Week 1 Case Analysis
BUSN427: Global Issues in Business

Summary The case analysis for week one was about a large company in Japan and the changing culture in which Japan has faced since the 1920’s. Panasonic was one of Japans largest and most sought after jobs in the 70’s and 80’s. Panasonic is a company that was known to take care of its employees as long as the employees were willing to take care of Panasonic by putting in the best effort they could for the company. Panasonic gave many perks to those who would work for Panasonic as a life time employee but soon came to realization that the culture in Japan during the 90’s was changing. Panasonic had to undergo many different structural changes to ensure the survival of the company during the global recession in 2009.
Questions
1) Some of the cultural changes that were triggered in Japan during the 1990’s included a generation of employees that no longer wanted to work for a lifetime employment system. The generation saw that the culture around them was a much wealthier culture and they could make more money working for a company that didn’t have that lifetime employment system implemented. In the 90’s Japan was in an economic slump causing people to look for jobs that didn’t require them to work as a lifetime employee. The cultural change is affecting Japan and its traditional values today because people now understand that there is no guaranteed job. A company could be as strong as ever, but as soon as an economic slump comes along they are no longer safe as they saw from those employees who worked for companies offering the lifetime employment system. Those were indeed some of the first to go in order to keep the company alive and cut costs. 2) The way that Japanese businesses operate in the future due to the changing culture will have a major impact on the way that Japanese businesses have operated in the past and may be against what they believe. However, in order to overcome the ever so changing culture it would be in their best in interest to look at the structure the business currently operates with. Developing a new structure for the business to accommodate the new culture will help the business to a successful path. Eliminating all of the perks for those who work for the company for a lifetime would have to be eliminated in order to cut back on costs. The potential implications of such changes for the Japanese economy will only benefit the company that has agreed to a new structured format to operate under. There will be employees who disagree with the new structure but it would be for the company’s best interest in order to keep the business in operation. 3) During the 1950’s through the 1980’s Panasonic was able to reap the benefits of the traditional Japanese culture because the people were willing to work for the company for the entirety of their life. A company who can get that dedication from its employees will be around for a long time as Panasonic has been. It eliminates a lot of retraining of employees due to the fact the employees already know how to do the work, what is expected of them, what direction the company wants to go and how they can help Panasonic succeed. The traditional values did however become a liability during the 1990’s through the 2000’s due to the cost of keeping those employees. They were promised so many things when they were hired on and not to mention the average age of the employees during this time frame was 35 with many employees having to be over that age. A company cannot continue to promise a list of perks to employees willing to work there for a lifetime when the economy isn’t as strong as it was when the company first opened its doors. 4) The human resources that were being implemented at Panasonic were trying to attain a goal of reducing the costs Panasonic was putting out in order to stay afloat. They were giving employees a list of options to choose from to basically say that there is no longer a lifetime guarantee for working for our company but here are a few of your options to lessen the blow. I would have to say that in order to successfully implement these changes Panasonic should have set a goal for obtaining the implementation process. It seems Panasonic didn’t really have a time frame to achieve this goal which caused for Panasonic to run into issues faster than what it should have had those implementations been implemented at a faster rate. In Panasonics situation if the implementation process were to happen rather quickly than Panasonic could have avoided closing as many plants as they did all at once. Implementing the process as slowly as they did will create plant closures at a faster rate and possibly at a larger rate. By not setting a deadline to have these implementations implemented just shortened the life expectancy of Panasonic and its employees. 5) The Panasonic case analysis taught me a lot about the societal cultural and business success. Before reading this I would have thought that having lifetime employees would be the ideal way to go due to the lack of costs that would have to go into the employees seeing as how they have worked there and know the operation. However, it quickly dawned on me that the culture is and always will be changing and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. From a business perspective, it wasn’t the best idea to offer the large scale of perks to those employees based on the traditional culture due to the ever changing culture. In order to be successful it is alright to have a change of pace in the business place in order to achieve its goals and remain in business.