TOWARD A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF CREDO-DRIVEN MANAGEMENT: CASE STUDY OF HUAWEI AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

• Published in: JOURNAL OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Vol. 49; pp. 67 - 79
• Main Author: Goto, Toshio
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Japanese
• Published: Japan Academy of Business Administration 25.05.2022
• ISSN: 1882-0271; 2424-2055
• DOI: 10.24472/keieijournal.49.0_67

This paper aims to discover the problems inherent in today's Japanese management and their solutions by comparing with Huawei, which is in sharp contrast to Japanese companies in its rapid growth, focusing on their credo-driven aspect. The first part of this paper examines Huawei's Employee Ownership Scheme to prove the company is wholly owned and governed by its employees. This governance system is also identified as the core mechanism to achieve a rapid growth as a credo-driven company by instilling the corporate philosophy among employees. In the next part, the literature review shows that credo-driven management improves financial performance, if accompanied by a sufficient mechanism to instill the corporate philosophy among employees, and that corporate philosophy is one of the major strengths of Japanese-style management, which however has not been sufficiently highlighted in the conventional research. The rest of the paper discuss, based upon the above, the credo-driven management with focus on its importance in general and specifically in the post-COVID-19 pandemic business environment, its potential to revitalize Japanese management, and its implementation. This paper has three major contributions to the literature as following. First, it first proved Huawei is wholly owned and governed by its employees under the relevant Chinese legal system, by examining its Employee Ownership Scheme and the governance system and rebuking other paper which negates its employee ownership and posits Huawei is owned by the trade union and, ultimately, the government. Second, the paper presented a new approach to the study of Japanese-style management with focus on its philosophical aspect as its strength. Leaving this subject less attended, the literature has focused on the labor practice, marketing and other aspects of Japanese-management in the past. Third, the paper clarified the way to revitalize Japanese management with credo-driven management and its implementation, with due emphasis on how to share and instill the credo with employees.