ACP PHILOSOPHICAL MANAGEMENT CONSULTING

Knowledge Management Japanese Style

How an Eastern Understanding of What Knowledge is, Drives World Best Practice

By Dr Dirk Maclean 

Japanese companies and academics between them have dominated the field of knowledge management since it first established itself as a discipline during the 1990’s. The writings of Nonaka and Takeuchi have become the standard texts of KM, their models capturing the world beating practices of Canon, Toyota, Sony, and a host of other successful corporations whose home base is in Japan.

An examination of the conditions that generated such success reveals a close connection between the management of knowledge Japanese style and the key capabilities displayed by these companies, their responsiveness to consumer tastes and market trends. their speed in developing new products, their domination of new technologies, and their ability to create entirely new markets from nothing.

Western competitors have begun to match these capabilities in the recent period, a company like Apple being the most obvious example. Nevertheless, for most large corporations based in the West, knowledge management is understood as a purely IT function and focuses mainly on databases. While there is a growing awareness that KM has an important role to play in today’s ‘knowledge-based economy’, the field is still struggling to shake off its IT roots and take the kind of central position it has in Japanese companies for many years.

Underlying this is a cultural difference between East and West, Japanese style knowledge management is above all Japanese, rooted in Japan’s culture in the same way as are many of the distinctive management practices of Japanese companies, the ‘Toyota Way’ for example.
However, this culture is not impenetrable to Western observers. Japanese KM rests on a certain understanding of what knowledge is, one that is radically different from the conception that predominates in the English-speaking world. in spite of this, a number of currents within Western philosophical thinking, above all the work of Heidegger and phenomenology, approach knowledge from a similar perspective to the one that drives the Japanese attitude to KM. An understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy, therefore, helps to shed light on how leading Japanese corporations have been able to use superior KM to build and reinforce their competitive position.

THE WESTERN CONCEPTION OF KNOWLEDGE
The Western understanding of what knowledge is traces its origin to Ancient Greece, and takes its predominant current form in the shadow of modern science and technology, as well as Enlightenment thinking. The influence of the ancient Greeks is present in the consideration that knowledge is somehow superior to mere ‘opinion’. This leads to two important conceptions, that knowledge is ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’, and that what is known is separate or independent from the knower.

This in turn has several implications, it privileges certain types of knowledge over others, objective ‘facts’ over subjective ‘points of view’, and it sees the act of knowing as a kind of grasping or capturing, once knowledge is gained it can be held securely as it will apply in all places for all time. It is this quality that raises it above ‘opinion’.

Within this conception, science revolves around facts that are verifiable through experiment or technology, their practical application is ‘repeatable’ by anyone with the right equipment and eyes to see, based on principles that are universal across space and time, the laws of the universe. Repeatability and universality mean that knowledge is something that can be captured in writing, above all in the timeless and culturally neutral language of mathematics.

In a management context, this cultural preference expresses itself in a favouring of quantifiable data as the basis for decision making and performance measurement, the codification of processes and procedures, the adoption and use of SOP’s, and a reliance on tried and tested ideas in common use across an industry or sector. The aim is to back up the mere subjectivity of an individual management’s viewpoint or an organisation’s practice with an appeal to something more solid, more objective, knowledge that can be locked in through writing or numbers.

THE JAPANESE VIEW
In Japan, this approach to knowledge is accepted as having practical value, it has its place. However, the Japanese conception is much broader, and rests on an entirely different set of assumptions as to what really counts as knowledge.

It is this broader conception that also belongs to phenomenology, and motivates Heidegger’s critique of Western ‘metaphysics’, the worldview that underpins Modernity and at the same time informs current management attitudes to KM. Heidegger argues that the privileging of the objective over the subjective, the view of knowledge as being something independent of the knower, is itself a particular form of subjectivity, one that arises in the West at a certain historical moment, and it is by no means the only way of understanding what knowledge is. Even the Ancient Greeks, in their daily lives and as expressed in the ideas of Aristotle, held a very different view of the world and of knowledge when compared with the perspective of modern science and technology.

From this point of view, knowledge is always ‘subjective’, it represents a certain perspective that says as much about the knower as it does what is known. However, this does not make it an inferior form of knowledge, ‘mere opinion’, for any perspective has a validity of its own, and ultimately the question of its value is an ethical one rather than to do with ‘objective’ truth. This is an aspect of the question that was long forgotten in the West until some of the negative and darker aspects of modern technology started to become more obvious as the 20th century progressed.

The ideal therefore, is not to create knowledge that is objectively correct, but to develop a subjective perspective that is of value. This is precisely the approach adopted by Japanese companies to knowledge creation and management. The first step, therefore, is to define the knower and the vision of knowledge they will be deploying. This plays a role similar to the mission statements common in Western companies, but stronger. It defines the identity of the corporation, how it sees the world, and what its place within that world will be. In the case of the pharmaceutical producer Eisai, this first manifested itself with the slogan, ‘on the side of patients’, followed up with the company philosophy known as ‘human healthcare’. It is this ‘knowledge vision’ that determines the company’s entire approach, to those areas of knowledge that are relevant to its purpose, what it is looking for within those fields, and what it intends to do with that knowledge. It is a subjective standpoint shared by everyone within the corporation.

Not only is such a standpoint subjective rather than objective, it is in fact unique, and this is considered a strength rather than a weakness. On the basis of this shared subjectivity, employees inside the company experience the world and understand their own activity in terms that no outsider can participate in. Among other things, this means that much of the knowledge inside the company is based on shared experiences, and is tacit, or unspoken. It is no accident therefore, that the handling and circulation of this tacit knowledge around the organisation forms a major focus of Japanese KM, a notion entirely alien to the Western viewpoint where the tacit has never counted as genuine knowledge. It also goes some extent to explaining Japanese HR practices, in particular the reluctance of leading companies to hire people who have worked elsewhere, and therefore whose worldview has been shaped from within another organisation’s knowledge vision.

THE CONCEPT OF ‘BA’
The management of both tacit and explicit knowledge lies at the heart of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s famous SECI model, which has become the standard for KM internationally. At the centre of the SECI circuit lies the Japanese concept of ‘ba’. ‘Ba’ stands for the company and it is a location, it is the location within the world from which knowledge of that world arises. There is no English equivalient to ‘ba’, but the idea is very similar to Heidegger’s ‘Lichtung’, the light or clearing in the forest. Where the Lichtung happens to be determines what part of the forest can come into view, what can be known. ‘Ba’ is not a thing or a place, it is in fact an empty space, the creation of a space into which the things of the world can emerge, and be known as belonging to it.

It is with this in mind that the broad scope of Japanese style KM can be understood, and why it goes so far beyond the management of databases. KM is intimately connected with the corporation’s mission, and is fully strategic in the sense that it is also inextricably bound up with its core competencies, those organisational capabilities that deliver a competitive advntage. And it helps explain the particular strengths of Japanese companies, most notably the rapid development of innovative families of products within a defined technological sphere. Canon for example, has a knowledge vision and set of core competencies related to optics, and this single ‘ba’ is the common thread across all its divisions and wide-ranging suite of products, from cameras to photocopiers.

What does Japanese knowledge management look like then ? Aside from the SECI model which focuses on the movement of knowledge between tacit and explicit modes, KM Japanese style has a number of features which contrast sharply with conventional Western thinking. These include –

  • IDEALISM AT THE CORE
  • INNOVATION AS SELF-RENEWAL
  • AN ORGANIC STANDPOINT
  • BOTTOM UP THINKING
  • KNOWLEDGE AS SOCIAL

While these concepts have their roots deep within Japanese culture, the experience of the last few decades has demonstrated clearly that companies anywhere can adopt and adapt these principles to great effect.

IDEALISM AT THE CORE
At the heart of the company lies an ideal, a vision of how the world should be, and it is the purpose of the organisation to bring this vision about. Microsoft captured this same sense of idealism with Bill Gates’ famous goal of ‘a PC in every home’. This core ideal remains constant, and the stability of its vision serves as a compass and a guide allowing for anything and everything else about the organisation to evolve as it seeks to achieve its goal.
Companies can also use this principle on a smaller scale, setting a ‘driving vision’ for a particular project or product. This vision may be an impossibility, nevertheless it still serves to inspire and direct the organisation’s efforts. Tata’s Nano, the ‘I lakh car’ ($2,500), or a ‘zero harm workplace’ (accident free), are two examples of a vision that binds a project or program together.

INNOVATION AS SELF-RENEWAL
The stability of this core ideal and the sense of identity it creates in turn allows for every other aspect of the company to be open to change and innovation. Japanese companies follow Nietzsche’s call to ‘invent yourself’, seeing innovation as a process of self-renewal, in other words what gets renewed is the company itself, rather than just a product or service. This generates a more open and flexible attitude to change across the organisation.

AN ORGANIC STANDPOINT
This is a conception of the company as an organism rather than a mechanical system, with a sense of its own identity, purpose, and set of values. The parts within the organisation each develop and contribute their own perspective as they experience the world in different ways, like the hand or the eye, and it is from this combination of multiple perspectives that the organism finds a way through its environment that is unique to it. The parts are defined by their common identity within the whole, are not interchangeable with the same parts of another organism.

BOTTOM UP THINKING
In Western companies, ideas tend to come from the top and filter down through the ranks, the CEO and top management team set the direction, take the initiative, and issue instructions. In Japanese companies, ideas flow up from the bottom, from frontline employees engaged with customers and the production process. The role of managers is to reconcile conflicting information as it rises up through the organisation, and set priorities for the allocation of scarce resources. This means knowledge creation and management is above all a bottom up process, an approach that is now being adopted in the West by the military, emergency services, and ‘high reliability organisations’.

KNOWLEDGE AS SOCIAL
The Japanese understand knowledge as a collective, or social product coming out of the organisation as a whole and shaping its sense of self. Knowledge management, therefore, is above all concerned with the facilitation of this process, allowing knowledge to circulate around the company and be absorbed into its being. KM shifts from being an IT function to one that encourages social interaction across the organisation, building knowledge networks and a common understanding of both the wider world and the company itself.
This approach to knowledge management has a number of implications, in particular for the development of competitive strategy. KM takes on a strategic dimension as it is intimately linked with a company’s mission, its vision, and is thus bound up with the development of core competencies, those key organisational capabilities that deliver a competitve advantage.

STRATEGIC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR SME’s
Adopting Japanese style KM can therefore help entrepreneurs and fledgling companies establish a clear ‘knowledge vision’ around which to build the core competencies that will establish them successfully in the marketplace. This is especially so if the company intends to follow a differentiation strategy, as most start ups do, building on a unique insight, position, or intellectual property.
Medium sized companies or conglomerates that lack a clear set of core competencies and are lagging behind market leaders can also benefit by asking themselves the following questions –

  • does the company have a clear identity and purpose ?
  • is there a stated knowledge vision ?
  • is this linked to some core competencies ?
  • do existing core competencies provide a platform for innovation ?
  • are HR practices aligned with this platform ?

Examining these issues can assist a company to develop its competitive position, and secure its successful operation into the future. ACP consultants can help entrepreneurs, start ups, and medium sized companies in particular establish a sound competitive strategy by applying the principles of Japanese style KM.

Contact ACP for information on Knowledge Management Staff Training and Development Programs to benefit your enterprise.
 

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