From The Economist
It is
hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.
But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.
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From The Economist
• London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.
• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.
• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.
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Globalization, Labor & the Transformation of Work: Readings for Seeking a Competitive Advantage in an Increasingly Global Economy an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
“Globalization” is a key concept that represents a wide range of complex processes in our modern world. These processes have wide sweeping impacts on the international political economy, international capitalism, and the ability for organizations of all types to gain and maintain a competitive advantage and successfully compete in an increasingly global economy. Additionally, increasing “globalization” over the past several decades has changed the dynamics of an increasingly international labor force, how organizations compete for this labor, their internal labor dynamics, and ultimately how they do business. As such, the nature of work and the workplace has also shifted dramatically over the past several decades.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to “globalization” and its wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to academics and students interested in the interplay between macro global processes and the more micro organizational and individual impacts, while also instructing managers, policy makers, and practitioners of all types interested in the role that “globalization” is playing in shifting international labor dynamics and the transformation of the modern workplace.
