Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.

Despite the gulf, physical and cultural, between the United States and Japan, both societies are, in the end, made up of people, and people everywhere – when you strip away their superficial differences – are crazy.

While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.

My most important finding, however, does not involve the differences between us and Japan; it involves the similarities. Because despite the gulf, physical and cultural, between the United States and Japan, both societies are, in the end, made up of people, and people everywhere- when you strip away their superficial differences- are crazy.

Japan gets the most of ordinary people by organizing them to adapt and succeed. America, by getting out of their way so that they can adjust individually, allows them to succeed. It is not that Japan has no individualists and America no organizations, but the thrusts of the societies are different. Japan has distorted its economy and depressed its living standard in order to keep its job structure and social values as steady as possible. At the government's direction, the entire economy has tried to flex almost as one, in response to the ever-changing world. The country often seems like a family that becomes more tightly bound together when it must withstand war, emigration, or some other upheaval. America's strength is the opposite: it opens its doors and brings the world's disorder in. It tolerates social change that would tear most other countries apart. The openness encourages Americans to adapt as individuals rather than as a group.

Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service...The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.

So why is Japan different? Why do its top officials – and this trend extends across senior government posts – resign office, seemingly at the drop of a hat? The theories are endless, most of them relying on oft-repeated but simplistic stereotypes about the supposed centrality of honor, saving face, and respect in Japanese culture... Japan's problems are too vast, and its strengths too great, to be ruled by something as capricious and frivolous as the whims of the majority.

One of our competitors is a manufacturer in Japan who wants to capture every one of your entertainment dollars transporting all your content between all of your electronic devices on their memory sticks. We are not that company. And there is another company out there who doesn't care what you do, as long as you do it on their operating system. We are not that company either.

The American system of management, in my opinion, also relies too much on outsiders to help make business decisions., and this is because of the insecurity that American decision makers feel in their jobs, as compared with most top Japanese corporate executives.

The Japanese theatre art differs so widely from anything to be seen in Western countries that it might as well belong to the people of Mars or Saturn, so far removed is it from the ordinary affairs of life as known and experienced in the West. But just because the Eastern hemisphere has founded its theatres on opposite principles from those of Europe, there is all the more reason why this uncharted field of human endeavour should become familiar to our unaccustomed ears and eyes.

no company has a culture; every company is a culture.

The difference between the man of print and the man of scribal culture is nearly as great as that between the non-literate and the literate.

Collaborative competition is the way we should define the relationship. ...U.S. and Japan had similar... economic... technology competition, and... everybody was better off because Japan pushed the U.S. to do much more. Lots of these... important innovation pushes were because of Japanese competition.

no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A