I.1) The Japanese school, Prioritizing harmony and operational efficiency The Japanese executive is a gardener when the western one is an architect*. This sentence is a good summary of the differences between the two managing system which I call the first two roads of management. When the western executive defines centrally a detailed plan, his[…]

At a time when many are writing about the future of the Renault Nissan Mitsubishi alliance, it is good to remember what made its success 20 years ago. Sometimes, it is not necessary to reinvent everything. This is an extract of the book to come, which I wrote a few years ago. It is part[…]

The fist chapter of this book is a quick description of the dominant Japanese management model and how it differs with its western counterpart. It is of course a difficult exercise, as it could be perceived as restricting the way Japanese firms are managed in a single and frozen manner. It is of course not[…]

  As child my first experience of Japanese culture was the Judo class my parents put me in when I was 10 years old. Judo means in Japanese the road of flexibility (柔道). 2 years later, facing a total lack of progress, partly due to a very rigid body, I gave up Judo. This was[…]

Paris Motor show (Le Mondial de l’Automobile) is the last major Motor Show of 2016 closing a transformation cycle that started a year ago in Frankfurt, followed by Tokyo, Detroit, Geneva, and Beijing. It is also the last Motor Show of a type. 2016 will remain a turning point in the auto industry. In just[…]

I was given the opportunity to make a keynote end of September at the Smart Cloud Show 2016 organized by the Korean newspaper Chosun on the theme smart city and smart manufacturing. This is in a nutshell, the outline of my presentation: Our world is at the dawn of an unprecedented transformation from a technical,[…]

There is not one day without news on the front of autonomous driving. But things appear now to be clearer with 2 schools of thought. The two giant companies Toyota and Google, leading their relative businesses, are representative of those 2 schools. From Toyota’s and most carmakers’ point of view, autonomous car will come step[…]

Starting in 2009, Toyota was hit by one of the biggest series of recalls in the automotive history. Even though it was later proven that there was no intention from Toyota to hide anything and that eventually it was established no defect affected the electronics of the car, the damage to the company’s reputation and business[…]

We regularly read or hear from renowned economists how the digital revolution to come will destroy jobs and keep GDP growth depleted. Among those economists are the 3 French Thomas Piketty, Daniel Cohen and Patrick Artus. All 3 have described in recent books a world that is becoming unfair, difficult, and according to them, the[…]

2 major new cars are introduced this year. Toyota Mirai –future in Japanese- is the first production model with a fuel-cell power train fuelled by hydrogen and only emitting water. Renault Kwid is the cheapest modern attractive product ever developed. Both impressive outputs, results of the best of the know-how of the 2 brands are[…]