Japanese workers transform themselves
Associated Press
OSAKA, Japan — For the first time in 28 years, Shigeo Suzuki breaks with a tradition in a nation known for its respect for protocol — he has no business card to offer a guest.
Associated Press
"Those are the company rules," he said, bowing in greeting. "No business cards while we are metamorphosing."
Shigeo Suzuki, left, and his colleague Mitsuhisa Yoshimura are taking part in a training program called Henshin University. Henshin, which means metamorphosis, helps Matsushita employees develop skills that will serve the firm in a new economic era.
Suzuki looks much the same as the other workers at his office, a subsidiary of electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products.
But after six months of participating in a training program called Henshin University, Suzuki will switch out of his job as a manager overseeing an engineering team, and join Matsushita's fast-growing technology patents sector.
Henshin means metamorphosis, and transforming workers like Suzuki is critical to Matsushita for a simple reason: Layoffs are regarded as impossible in Japan.
Jobs at big Japanese companies are promised for life, a tradition that in the past won praise for nurturing worker loyalty, long-term corporate planning and economic prowess.
Now, however, Matsushita must stay competitive in a global business environment where speed, flexibility and cost cuts count more and more — without letting workers go.
"Getting rid of people because we don't need them doesn't happen in our company," said Seishi Sasaki, a director at a Matsushita subsidiary, who now teaches a Henshin course.
Over the years, Matsushita earned the nickname of "copycat," for being in no particular hurry to innovate a technology and then adopting it quickly, once it took off among consumers.
Now, fears are growing that Matsushita is too slow and bureaucratic to compete with rival Sony Corp.'s savvy marketing and entertainment empire. Matsushita also faces greater competition from other firms in Asia, where cheaper labor is giving competitors an edge in product prices.
Yasunori Tateishi, who has written books on the electronics industry, says Matsushita's troubles are symbolic of the wider problems facing corporate Japan.
"If Matsushita goes down, Japan as a whole is going down," Tateishi said. "My question is, can Matsushita keep up with global changes?"
Shaken by the recent worldwide slowdown in electronics and telecommunications, Matsushita has forecast $364 million in losses for the fiscal half-year ending this month.
As a result, under a turnaround plan led by company president Kunio Nakamura, who took office last year, Matsushita is seeking to move 13,000 workers to sectors that produce solid profits, such as Internet linking digital appliances, computer services and display devices. The company also announced last month it was expanding its early retirement plan in hopes that several thousand of its 143,000 employees in Japan will quit.
The retirement plan comes on top of the $810 million Matsushita already spent in the fiscal year ending in March on other packages to coax workers off its payroll.
Although the plan is voluntary and critical for the company's turnaround, it has been criticized as a restructuring that previously was unimaginable.
Based in Osaka, Matsushita had prided itself on a corporate culture that claimed to build people, not just products — a favorite catch phrase of its philosophical founder, Konosuke Matsushita.
As a result, the company won't say it is restructuring. Reneging on the promise to provide jobs for life would turn Matsushita into "a run-of-the-mill company," said Nakamura.
Instead, he said, "We are asking our workers to metamorphose."
About 500 workers have moved on to new jobs in the last several years through Henshin programs, according to Matsushita. However, it is not clear whether the company can change as easily as its employees have, through crash courses in such fields as network engineering, liquid displays, and computer chips
Suzuki says he chose to participate in the metamorphosis effort because he wants to contribute to his company's future growth.
"The 21st century is still very uncertain and difficult to read. We need to find the seeds of technology to redefine manufacturing."
