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Albert L. Sieg with Steven J. Bennett. The Tokyo Chronicles: An American Gaijin Reveals the Hidden Truths of Japanese Life and Business. Essex Junction, VT: omneo (Oliver Wight Publications), 1994, 182 pages, $24.00.
Reviewed by Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, Associate Professor of Management, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS.
Albert Sieg was one of the corporate generals sent to penetrate the battleground of the Japanese market for Kodak in the 1980s. In his book, The Tokyo Chronicles, he details 25 lessons he learned about Japanese business and culture. I found the book both enjoyable to read and filled with insights from a man who accepted a difficult challenge with an open mind and a desire to learn.
Sieg was sent to Tokyo in 1984 as president of Kodak's Japanese subsidiary. He was a "gaijin" (foreigner) who oversaw operations that grew from 11 to 4,500 employees during the 7 years of his tenure in Japan. In addition to manufacturing, marketing, and sales functions, Sieg established a state-of-the-art research and development facility in Yokohama and hired the world's leading expert on molecular beam epitaxy away from a Japanese competitor's lab. By the end of the decade, Kodak had Japanese revenues of more than $1 billion annually (Latham, 1995).
Sieg and co-author Bennett recount how Kodak succeeded in Japan through a series of Sieg's personal stories that resemble parables. Chapters conclude with the lesson the reader should learn about Japanese life and business. For example, Sieg tells a story about a long train ride from Tokyo to Osaka, with the sole purpose of personally apologizing to a single Japanese consumer, Sugisaki-san. Sugisaki-san earlier had gone to the press about his anger over the compensation Kodak was offering him in exchange for his instant camera. (Due to a patent infringement lawsuit that Polaroid won, Kodak had been forced to both stop making instant cameras and recall and destroy all the cameras it had sold.) Sieg, in his role as president...