Reading the book and writing this review is made entirely worth it just so I could make that awesome pun for the title.
Now, why would anybody read a book on japanese mangement from 1981 in their free time? The answer here is far too long and complicated, but needless to say the economic landscape has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. Japan is no longer the model of an effective economy having found itself in a slump since the early 90s, with the US maintaining its dominance in the world. And far more recently the companies that are highlighted in the book (IBM, HP, etc) have had some troubled histories and have been eclipsed by quite a number of companies. Despite all of these facts, there is still a lot of use out of this book, even if a lot of the information is common sense. Maybe it's useful since the management practises espouced aren't so common.
I will divide this review up into 2 sections, the first dealing with the theory itself, and the second dealing with the way the theory is presented in this particular book.
In a nutshell the ideas that govern Theory Z revolve around making a company's management style much closer to that of a nuclear family than a rigid hierarchy. In the nuclear family each person, or in a company the division and different employee levels, plays a particular role, but those roles are not clearly defined with blurry lines, and each member is dealt with respect and some equality. More practically for a company this means
- long term employment which encourages looking beyond the next-quarter's results
- slow promotion, so people aren't looking to take one another down
- trust, where people are confident in each other's capabilities, and also in the management's capabilities to reward people down the line
- a common company philosophy that defines the company's role in society and how employees should achieve that role
- lateral employee movement (and discouraging ultra-specialization) to increase the value of each employee and keep people enthusiastic about their work
A lot of these ideas as mentioned earlier are quite common sense, but a lot of companies back then, and even today have found themselves sticking employees in very specific roles, with people hopping from company to company. The biggest underlying current behind the theory is that everybody involved in the company shares the same ideas and concepts and works together for what is in the company's best interest and not their own.
These ideas are all presented in the book pretty concisely in the first chapter, and then repeated over and over again for the next 150 pages. Ouchi constantly retreads over the same points over and over again using different companies for examples, but each example really following the exact same pattern. The next 150 pages just become a kind of long and drawn out salespitch for his ideas where he keeps trying to point at different "success stories" and saying "see see! These ideas DO work!" Well, some examples are good to tie abstract into reality, but he comes off as desparate and overbearing by constantly hammering in the same points.
There's also some background and history of the way companies have evolved in both the US and Japan with some sociological insights thrown into the mix. Ouchi uses these theories for explaining why things have come about the way they have, and the knowledge he puts forth is quite interesting even when considered outside of a corporate management context.
All in all, I don't recommend picking this book up, but I do recommend spending an hour or so and reading a website that explains Theory Z in more detail as that's really all you need. After reading this review, you'd really only need another 30 minutes or so. And any kind of management information even if it's not totally practical or useful is still good to know to make people's lives easier by being able to better appreciate the way people work.
