Toshiba about to go bust?

I would be shocked if failure of a subsidiary brought down the whole structure. However it would not surprise me for the troubled construction arm to be severed away from the overall Corporate structure and restructured. I don’t think only Westinghouse is in trouble, but no doubt we will hear more later today as I think US financial regulators are more scrupulous about revealing all contingent aspects.

The Japanese way of working has some curious effects. I knew one sales person who ended you tendering for an entire bridge building contract. He had to go to a (Japanese) competitor for much of the work, but his lot had one factory on short time and really needed a good contract to sell the lanterns for street lights. He won the contract and his light maker was kept in work.

Landis+Gyr is one on the seller’s list.

Dave, I blame fashion. Many of the head Honshu maybe male and of an age when fashion is perhaps not the first thing on their mind. However, as soon as they believe that others are buying into the diversification game they jump on the band wagon.  Then they become suckers for the first pile of junk that comes along. It is not always junk often they simply over pay or find that selling lemons is not the same as say making silicon chips, even if you did use the chips in some other product. My old lot tried to put Steptoe to shame. They bought up a range of companies stacked out with just over the hill technology that the previous owners could not make pay. In some cases I advised not to buy, but they went ahead anyway. Of course they could have bought today’s tech for half the price using 25% of the power and doing twice ~ six times  the throughput. No wonder they wreaked the company. Shiny knobs were all the range one time, even if they did not know what the knobs did or why they wanted them.

Jason wrote:

Shiny knobs. We talking about the products or the bosses?

Well now you come to mention it, they were interested in shiny for the sake of shiny, without knowing what they did, many clearly were shiny knobs to boot. They all got their bonuses utill the river ran dry and we all got the shaft.

Ed is very correct, but the key is consensus. You must build a consensus before going to a meeting, let everyone know what is wanted and why it is such a good idea, get the whole team, or if necessary the whole company talking the same way and the action will emerge at the inevitable (rubber stamp)  meeting. However, the chop will always be used by the ‘key man’.

This can have odd effects, the most dangerous commands and passwords for those commands will be held by the ‘key man’. Then the same password and commands will be used by  the juniors who know the work. Security audits are just not an easy concept to sell in such cases.

However, unless you are Japanese you will never unravel the concepts under which they operate. I believe that Toshiba’s concept may have been right, the execution was seriously flawed. Westinghouse was a disaster with huge but not fully known financial holes into which Toshiba has been tipped.

Will they survive? How much will they have to put in to fill the holes? I do not know, but it will be a hugely damaging culture shock.

Ed P wrote:

I did however work with a number of Japanese and Japanese teams on major construction projects, and while hierarchies are good for building consensus their weak point is deference to someone perceived as stronger/wiser etc. This deference is a major problem when the ‘wise one’ ain’t so wise!

Ed I am reminded of these words by <span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>Tobias Smollett</span>:     https://tinyurl.com/k69r6hq   – quite a character –

“Some folks are wise, some are otherwise.”