Biography of Ouchi

Ouchi was born in M ​​in Gonolulu, Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii, where he grew up. He received a bachelor's degree of arts at Williams College Williams College and the degree of a master of business administration and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Chicago University University of Chicago. For the first time, Oucochi was awarded for his research differences between Japanese and American companies and their management styles.

His first book was published in M, in which he summarized his observations. Currently, the book takes 7th place in terms of the degree of 12 million. Ouchchi also put forward three main approaches to exercising control in the field of organizational management: market control, bureaucratic control and clan control. In recent years, Ochuchi has turned his attention to the organization and effectiveness of school education, as well as questions related to the school administration of the districts.

He published his review on these topics in metro, William headed a commission that proposed to consider the reformation program for the Governor of California California Arnold Schwarzenegger Arnold Schwarzenegger, and some of the professor’s proposals are currently being considered. Ouchi is a member of the advisory council of the US Presidential Debats Commission, the Council of Trustees of the Japanese-American National Museum and the board of directors of The Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools or just The Alliance, the companies of city schools in Los Angeles.

Economist William Ouchi American Japanese descent investigated the phenomenon of Japanese management of the USG. He explains the success of Japanese companies by almost the complete inclusion of an employee in a production organization, in which the authorities are taking care of the personal and family life of every subordinate; collector, and not an individual approach to work and responsibility, an extremely high degree of identification of an individual with a company.

These characteristics are largely the result of a lifelong system, characteristic of large Japanese companies. That is, the stability of the employee’s position is ensured, which is contrary to the American mentality, the main features of which are love for personal freedom, orientation towards individualism. The hybrid of the Japanese and American approaches was called the “ideal type Z”, which combines basic cultural commitment to individualistic values ​​with a pronounced collectivist model of interaction.

He simultaneously satisfies the old; standards and involves satisfying the need for involvement. Employment is actually lifelong despite the fact that this is not officially established, the staff turnover is low. In the city, the article began with a statement of the growing breakdown of labor productivity in Japanese and American companies and the following example: on the assembly line of one American company in Atlanta, Georgia, 35 Americans collected transistor panels, performing a number of standard operations.

In Tokyo, at another enterprise of the same company, 35 Japanese women worked on the same conveyor, performing the same operations. After World War II, American manufacturers began to consider their obvious superiority over foreign competitors self -evident, the Cold War era made them believe that the only threat of their security was associated with the communist bloc and, above all, with the Soviet Union.

And the idea that the opponent they had defeated, who became a strategic partner of America, could surpass it technically and even economically, was unpleasant and seemed incredible. However, Johnson and Ouchi did not limit themselves to this, they decided to tell the Americans about even more unpleasant things. Reading this book, you could make sure that America, for almost the entire twentieth century, retained the management in the field of management.

The Americans have always been at the forefront of its development, no matter what of its stages were discussed: scientific management, mass production or applied industrial psychology. Therefore, the idea that Japanese managers were able to surpass the Americans not only in Japan, but also in the United States themselves, in the seventies seemed almost offensive. Nevertheless, according to Johnson and Ouchi, the situation was just like that.

Here's what they wrote: at the Sony Corporation in San Diego, California, near the Americans, worked on the assembly line with and an inch screen, which was no different from a similar assembly line in Japan itself. However, in this case, the similarity did not end there: American collectors in San Diego worked with the same performance as their colleagues in Tokyo. Moreover, we conducted an examination of 20 other Japanese companies working in the United States showed that in some cases they are ahead of American companies operating in the same industries.

Johnson and OCHCHI asked the following question: if the Japanese really managed to get ahead of the Americans in the field of management, then what are the reasons for this and what should the Americans learn from the Japanese?The authors admitted that some elements of Japanese management technique are used in the USA, moreover, it was there that they first appeared. Say, the ideas of Taylor and other supporters of scientific management became known in Japan before the start.

First World War. Ren writes: the Japanese, probably, introduced Yukinori Hoshino Hoshino, the director of the Japanese bank Kojima Bank, who visited America in Hoshino, he met a permission to transfer his labor Principles of Scientific Management; The Japanese translation saw the light in or G. Having got into fertile soil, the seed of scientific management quickly sprouted and led to a genuine management revolution, which put the end of the era of the mercenary of entrepreneurs.

The leading specialist, author and consultant in this area was Joisi Ueno, who wrote in the city of scientific management, they began to penetrate the pages of magazines, educational programs and management in Japan. Karl Bart visited Japan in Johnson and Ouchchi believe that certain aspects of Japanese management are “inextricably linked with Japanese culture” and are therefore absent in America.

Having examined the similarities and differences of managerial approaches, they identified five distinctive features of the Japanese approach to management, which can be considered as an object for transfer to another soil: 1 emphasis on the movement of information and initiatives from the bottom up; 2 The transformation of the highest leadership of top management from the body issuing orders to a body that promotes decision making; 3 The use of the middle management link in the Middle Management as the initiator and the driving force of solving problems; 4 making decisions based on consensus; 5 Increased attention to the well -being of employees.

The assignment of these features to the specifics of Japanese, not American or Western management, seems quite controversial. The statement that the increase in the performance of Japanese companies operating both in Japan itself and beyond is equally controversial is due to some or all these factors. Nevertheless, the work of Ochuchi soon outgrown out of the analysis of the causes of a leading growth in labor productivity in Japan into consideration of the organization as a place of self -identification and as a social phenomenon.

Ouchchi co -authored with Alfred Yeger, who also worked at Stanford University, published the work “Type Z Organization: Stability in the Midst of Mobility” “Organization of type Z: Stability in the conditions of mobility” that appeared in the journal Academy of Management Review. Based on the provisions of Weber, Mayo, Houmans and Maslow, the authors began to study the concepts of anomia introduced by Durkheim.

They write: to ensure social support and normative anchors, which are a necessary condition for social life, society traditionally relies on family, friendly, church relations. As Mayo emphasized, the emergence of a factory production system and rapid changes in the technological sphere led to a high rate of urbanization, as well as to the mobility of labor and to the division of labor.

For many Americans, these forces weakened public, family and church ties. Sociologists indicate this weakening of associative connections as the main reason for the growth of alcoholism, crime, the number of divorces and other symptoms of mental dysfunction at the social level. At the same time, the most likely reason for the weakening of family, church, neighboring and friendly ties seems to be overshadowed by their emergence of a more promising source of connections: production organization.

A large production organization, which is the cause of urbanization and the involving evils, may also become a means of resolving them. Of course, the central role of the production organization as a place of self -identification has already been considered by industrial sociologists and, above all, Elton Mayo and U. Lloyd Warner, until the end of the seventies, the time when Ouchi and Yeger wrote their work, this subject did not require any additional interpretations.

The most modern researchers, such as Schumacher and Braverman, quite reasonably considered a large production organization more likely as a source of alienation and loss of self -identification than as a “social umbrella, in the shadow of which people can live happily and happily”, which Ouchi and Yeger write about. Based on their previous studies, Ochui and Yeger believe that the success of Japanese companies is explained by the following reasons: almost the complete inclusion of an employee in a production organization, in which the authorities are taking care of the personal and family life of every subordinate; collectivist and not an individual approach to work and responsibility; An extremely high degree of identification of the individual with the company.

These characteristics, in many respects, are the result of a lifelong system characteristic of large Japanese companies. Japanese companies operating in the USA, according to Ouchi and Yeger, are trying to establish the same system of identification of the company and the employee as in Japan itself. Despite the notorious love of American workers for personal freedom and their hostility to any manifestations of old -fashioned paternalism, the facts indicate that "they like organizations that provide communicative relations, stability and guaranteed employment." This allows Ouchu and Yeger to declare that the new model of the production organization is characterized by a combination of residual elements of an ordinary American model and elements of Japanese models.

They called this hybrid “Japanese-American mixed shape”, or “an ideal type Z”. They describe it as follows: the ideal type Z combines the basic cultural commitment to individualistic values ​​with a pronounced collectivist model of interaction. It simultaneously satisfies the old standards and involves satisfying the need for involvement. Employment is actually lifelong despite the fact that this is not officially established, the staff turnover is low.

Decisions are made on the basis of a consensus, and often attempts aimed at maintaining this “consensus” fashion look very clumsy. The authors believe that the organization of the type Z may not arrange some employees and be unsuitable for organizations of some types. Nevertheless, where such organizations are effective, they can fill a vacuum caused by relative degradation of society.

As these authors write, “American society as a whole is moving from a high degree of involvement in low, but people who are engaged in organizing the Z-type will feel more capable of stress and will be happier than the population as a whole” in Ouchi, who had become a professor at the Higher School of Management at the University of California Los Angeles, turned to the works Arjiris to ensure theoretical substantiation of their work.

By turning the description of the organization of the type Z, presented in an early work, into the theory of Z, in the new book, Ouchi deliberately resorts to parallels with the theory of X and the theory Y McGregor and notes that the attitude towards employees inevitably affects the management style. Although the book of McGregor was quite known, it was not the greatest influence was used by it, but by the work of Arjiris.

Referring to his book “Integrating the Individual and the Organization” “Integration of the individual and organization”, which has seen the light in the city of strict direct guide, weakens the motivation, delays psychological growth and limits personal freedom. Within the framework of “theory Y”, direct-authority can play a positive role only when the leader trusts employees to exercise their powers so that this meets the interests of the organization.

Then, we can talk about the dependence of the egalitarian based on equal rights, collegial management style and mutual trust, Arjiris calls for managers to integrate individuals in the organization, and not to contribute to the growth of alienation, hostility and bureaucratic depersonalization of work. In fact, the type of organization Z is close to the implementation of this ideal.

In the consent of the culture, the community of equal individuals works together, striving to achieve common goals. The work of such a system depends not so much on its hierarchy and control over the actions of employees, as on their consent and mutual trust. Organizations of the Z, according to OCHI, work better insofar as they are free from the worst elements of the hierarchy and bureaucracy and reach a high degree of consistency within their own culture.

According to Ouchchi, organizations of the Z “are usually considered clans, since they are close communities of people engaged in joint economic work and related to various kinds of ties”. Ouchchi borrowed or, more precisely, used the term Durkheim “clan” for the name “group of industrial workers who know each other well, but usually not connected by blood ties.” A striking example of the clan in action, according to Ouchi, was the CKK quality control circles, which began to operate in Japan since the beginning of the X.

The irony of fate, the movement, which engaged in the widespread implementation of quality control, was largely inspired by the work of American researchers, and, above all, U. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. In the first post -war years, Japanese goods were considered quite primitive and low -quality. The desire to improve the situation arose, partly thanks to the activities of American engineers engaged in the evaluation of the quality of American products within the framework of the relations sector with the civilian population of the occupation administration.

Tsurumi writes about two such engineers, Charles Profaman and Houmer Sarason: they made up a full course on industrial management, in which they affected politics, organization, governing bodies and activities of what they seemed to be a model of an American company.However, the material they presented were seriously different from what they were taught in America, and was an attempt to pass the desired for the real one.

In a section on quality control, they quoted Andrew Carnegie: “General successes in business are rooted in a much more important factor - quality.” In the end - the beginning of G. Permamamomamom and Sarason held two eight -eater seminars in Tokyo and Osaka, to which only top -level leaders were invited. The presence at these seminars was mandatory for its participants.

When the Americans stopped holding them, the Japanese began to do it on their own and held such seminars for another 25 years. According to Tsurumi, "to G., it was these leaders and Japanese scientists who actively distributed the ideas of seminars that were invited to Japan to the city, thanks to their efforts in Japan, the movement of quality control circles began." It is interesting that the interest was working as an engineer at the Hawthorne Works factories by Western Electric at the time when there at the end of the X - the beginning of the xg.