japan's new role in Asia and Asian business and global business. There's a chapter on corporate governance chapter of financial markets and private equity. And then I look inside the company on how the reinvention is managed in terms of changing corporate cultures towards new approaches of innovation, and I end on a chapter on how Japanese companies are going to compete in the digital transformation. Now first is I'm going to introduce the core concept, the aggregate niche. Alright, so why did Japanese companies have to reinvent? There are two main triggers. The first is that Japanese companies have lost the previous competitive advantage in mass producing high quality consumer end products. In the 70s, 80s, you walk into any living room around the world, whether that was in Europe or in the United States, the TV was either Sony or a Toshiba or a Panasonic, maybe a Hitachi. It was made in Japan TV. Today, you walk into anybody's living room, and it's an LG, it's the same, so it's some other brain, right? And that's why this disappearance of Japanese consumer end products is why people think that Japan has lost it. And so yes, that required a corporate response, a strategic response, right? And the second reason that Japanese companies had to pivot is the globalization of supply chains. So now I'll explain that in a moment. So Helen mentioned my previous book, which I wrote and published in 2008, so I wrote in the early 2000s. And it was called Choose and Focus, which was my translation of the Japanese phrase, sentakuto shuchu, which was the business catchphrase at the time, which means refocusing, choose and focus literally. The Japanese government translated it as selection and concentration, but in strategy, we actually do have, you know, a concept of refocusing. And the book was about the fact that the post-war Japanese industrial success, so the success of the 20th century, was expressed to size. Japanese companies, one, if they were big, bigger was better. The more sales, the better, the more employment, the better. Size afforded them access to talent, technology, trade quotas, and all kinds of things. And then the bubble economy of the 80s added some exuberance and more diversification to that. But the thing is in the global economy, size no longer works. In the global economy, these companies have to do something else. They have to be profitable. They have to attract shareholders through profits. They have to be agile and nimble and innovative. So what we saw, what I observed in this book, was a first round of refocusing, where companies exited, sold out, reorganized, and it was a big push. And what we know now from hindsight is that mostly what they did at the time is they exited and they parted with the low-hanging fruit, the non-performing or the non-career businesses. The challenge is, this is the second book now, by 2019, as of today, Japan still has or has or had more than 250 conglomerates defined as companies with 50 subsidiaries, white-spread subsidiaries, right? And the challenge with that is a conglomerate discount at the stock price and that there was still stooped in old processes of that. And so to respond to the rise of China, they now need to choose and focus on sort of version 2.0. So why am I bringing in the sumo here? Let me talk a little bit about sumo. And those of you who've been around the block may remember from the high days of sumo in the bubble years, these two star athletes, Konishiki and Akebono, these were massive men. Had they grown up in Texas, I'm sure there would have been, you know, brilliant linemen in the American football league. They were sumo and one was six feet, 600 pounds and the other was seven feet, 500 pounds big. They had a competitor called Maino Umi, who soon, you know, rose to the popularity, to the top of the popularity chart. Maino Umi was actually too short for the sumo association's roots. He was only 173 centimeters, so he had some silicon inserted in his scalp so that he would make the cut. And he weighed all of it 200 pounds. And he became known and popular as the store of superior techniques, waza no depato. And he, in this particular picture here, he, let me see whether I have a, he trips up this opponent while grabbing the other leg and pushing in with his shoulder. And so this fellow here is going to topple over any moment now. And so he introduced to sumo a new way of competing and that is through techniques and technologies. And I'm bringing this up because it's a fabulous image of what, what, what Japan's new approach to international competition is, which is to outsmart to be agile and to be quick on the feet. Okay, so what's going on here so so the globalization of supply chains has made this possible and necessary so let me, you may have seen this a globalization basic of supply chain means that the, that the stages of production are cut into their each, each, each stage and then each of this happens in different countries so in the case of the iPhone here. The iPhone is of course designed in in Cupertino and California and then the input materials and components, as well as a production machinery made in Japan. And so in Taiwan and South Korea make input parts like panels and things like that, and the assembly is happening in China, and then the retail is back and I would let's see stores around here. And what the Japanese companies were realizing is that they had lost the cost advantage in this pocket here that they could not compete with China in low and, you know, toaster ovens and blow dryers and so forth. And therefore, to escape this competitive realm, they moved up the smile curve, which is this this thing's like sort of a U shaped curve that maps operating margin by stage of production. This was then first drawn by the former CEO of Acer, the computer company from Taiwan, Andrew she drew this on a napkin in a restaurant and said we're in trouble, because Acer is here we're an assembler, we're an assembler of laptop computers, but there's no money here the money is here, or here, this is sort of a bad spot. And so this is what this reinvention is about Japanese companies have realized that this is a bad spot. And, and some of them are playing here like soft bank and Uniqlo and so forth, but the manufacturing firms that I'm talking about here today have moved upstream into components and materials. So, somebody did a study 10 years ago that took apart the iPhone and they realized that in terms of the total cost of making the iPhone at the time it was $180 34% of this value added a crude in Japan, 17% in Germany and China with its assembly only only contributed 6% to the value added. And so my question when I first saw this 10 years ago was, who is that somebody who's making this money. And, and so here's the answer so this is my bubble chart no worries I will explain. So, this is the global market size of a set of 1000 products that were made for this purpose. So this is a 1 billion to a trillion. And this is the combined global market share of Japanese companies in percent right so this is a hundred. Let me explain how this goes so the size of the bubble indicates the size of the power of the market so the combination of these two. So this is automobiles and we know that Japanese companies have a 30% market share in automobiles and this is the Prius and other hybrid cars like the Nissan Leaf and electronic cars so Japanese companies have 80% of the global market share in those. What I want to draw your attention to are the bubbles down here, the sort of the milky way of tiny little spots. And these are input parts and components in electronics and automobiles and maybe also some one here where Japanese companies control 100% of the world market share. And so this is a, you know, sort of increased size bubble. So, this is an analysis that that met he did in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan did in 2018. They looked at 931 global product categories. This is not a scientific exercise with the picked particular industries. But that's fine. It's completely maps what I what I learned from the CEOs that I was talking to in Japan. There are roughly 500 product categories where Japanese companies combine to more than 50% of the market. The average market size of these is roughly 5 billion. So you can do the math 500 times 255 billion that adds up. And, and what's important to know is that this is not sort of hidden champion small little companies. This is large listed companies and some of them double down and have controlling shares and, and several of these. And so, and so this is the new competitive thrust of successful Japan successful manufacturing firms. Now you might say well wait a minute doesn't every country have you know some sort of pockets of invention and dominance. And the answer is no not really this is South Korea same same thing. So South Korea of course is automobiles and cell phones and, and, and televisions and LCD panels, but and semiconductors of course, but they have nothing here. Almost nothing on one type of semiconductor. The United States has some stuff mostly pink pink is farmers so this is the US biotech industry and then of course also semiconductors. And the US car companies, kind of losing it a little bit I guess. And so back to Japan. So, so this, this, this is what I call the aggregate niche strategy so they're all these little niches and then there's large companies that have several of these of these competitive niches, and it adds up. So therefore in the aggregate, this is a winning strategy. Okay, so here's, I've already said all of this. So there are actually 57 critical input products where Japanese companies have 100% market share, which means that somebody else is dependent on them. And so the companies that do this are, you know, some of them you know, companies with the name of Mitsui and Mitsubishi Fujifilm JSR is big. And so this is a, this is a big, big competitive play. And just so that to update this, somebody at Nikkei did a study of the four way 2019 phone and they found that Japanese companies contributed 23% of the global of the value added. They found where South Korea and Taiwan and these Chinese companies got their input chemicals from mostly by the way this is in the chemical industry it's fine chemicals for for consumer electronics like the, the films, the polarizer films in this panel, the touch sensitivity of this panel. You know, some, some connectors here, you know, chips here but a lot of this is actually chemicals and, and chemicals that go into things like batteries. Okay, so the implications of this is that Japan Japanese companies now anchor the Northeast Asian trade supply chain and supply chains right and they have to change their core identities to to be these technology leaders and to compete at the technology frontier. So this is just on the trade side, I looked at trade data 2018 is the latest I could get fine. What we see here is that Japan and China are roughly equal so they trade $180 billion each every year. And, and so that's, that's about equal, but Taiwan and South Korea have a trade deficit with Japan. And China has a trade deficit with Taiwan and South Korea, and what they're trading are these input materials and components that then are assembled in China. So that's the aggregate niche story. It's a technology play that currently affords Japanese companies great competitive advantage and of course you could also look at that picture and say Konishi is, you know, is China and, and, and my name is is the new agile, competitive, high tech, you know, was a no departo leader in in deep technologies. Okay, so let me add one more wrinkle to this and then then I'll open this up because I want to hear the questions that you might be having on this but, but, but clearly the question that you would ask is this thing but okay so how can Japanese companies change their corporate culture they used to be, you know, driven by Kaizen and and and manufacturing as I said, right repeatedly upset that there were the competitive manufacturing leaders. And now they're playing at the front at the competitive frontier with breakthrough innovation. How can they do this. And in fact, that is the reason why this is such a slow process. And by that by the time this will be done and will have taken Japanese companies 20 years to reposition themselves to go on this is a massive diet right. So, to get at this let me just go into culture real quick. There is a deposit in the book that there are three basic rules of Japanese business culture that and then those are to be or appear to be polite, don't be loud, don't argue don't complain to be appropriate. For example, you know, if, if somebody in Japan would would color their hair green and go to their office. People would find that inappropriate and they would, they would ask you know that green hairs not it's just not done be appropriate and be appropriate, which stands for don't rock the boat don't don't cause an inconvenience. Don't don't choose actions that that cause trouble for others. Right. So those are the three main rules and happily. Most people in Japan get away if they were doing two of those right right so you could be a reformer and rock the boat. If you do it very politely, and in ways that are completely appropriate. Or you could actually be impolite in Japan. It's, it's, it's, it's okay if you don't rock the larger boat and if you if you otherwise are completely appropriate in your attire and so forth. So two out of three is important here. And, and so what where I'm going with this. I'm going with how can you support Japanese business culture. While you're pushing for breakthrough innovation and the framework that I'm using in the book to explain this is called tight loose theory. This is a new framework and international business that comes out of social psychology and and cultural anthropology. And it defines culture as the set of norms that guide our behavior. These are culture are socially created standards standards that shape our expectations. And, and in general, the social psychologists think of psychologists think of culture as having three components. There's the content, which is the prescription, which I just gave you right so in Japan's case be be polite be don't don't rock the boat. Then there is a second dimension which is consensus to what degree do people agree that that these norms are important. And the third is the intensity with which they feel this that is the extent to which deviance is tolerated. The framework then divides into tight and loose and this is a very carefully done. Oops, let me just, let me just go to this a very carefully done study where Michelle Gelfand from Stanford and her colleagues went around 33 countries and asked almost 7,000 respondents questions like, is it okay to eat in the elevator. Is it okay to read a newspaper in the park. Is it okay to kiss at a funeral. Is it okay to wear headsets in a restaurant. And, and then they could measure to what extent people agreed yes that's okay that yes it's not okay whether they were all over the, you know, spectrum. To what extent the answers reflected that people were quite intolerant toward deviance. And so they get this thing where they have Norway as the tightest of the countries that they studied. And Japan and South Korea are also up here and the UK is in the middle and the United States is quite quite a loose place the, not as loose as New Zealand or the Ukraine but but quite loose so with my image with my example of the green hair so if a Japanese came to the office with green hair people would be quite concerned about whether he's he or she's okay. In California, you know my colleague shows up with green hair, you know, people with that's cute. There's nothing to think about. So, so Japan has a tight culture, right and and by the way this is enforced, not because Japanese are Japanese this is a global phenomenon right so Norway is even tighter than Japan and India is tighter than Japan. And the way this is done is through social proof, the human desire to fit in and to just behavior to those around us, right it's not innate it's socially constructed. So I brought you a little video to see. Let me see what I can, I can actually show this. Oh, how do I click this button. No, it doesn't want to go. Oh, I have to click here. Okay, so this is a an experiment that they ran in the United States, many, many years ago it's very old for you it's very very rough. Of course, the elevator example. Here comes the camera stand. So the guy is looking at us is the subject here. These people of course all look towards the wall in the elevator, and he turns this has been replicated. Recently, they did it with a student group and the student turned everybody else look into the wall. The student also turn they asked her why did you turn. And she said, I thought you knew something that I don't know. Right. So that's the power of social proofing. And we are in an environment everybody is doing something we want to fit in we do the same thing. And, and the reason I'm showing you this is that corporate culture is this, the elevator is the company, or your organization, or in fact, Helen your classroom, right, my classroom. The, the, the elevator, the company is the elevator, when people show up to work in the morning. People new hires come to work, they will take their cues from their environment. And they will try to fit in. And they will do this even more they will have an even more sensitive social radar, if they are in a tight culture where there's, there's no, there's not a whole lot of tolerance for deviants and all of us who have been to Japan. Foreigners who come to Japan after some time they start bowing on the, on the, on the cell phone, or we get very, very exact with how we separate our garbage, because we know if you don't then you know somebody will come and teach us how to do that so. So then that becomes the puzzle right so how do you change the behavioral norms in a tight culture setting. And that is the task that the CEOs in Japan are currently pursuing right. And the answer is, they can't change tightness. Japan will always be tight, tighter than the US. They can't just say hey everybody be loose now and you know become innovative and switch from be a conscientious order taker and the Toyota production system to being a break it fix it, risk taking innovator and you can't just order people to do that. What we need to do what they would the Japanese CEOs are doing currently is they're working hard to redefine what the right behavior is right so so they will always be, you know, a tendency to think you have to be appropriate and polite, and you should use your own code, but what is appropriate needs to be redefined right and that is, that is why this process of culture changes taking so long because you, you to make a tight culture loser. they actually have to use tight mechanisms like very carefully structured workshops and sign-ups and processes and meetings in which they tell people to be more loose. And this is already happening now in offices. And so this is one of the ways in which CEOs do this and then I'll let you open up the conversation. So there are three ways that I identify the book where this is happening. One is open innovation strategies. This is a that the Japanese for this is open innovation and it actually doesn't mean open innovation. It literally in a very narrow sense of the word means let's open up our R&D departments and bring in outside researchers and go to Silicon Valley and purchase startup companies and new innovation streams and maybe do some more proactive hiring of foreign staff. There's also office redesign. I brought you pictures here. So one is the old tender Japanese office with a lot of sleeping going on on this particular picture and paper and it's all cluttered and very rigid. The latest thing in Tokyo whether that was inspired by we work or not is the free address office. And the free address office is very interesting because it causes a big problem for Japanese employees. In the old office down to the right the employees basically impressed their bosses by putting in long hours and hard work and that they're so exhausted that they would have to take a nap in between but still that counted as work hours. And so they would be there and they would be conscientious. They would do exactly as told in the free address office. This is no longer possible. The free address office is an office where the employee has a locker and every morning when they come to work they pick where they want to be for the day. Do they need to be in a sofa? Do they need to be at a table? Do they need to find a meeting room? Do they need to be in a hammock to be creative? And so the new free office undermines the old processes of HR evaluations. And that is a very interesting phenomenon where and at first where this is happening it's met with great unease. The employees don't like it. They don't know how to impress their boss. And it's beginning to dawn on them that in the new Japan it's no longer about process. It's about outcome. It's about showing what you've done. It's about getting it done and then showing what you've done and being impactful. And that will take a long time. You can't just tell people to switch from process to outcome. You have to create buy-in for this. Otherwise you get boycotts. You have to do this very, very carefully and slowly. And the labor shortage is helping with this greatly. And if you're interested in this we can take this on later. But so let me just stop here because I've been talking too much I feel. And let me stop my share and invite Helen to join me here for a conversation so that we can maybe delve more into the topics that you think your audience is most interested in. Thank you. Thanks Ulrika. That was brilliant. That was a really good explanation of some of the core insights in your research and book and lovely and visual as well. I love the little bubbles. That was really good. And I now understand 30 years after moving from New Zealand to the UK via Japan that I've moved from a loose culture to a tight culture. And now I understand some of the problems I first encountered when I came to the UK. So let's put it into perspective for me. So I'm just going to ask you a little bit more about your aggregate niche value. So you said that obviously Japanese companies are moving up the smile. And they're also moving upstream as well upstream in the supply chain. So I think you hinted a little bit at this. But how are they doing this? Are they investing a lot more in R&D budgets? Are they utilizing joint ventures and M&As and strategic partnerships? Are they linking up with universities or other consortia as they used to do previously? Or are they doing it differently? And are they still using Japanese practices like Kaizen that you briefly mentioned? So how are they going about that moving up the smile curve and going upstream? Yeah, so that's a great question. So the Kaizen and all of the previous mechanisms of making great products are still super important because we're talking fine chemicals here and that's a tacit knowledge manufacturing industry. So you need to have, you need to maintain and in fact enhance the capabilities in manufacturing. At the same time, you need to have parts of the organization that are speedy and nimble and agile and at the frontier of technology. So what these companies are doing is they're adopting ways of what's called ambidexterity. So do both and find the right balance and manage these two cultures in one company. And so on the research side then, so first of all, they're still getting better. So Toyota production system is not done. It's getting better and better and better. And now we're going to have digital manufacturing and Japanese companies are going to be on the forefront of this new industry 4.0 and the edge computing and that whole part. So we see innovation there. At the deep tech frontier, Japanese companies have, I briefly mentioned, open innovation. So they've realized that they can't quite do it with the old Stodgy R&D departments of the old because they had a not invented here syndrome, but they were kind of, you know, there was very little cost utilization due to life and employment. So to get them going, we have these various processes of opening up companies to emanate. So purchase startups, there's also at the same time, the government is very active in setting up innovation, a new innovation ecosystem and have startup support programs. And society is warming up to the idea that there are careers other than being a Saturday month at a very large company, right, that it's actually could be successful to be, you know, an innovator that's low also, but it's happening a little bit. And very quietly, there's a large companies that even somewhere that we've written off as lost and admired in their old ways of doing things are focusing on a set, a clearly defined set of competencies that they're pushing. So let me give you the example of Hitachi, which I actually had written off 20 years ago, I thought Hitachi was definitely not a wrong way. They had something like a thousand subsidiaries, they were like huge. And they were playing in way too many things, they were doing everything from nuclear power plants in the UK, in fact, right, to to to toaster islands and then blow dryers and so on. There did no way that that can become, you know, a winning strategy. Over the last 20 years, Hitachi has not only greatly slimmed down to become this more nimble minority, they're even now selling off their crown jewels. So they have partnered with Hitachi Chemical last year. They have just last week sold off Hitachi Construction. They have spun out and sold off Hitachi Medical, even though that was a $10 billion business. And they have instead bought some micro grid technology from ABB, where they're now going to be, they're going to be in smart cities, smart energy, and transportation as a service. And that's the new Hitachi and a and a integrated data solution provider. It was maybe similar to IBM a little bit, and it took IBM 10 years to to get from mainframes and and computers to to Watson and what IBM is today, right? And so Hitachi is doing something very similar. And that requires that they build out new R&D capabilities, right? And I could tell you the same story about Asahi Glass, which is a windowmaker that is trying to push the envelope on on on 5G antennas or something, right? And NEC, which is a big player in AI. And yes, massive investments in R&D to play in the front. And so they sell off, they carve out some of their actually previous core components, not only are they selling off sort of the leftovers or the non performing stuff, but but actually viable businesses. And that, by the way, has has fed into a budding private equity market in Japan, which is one of the hottest markets right now in in dealing corporate assets. So it's a it's a very and again, I'm only talking about the 20% good companies, right? So there are lots of companies that are not doing this. But the ones that are doing this are very committed to the R&D aspect of it. Yeah, great. So you said that even so you've talked about some of the big brands there. And you said that even those little bubbles that you showed a big companies rather than SMEs. So can you give us a sort of insight into what's happening with the SMEs sector? Although maybe it doesn't come into that 20% that you're looking at what's happening with, you know, cadets who supply chains are they just breaking down as this process happens? And, and obviously, we're not going to see, you know, big brands like Toyota and Hitachi disappear anytime soon. But as you said, you know, we no longer walk into people's kitchens and lounges and see some of the brands that we used to see so visibly. So even though big companies are still very competitive, they may be, you know, selling off viable entities and specializing. Do you see, do you see some of those brands as becoming perhaps less visible as Japanese brands because they're moving in upstream and into the input side of things? Or will we always see Japanese brands maybe not on end consumer products as much but in the marketplace? What's your view on the brands and the big business SME relationship? Right. So that's already happened right. So the living room is already, you know, I still have a Sony TV, but I think that beats me. So, and by the way, that's not, that's not bad. That's not a bad thing. Moving upstream, yes, there's no Japan inside label on the screen that you're looking at right now, but there is Japan inside with 100% certainty. There's the Japanese part in your computer screen that you're looking at right now. And so that's where the money is. So that's a good thing because there's no money in assembling that thing. So making the expensive part that goes into it, that's a good strategy. So that's not a concern. That's just a misunderstanding. So this Japan inside label does not exist, but I bet that there's not a day in your life that goes by where you're not using a Japanese product. Whether that's when you start your car or you drive your car, it's a microcontroller. There's a 0.4 probability that that's from Japan, right? And so the motors in your car, you know, windows, wiper, all of that, these little motors are made in Japan and so forth and so on. So that's, I'm not concerned about the fact that the consumer end product has gone away. That's a sound strategy. The SME is just a very interesting question because what we see there is more of a bifurcation. And so in the old Japan, Toyota had its supplier hierarchy and the whole ship would always, you know, they were dependent on Toyota, but Toyota would also take responsibility for them and make sure that they would make it through any recession and so forth. That started to go to disappear with the globalization. And so when the U.S. and Japan had a trade war, which is like now, it's like a long time ago, but it was very similar to what we see now between the U.S. and China, right? And so in the U.S.-Japan trade war basically ended when the Americans had these voluntary export restraints and the Japanese companies had to set up plans in the U.S. or somewhere in Canada or Mexico and NAFTA. And so that's how we ended up with all these Honda par companies in Ohio and Toyota and Kentucky and so forth. And then the first year suppliers went with them. And so the first year suppliers are now these very strong players and they're very innovative and they're very important and they're fine. And the fourth year suppliers got lost. And that is definitely true. They got lost. They were left behind in Japan and that's the atrophy in the regions and the shrinking. That's not a good story, definitely. By the way, the whole iPhone story is actually an SME story because you may recall that NTT Dokomo had the iMode phone in something like 2001. This could go on the internet and do all kinds of fancy things. At a time when we thought of a phone as something that we speak on and no more. And iMode already had the internet access and you could order things out and you could see things and so forth. And so the iMode never became a global standard. But when Apple developed its iPhone in 2006, I want to say, it came out in 2000. So in the early 2000s, they were looking for suppliers to make the iPhone. And where did they find them? But in Japan because the iMode had already, the making iMode phones had already geared up all of these Japanese suppliers and making smaller connectors, screens, capacitators, antennas and so forth. So the SME story is shifting. Yes, the Japanese hierarchies, the K-dots, the vertical K-dots may be falling apart, but the strong SMEs are now just feeding into other K-dots. And some of those bubbles are those companies that are largely listed. So in many ways, it seems like a very natural progression has taken place. Like you say, some of those structures and hierarchies have fallen away, but a lot of these SMEs were already making precision equipment and it's just gone into a different art. So okay, great. You talked about culture, obviously being important. And you mentioned that changing the culture in Japan is like changing the course of a huge cargo ship. And so therefore I like that. It's a great metaphor. It's so difficult. You have to do it very slowly, very steadily in order to steer it in a different direction. To what extent, I mean, you kind of hinted at this, but to what extent do you think Japanese corporate workplace culture and practices is impeding that? And is it Japanese workplace culture that's behind that slow, steady turn of the ship? Or is there change going? I mean, you mentioned the free address spaces, but you also said it's quite difficult for people to adapt to that. So what is it about workplace culture in particular that's such a slow, steady process? So Japan, the three norms of Japanese business as I posit them is to be polite and appropriate and don't rock the boat. And the managerial challenge with this is that you'd never know if people are unhappy. But in the United States, if an employee is unhappy, you know, they'll tell you. And they'll not mince words, right? This is a lot good. We're doing the wrong thing. We need to go the other way. And that doesn't really happen in Japanese companies. So one has to tread much more carefully. Lest people start to boycott the whole thing, right? And quietly, you know, keep running their divisions like they've always run them and so forth, right? And so in order to change the culture, it has to be a very carefully laid out process of involving everybody in the new vision and then showcase the right behavior, like the elevator thing, right? So let's all turn this way. And the management has to do that. So as a senior managers have to showcase the behavior, they have to celebrate the people that are adopting the new behavior. And that all takes a lot of effort. And not every leader can do this. It's hard, changing culture is hard work. And you know, in Japan, of course, a lot of Japanese companies have the problem that the CEO is only in the office for six years. And so some of them are saying, you know what, this is too hard. I don't want to do this. And maybe we can go buy, maybe polite is okay, right? Or something like that. So it takes a lot of time to even get the buy in that we have to change. And even in the United States, right? Culture change can take fairly long. And it's a little bit of the old Warren Buffett line in, you know, it takes a lifetime to build a good reputation. And you know, you can destroy it in a minute. And you can, you can, it takes a long time to build a very good culture. But you can also destroy it very fast. You put, you know, the wrong person at the top and so forth. So it's not a linear process either. And so the free office, the people that work in the free office places actually eventually embrace it. Right? But it's not just the work of the employees that need to find new ways to impress their bosses. It's the bosses and the HR function that needs to find new ways to evaluate the people. And do it in a way that is perceived as fair and just and appropriate and right. And then convince them that the fair. And so this is, this is a big shift. And the labor shortage and, you know, the whole employment system is changing right now. So the, I don't know whether you've heard of the shoe cuts. So the shoe cuts is this annual hiring event. And it's very efficient for HR departments to hire only in April, right? Because they can do the socialization and indoctrination if you wish. So the onboarding, they can do all of that in the summer. And then the training programs are all lockstep and everything happens at a season. And then after five years it was sent to study abroad. And then they come back and everything is locked up. It's very easy to be an HR manager in that setting in a way, right? So the shoe cuts, it was just abolished. It had become so perfunctory and so shallow that it had become a show where, you know, thousands of highly educated Japanese 22 year olds would show up in the same outfit, the same hairdo, the same thing, giving the same answer to the same questions. And basically the companies which is hired by cultural fit, is this person a fit to our company culture? And is it just like us? That's completely risk-averse. And so everybody's agreed that this is a farce and it inhibits studying and inhibits individuality. So let's stop it. And so the first order challenges that now people can be hired at any time. So they might, you know, come to study in other countries and return to Japan, you know, at a time that is not March and they can still get a job. And mid-career job changing has also been done. Still most people identify as a company and so there's a lot still about lifetime employment and lifetime employment is important. It has huge benefits for companies to have lifetime employment. Nobody wants to get rid of it, but they want to modify it. So there's now much more flexibility at the margin. And the core remains, but the margin is becoming very flexible. And that allows the high performers to craft their individual career path. And it puts pressure on the companies to make sure that they can keep the higher performance because there's labor shortage. So the companies are rethinking what they do with their best performers. And the best performers are rethinking of what kind of relationship they want to have and what kind of work-life balance they want to have. And that plays into this free office, right? Because the free office places are the ones that are competing most for talent. And so it's a very exciting point in time to go and visit Japanese office Unfortunately, we can't go this year, but no worries, Helen. This process will keep going so you can go. I hope so. It's very exciting. It will be very interesting to see what happens with the loosening up of shukatsu and mid-career hiring, etc., and the loosening up of recruitment and selection, which brings me to another important point. There's the loosening of that rigidity going on, as you said. And it's often said that gender norms and gendered employment system is very rigid in Japan. And policies like womenomics haven't really made much progress, etc. So, you know, in some ways that whether you agree with it or not, obviously, that's that kind of social stability that Japan is sticking to those sort of gender norms. But do you see that changing? Did you look into that when you were researching the gender relations in Japanese companies? Why is it that gender, particularly in the workplace, is lagging behind? Are any of these rigidities opening up progress for women in Japan? So there's a two-level answer to that. In terms of numbers, if you just look at the statistics, Japan is not lagging. I mean, the U.S. is regressing, but that's a... No, in numbers. It's an intensive career. But in terms of female work participation, and even in sort of managerial positions, it's nudging up in Japan. So where Japan is behind, what drags Japan down in these international comparisons is politics. And you could actually quit that. Japanese women are smart enough to know that politics is nasty, and they don't want to do it. I think it's actually a big part of this. But in politics, women are clearly underrepresented, and it looks bad, and you see these funny pictures of Japanese committee on women issues, and it's 20 men sitting around the table trying to figure out how to improve women issues. But in the workplace, so in terms of numbers, it's not so bad. And actually, employment systems help because it's the same wage for all. So for instance, Japan in the career tracks, there's no wage differential between men and women, because that's not how the Japanese wages until now were determined by size of company. It's getting better. There are more women. There are also more women in the bureaucracy styles than the ministries you go. You see women. So then the second part of that answer, though, is the qualitative situation. And so whether it's power harassment, sexual harassment, recourse to workplace situations that are just not okay is very limited. And that's because it's new and people are very nervous. And so men know what mentoring young employees means. It means going to the beer place in the evening and telling them that they misbehaved at the meeting and that they should never do this again. That's mentoring. I think you can't do that. You just spoke out at the wrong time because it was not appropriate. And they can't do that with women because women don't want to and can't whatever go to these beer places. And for good reason. And so mentoring is now moved inside the company, but men still have a hard time trying to figure out how to mentor a woman without making mistakes. And then we have that issue in the US, of course, as well with the Me Too movement now. Men are getting very nervous about being in situations where they could be accused of things. So all this is very difficult. And then there is, of course, in Japan, the proverbial Oji-san boss is a nice man who's a little behind in the times and has strong subconscious biases of what the role of women is. And they make tea and bring the flowers and so forth. And they get away with open displays of chauvinism without any sanction. And as long as they are around, they're, of course, upholding a certain culture. But I've talked to many Japanese women, they're telling me that those guys are now the minority. It's no longer not sanction, right? So if open displays of chauvinism no longer are okay in Japanese companies. And so it's changing. It's just that given the business norms of being polite and appropriate and not rocking the boat, what it means to lean in and to help the change progress for Japanese women is a little different from what it means for a woman in the US. We can do things like power pose and we can adopt some mechanisms that would look really weird in Japan. And at the same time, Japanese women have some other tools available that they can use to push for change. And it's more quiet. It's not as easy to see, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Great. Well, it's good to hear it might be changing because as you said, it's not a numbers game or a participation rate game anymore. It's about that ability to move up the pipeline and the career progression and change the old guard of management. As he said, there's a few too many men sitting at the top there of those companies who are steering the cargo ship still. I'm going to open it up. I just wanted to mention one thing that you didn't mention in your book, but when you sent us your bio for advertising the talk, you mentioned that you are an advisor to startup incubators in Japan. Is that the free address offices that you're talking about? Or is that something else? I mean, you mentioned that startups are quite active in this in this move up the smile curve and upstream. And that is something new. I mean, Japan has always had sort of low levels of startups and entrepreneurship. But is that changing? And what is that role that you do as an advisor? Can you give us an insight into that side of though? Yes, it's very, very, it's a fascinating because in the Japan, you know, the old image of a success story was to be a salaried employee for men, a salaried employee at a large company. And that's where all the talent went. If it didn't go to the ministries. So, so even a young, very smart engineer, the dream was to work for Hitachi or Fujitsu or something like that. Right. And so, so that began to change only at the turn of the century that people were saying, well, you know, I'm, I'm very good at computer science or IT or whatever they are, but I don't want to be part of this huge hierarchy where, where it just become a cog in this large thing. I want to do my own thing. And initially, this society was not really celebratory of this, right? So, in particular, mothers-in-law were held up to be against this. Right. Oh, my God, I married somebody. You quit the bank and now he's restoring a company. Even, even Mr. Mikitani of Rakuten tells a story. He used to be a banker at the Industrial Bank of Japan and he quit and he started the e-commerce platform and his mother-in-law said, no, so he jokes about it now. I think everybody is very happy there, but, but, but so society was not really supportive. So that has all changed that, that there's now sort of more of a realization that this could be good for the economy. And the role of the ministries have also changed, right? Because in the old, in the post-war Japan, Meti, the precursor of Meti could just basically, they were calling the shots, right? So they were saying, oh, the Americans have developed a technology, say for the fax machine. Okay, let's make lots of fax machines, right? You, you, you and you, you become fax machine makers. Oh, the Americans have developed a semiconductor, right? You, you, you become semiconductor companies. And so Meti was calling the shot and then the CEO's basically executed the strategy. But now that Japan is competing, that these companies are competing at the technology frontier. The ministry don't, doesn't understand these technologies either, right? Nobody understands technology. Japan is caught up. There's, it's no longer, is there a sort of a, a known goalpost where we just, we license the technology and then we make a commercial, a consumer product out of it. It's, it's competing at the frontier. And so the ministry has a new role in providing, you know, it's more, it's more like ours, or like, like what did German or a UK ministry would do, or even in the US grant, give grants to innovative, you know, activities, help set up an innovation ecosystem. And so out of this have come these initiatives to set up accelerators and build an innovation ecosystem. So to support startup activities. And because I'm in California, and you know, I work with a lot of startups here, I teach a class where my students write a business model for a startup. I've been asked, I've been invited to, to be on the advisory or, you know, become a fellow startup activities. And it's very interesting for me. I enjoy meeting the Japanese startups and learn about the challenges that they are having, which are, you know, a little bit different from here. There's the venture capitalists in Japan play a very different role from what they do here. And so, you know, to, to go through, you know, a sort of roll out a business model and a strategy with a Japanese startup is a very interesting experience. And I would just say that the people that say that Japan doesn't have any startups haven't been to those places. They are, and there's, there's actually a biotech cluster. There's an IT cluster. There's a lot of, there's not as much sort of apps and Uber and, you know, Airbnb and sort of those app-based stuff, but there's much more sort of deep tech of, you know, battery technologies and storage technologies, energy technologies where Japanese companies compete. Great. Thank you. Right. Well, I'm gonna, I'm conscious that people are asking questions in the chat here. So I'm going to open up to some of the questions. We have a question here from Paul. So as part of this business reinvention, he asks, has there been a greater predisposition towards investing internally in Japan rather than overseas? For example, for QC reasons. So he's thinking of the previous Toyota recall problems in the US, for example. So has there been that sort of shift, do you think? No, perhaps the opposite. So yes, there's a lot of, I looked at the private equity market, which is mergers and acquisitions and private equity investment and venture capital investments. And if you look at those data, the majority of activity is domestic. This has something to do with the choosing focus and consolidation. And so Hitachi spins out, Hitachi chemical, and then sure what Denko buys that. Right. And so you get a lot of activity there. But the largest M&A activities continue to be in and out. That is Japanese companies, which have a lot of cash, buying, consolidating their global operations. Right. So whether that's Santori buying the Jim Bean, the whiskey maker, you might joke that they went to the wrong country, they're going to come to Scotland or something. But I wanted to get into that market. And the Japanese insurance companies, we were talking about the shrinking society. So if you're a life insurance company in Japan, your market is shrinking rapidly. Right. So they are actually acquiring foreign life insurance companies. Right. So Meiji Yasuda bought the standard in Portland and so forth and so on. The car companies are already global operators. Right. So 60% of cars that have a Japanese label on it, whether that's Toyota or Honda or Nissan, are no longer made in Japan. Right. And so this is a global play. So and on the, but where do they buy the innovation? There are more than 250 Japanese companies that have an office in Silicon Valley where they scout, they buy, but they also just observe and they see what's going on and what's the action and what are they doing? Right. And where is this headed? And likewise, I think there are lots of them in Europe and also in Singapore. So a lot of this open innovation is a scouting exercise, but also maybe an M&A exercise that let's buy these startups. And in terms of deals size, so dollars or yen, the global investments are larger, but in terms of number of deals, the domestic deals are more frequent. Thank you. A couple of questions here from Chris talking about the business culture. So he said one of the sort of traditional ideas on Japanese is that they have slow decision-making processes and also they're kind of, you know, risk adverse or have a desire to, you know, avoid or manage uncertainties. So do you see those things changing, those kinds of traits that if you like of Japanese companies? Yeah, of course. I mean, there is those of us who've spent, you know, time in Japan have encountered this and it can be very taxing to sit in a Japanese meeting or a never ending Japanese meeting and they're very slow and everybody has to sign off and so forth. And in some companies this is changing. So I did a number of interviews with companies that are very profitable and I wanted to know why they're profitable and in some cases they were, they just had a great business or they had a great strategy figured out. But I also noticed that one of the shared features that they had was that they were actually quite posimonious. That they were not wasting time. So they didn't have two receptionists. They only had one, right? And they didn't send 10 confirmation emails. One. That sort of thing, right? And so there are companies that are changing. There's a, let me give you one story that I like to tell in this when the previous CEO of Panasonic wanted to change the culture of Panasonic and he wanted to particularly change the way that his direct reports talk to him. Because those of us, you know, if you know Japanese, you know that it can be very convoluted, right? So people would say, well, I asked for your permission to be allowed to submit a proposal that I thought of yesterday. And you didn't want to have these like multi-syllable sentences. So what he did is he asked everybody to make proposals by text message. And if you do that, you know, you don't go down that, itadakitai tomo toorimasu, right? You would be typing all day long. And so they were actually saying, I would like to make the following proposal. And they learned that. And then they went back from text messaging to talking, which was even more efficient. And so they're working on it. But yes, absolutely. It's still there, right? And it's very complicated. And and safety and make sure. And I think that will always be Japan's trade. And they will probably lose out on a number of deals, like whether that's foreign M&A deals, or you know, they're just too slow, they miss out on opportunities. But they also may miss out on, you know, for their for their for their own good, right? So the whole global financial crisis with its collateralized debt obligations, they were prohibited in Japan because the Ministry of Finance didn't understand and they didn't allow it. So Japan missed out on that entire deal. They were caught in the in the subsequent recession. But the Japanese financial system actually escaped that thing pretty unscathed. And so, yeah, so what is good with bank, you know, so, yeah, they will always be slow, always be careful. And the reason, by the way, there's a reason if I may add this. So the research on this tight lose, of course, looks into why do why are some countries lose and why are some countries tight? And what they find is that these these norms, the behavioral norms of a purpose, they're very pragmatic. If they don't fulfill a purpose, they will change, people will not adhere to them. So what is the purpose for Norwegians and South Koreans and and and and people in Japan to have such tight norms? And the content is different, but the tightness is the same. And the answer is countries that have a lot of exogenous shocks, or wars, or invasions, or famines, droughts, earthquakes, for societies to survive those shock events, they have a structured system of of how to respond. Right. And so the earthquake is, of course, the story that, you know, and depends very concerned about earthquakes as it should be, there are 1500 a year. And when a big event like like Fukushima, like the Tohoku earthquake happens, you don't want people to run around and and and be all frazzled. And, you know, for society just to survive these shocks, they need society needs to be very organized. And then when the shock happens, people adopt these rules as they're sort of they go on automatic. Right. And that's why there are all these admonitions, they go in a subway, in a Japanese subway, there are all these rules, like, don't do this, don't do that, don't do that, you know, don't step, you know, and you have to fall in the line behind the yellow line, don't jump, don't. And then and they want people to have this as a sort of a, you know, they that in a shock situation, they can go on automatic and and do the right thing. And so I was I was in Tokyo at the time of the, you know, 311, the Tohoku earthquake. And it was for a social scientist, it was a very impressive day. I mean, how people really, there was no, there was no looting. There were no outward expressions of panic. Everybody was appropriate. Nobody, everybody was considerate. Nobody draw attention to them. There was no wailing, no screaming, no crying, as it was like, okay, I am going to be polite or appear to be polite over this. I'm going to be appropriate and I'm going to not talk about here. And so and because that's there, I think Japan will always be tight because the society needs it to to survive these events. Okay, interesting theories there. So speaking of shocks, somebody asks, what do you think about, you know, the current shock that we're all having the COVID-19 pandemic? Do you think it will have an impact on the processes that you've been discussing and the reinvention of business culture? Or do you see it having any impact? Oh, we see, we see tight, we see tight lose in action. Right, if you compare Japan and the United States, that's it's tight lose in Japan. Okay, so there's a complication. How good are our data? Are the Japanese, this Japan have so few cases because they're not testing. Yeah, yeah. But we can look at the death rates. And it's pretty hard to fudge those numbers, right? And so the death rate in Japan is very low. The incidence rate is very low. And there has been no politicization of this issue. There has actually, there have been no orders. All that needed to be done is for the governor of Tokyo to say, please, and the prime minister, please practice self-restraint. Be considerate, you know, be appropriate. And the right thing to do right now is not to go out. And of course, wear a mask. And the wear a mask is easy for the Japanese because they do that anyway. If long had a mask, wearing culture, right? So it's, whether it's for allergies or whatever. So Japan has a very, very low incidence rate per capita. And Tokyo is the most densely populated city in the world, right? The entire population of California, a state of 38 million, lives basically on the space of Los Angeles, right? And so if that was in the U.S., it was even possible. So in the U.S., we now have a, we even, you know, people here even discuss whether it's okay, whether we should wear a mask or not. And so the answer to the COVID pandemic is very tight. What about changing working styles like working from home, remote working? Yeah. So the second part of that is the telework is completely, of course, propelling this entire work style change, right? So the hanko, it's a stamp that people have to put on. And you can't do a hanko if you're not there in person. So they've now sort of deregulated the hanko, which means that that was a legal thing. So the Ministry of Justice had to say a signature or a docusign or whatever is valid. But the larger story is that the hanko was also a way of Nemawashi, of getting buy-in from everybody, right? So you would go around in this large organization and you'd frame the issues such that everybody would eventually put the hanko on it. And once they had the hanko on it, then they could not afterwards complain. It was a process of co-optation, of getting everybody's buy-in, of getting everybody's signature. So now we can't do the hanko anymore, right? And then suddenly we're, okay, we're just going to make decisions. And we're going to, maybe we're going to just make some of these decisions without getting buy-in from everybody. Maybe we're just going to cut these meetings short. Maybe we're just going to go for outcome here. And the shift to telework, this very sudden shift is clearly, clearly propelling the work style reforms of 2019 that the Hataraki Kata Kaikaku forward in a way that is like unimagined, that the people work normal hours, that people have dinner with their families, that the companies allow them to take the computers home. They have to, right? So now people can go home, have dinner with their families, and then keep working if there's a lot of work to do. And even the Ministry of Workouts can do that. And so it's, it's definitely changing, you know, tremendously. And so it's a huge push, it's a huge shut in the air. I think that's good to see remote working changing and the decline of the hanko. Yay, that's good. We have a question here from my so-est colleague, Sarah, who says she works with a lot of Japanese companies in the UK, Japanese subsidiaries in the UK, and the problem she sees is not with their globalization strategies per se, but rather the way that they deal cross-culturally with people management once they're in other, you know, cultures. So they're just sort of different approaches to business processes, makes them a little bit inflexible when they're operating in other countries like in the UK. So how, how do you see this affecting their globalization and their reinvention strategy? That's a, that's an ongoing struggle. And it won't change anytime soon. So that's not an old art, but I think that, you know, that's a mission earlier that's hard, right? And so what, what many companies did is they equated globalized managerial skills with speaking English. And then they would teach people to speak English. And, and that's, that's good. Might be helpful. But that's of course not being global. Globalism might say. And so I mentioned, I had on my slide, I had this innovation tourism chart. So what some of the companies that I look at, right? So at the, at the very top of us, what they're doing is they're taking people out of their comfort zone, they're sending them to a loose setting, right? And California owns that brand, right? And so they're putting one on an airplane, you know, go to California and do a design thinking workshop. And then they do this in English. And, and so they're trying to change this one person at a time. And of course that takes forever, but that's maybe the only way to do it. And it doesn't work for all people. And so, yes. So you get these office trades still back, you know, in foreign countries. But, but I think some of the companies I've realized this, and they've realized that this is the one thing that they really have to become more flexible, flexible, and they're trying, right? And so, so they're trying to change those things. But, and the free office and the innovation tourism is all efforts towards that goal. But, but yeah, it has to happen almost one person at a time. And so that that'll just take forever. There's a question here from Liam about the issue of Karaoshi, you know, overwork or death from overwork. Do you think companies in Japan are devoting more time to mental health care of their employees and looking at issues like that? I guess long working culture, long working hours, we're tying to that as well. Yeah. So, the Prime Minister Abe was very good at shaming people and companies into doing that. That's one way to do it. Yeah. So the blacklist was a list of shame, right? So if, if, if you were on the, on the overwork blacklist as a company, that was not good, right? And so, and so people tried to change this. And then the 2019 work style reform has introduced mandatory vacation and has prohibited overtime of that sort, right? And so if you're, if you're in a, in a highfalutin profession, consulting law accounting, then that doesn't apply. But for, but for the standard rank and file, the companies can no longer demand that you do overtime over a certain amount. And that's a law. And you could get into, into real trouble. Now, and so that what they, what they were trying to do there is to do away with the services on you, right? The free overtime work. And, and yet in reality, of course, people might still do that. And so that is, that is a, that has, that has to change. And the way that the government thinks that that has to change because it's, it's not good for anybody. It's not good for the reputation of Japan or the company or the people. So let's change that. And so, so that's where the shaming came in. And, and when Densu had this case, you know, the, the, of the worker that, that committed suicide from overwork and, and Densu was really perfect for that. I mean, they were in the headlines because they can't do this and they had to pay a big penalty. And so, so the, the government is getting more proactive around this. So in the old days, it was, oh, it's too bad, you know, it's on then, but now it's like, no, no, no, you can do this. I think this is not okay. So I think I'm hoping it's changing. And, and then with more cases that this is just becoming less and less acceptable. So that changes happening. And we hear less of it now, I think already. It's still there, but I think, I think that's going the right way. And we have a question here from Satoshi-san, who said, talking about this Japanese type business culture and making, you know, making it difficult for change. So he said there's been, you know, some scandals, for example, when particularly accounting scandals and things like that at Toshiba and thinking about previous ones like Olympus where, you know, people, people in the company knew that there were problems and accounting issues and budget issues going on, but nobody raised their head above the parapet, I guess. And so do you think, you know, how, how do you think this culture impacts on the achievement of Japanese companies? And is there any change going on in that kind of, that's very difficult. That's a great question. So my interpretation, I thought, you know, especially the Toshiba case where the CEO was a bad CEO, right? And there's no vision. And all he was saying is, you know, cook the books. We want to, you know, increase sales. Increase sales. And because it was clear that nobody could increase sales, they just cook the books, right? With a double counter. And my interpretation is that that's actually not so much a culture. Although on that point, as the famous Hugh Patrick, Professor Columbia was pointed out, you know, the Japanese scandals are interesting because generally, the companies, the employees steal not from the firm, but for the firm, right? They commit, they commit, they engage in scandals behavior to protect the company, not to take something from it. And so, and so this accounting thing is, so these, these managers in the TV business unit, you know, made up sales. And I think that's a challenge of life and employment and the rigidity of the lack of mid-career labor mobility. If you're a 45 year old employee of Toshiba, so too old to change, right? And you're already, as you've been 10 years, more than 10 years of the company, so your pension is vested. And yes, you have a house in the mortgage into children. And there's no, you can not just go sideways and join Hitachi. That, that, that still does not exist. That mobility is not there. If you're a 45 year old employee at Toshiba, you have no way out than to do this, right? And, and there's no whistleblower, but you also don't want to be the whistleblower because what are you going to do? You want to be jobless, right? You're going to lose your job. And then there's no way to go. So, or, or the places you can go or not are insufficient to sustain your, your lifestyle. So, so people are caught and that is changing. And so the life and employment rearrangement, what's the right of the worker and what's the responsibility for the company is being redefined right now. And, and as that happens, one hopes that, that, that employees will, will find ways to speak out and say, I don't, I don't want to steal on behalf of the company. I mean, I don't want to cheat on behalf of the company. I'm done with this, right? I don't want to do something else. And, and then also, this is clearly a leadership issue, right? I was in Japan as a leadership challenge that the people at the helm are, you know, Toshiba was a special case, but the Olympics were also maybe a special case, but, but it happens in Kobe Steel. The CEO was, was, there was, there's nothing wrong other than that he wanted, he wanted more sales because there was this pressure on profitability. We need more sales. And the good people at the shop floor said, okay, fine, we'll just cut some corners. And, and then that's just bad leadership. You should just tell it, but don't cut corners. Now we need to, we need to find a new strategy to be more profitable. But, but it can't be, it can't be, you know, in terms of, you know, lower quality, it has to be different way. We have to move up, we have to move to what's the technology frontier, we have to increase our prices, we have to do something, but not, not cut corners. And then I think, this is sort of the 2080 problem, right? So I look at the 20% of companies that can do this and can be more profitable without cutting corners. Whereas, maybe, maybe the 80% they're not doing well or, you know, squatting. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm aware of time that we've taken up the 90 minutes we said that we were going to take. There were a couple of questions that I didn't get to, I'm sorry, but I think some of them already covered people were asking about SMEs and entrepreneurship and womanomics, et cetera. And I think we did pick up on those in the chat. So sorry if I didn't ask your particular question, but hopefully you enjoyed the session anyway. And I think we covered most of the questions. So, I mean, just thank you so much, Orika, for joining us in the middle of your busy day. I'm sure many people want to go off and have dinner now as well. And you have to go, you probably have to go off and teach and go to meetings and things. But thank you for coming along and giving us such a wonderful insight into what's happening. It's really, it's really important, a lot of those changes that are taking place. And it's really good to see the changes as through your research. So thank you very much. And hopefully we can get you to London again one day when all these travel restrictions are lifted. And hopefully many of us here can get to see each other again and of course get back to Japan as well. So, but in the meantime, it's great to have these chats. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me. My pleasure. And yes, I will knock on your door as soon as I get. Brilliant. Okay, thanks, everybody. And thank you to everybody who joined today. We had about 70 people there at one point. And thanks to those of you who asked questions. That was great. So I hope you enjoyed it and have a good evening. And enjoy the rest of your summertime, Orika, because it's going to be winter soon in California. All right. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.