Poor company

 

The president of a poor company does not have a vision for the future. That's why he can not choose directors based on a plan to proper the company. (Especially in Japan, the President chooses the director and the General shareholder meeting approves it.) So directors have never been given any goals and never been shown a standard to evaluate them.

 

Each director is given a department under his/her control to keep their face. In order to get the president's praise, they independently set goals for his or her own department that are easy to achieve and to benefit only them. The goals will not be to the company's benefit. It can't help but laugh, but the president and his directors believe it is "bottom-up" in them.

 

Each director pursues only the results of the department which he/she oversees and doesn't care about the departments overseen by other directors. When the interests among the departments overseen by each director conflict, the president decides which department interest should take priority based on which directors he likes more. So directors get to learn how to flatter their president to get their ideas adopted and it becomes their jobs. Whenever someone proposes a new idea, the merits are determined not by its content but by who said it.

 

In such an environment, competent people are feeling stressed and gradually leave the company. Before nobody knows it, the company is full of incompetent people..

 

Excellent company

 

The president of an excellent company has a vision for the future. He/She appoints people who can realize his/her vision as directors. Therefore, all directors' goals are to realize their vision. And it is also very clear that the standard which the president evaluates them is the rate at which they achieve the vision.

 

As the directors understand the above well, they cooperate with each other and act to realize the vision as their common goal. The first thing they do is to explain the vision to the employees in the departments which he/she controls. As a result, common values are shared among employees and employees cooperate across departmental boundaries.  As they work toward the common goal together, a sense of fulfillment in their work is created.

 

Why can the company be an Excellent company ? It is that the president has a vision and makes everything simple and clear so that his subordinates have no doubts about their decisions.