Fukushima: Breaking Through the Rules

When a Japanese worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant ran into a guard who stuck to the rules and refused to improvise, it revealed a lack of flexibility Japan urgently needs to get out of its crisis. Unfortunately Japan is not alone. All too often, companies get attached to rigid plans and cannot adapt to new facts on the ground. 

Masayuki Ishizawa could barely keep standing when the ground started to shake under his feet.

Helmet in hand, he ran from a workers' standby room outside the plant's No. 3 reactor, near where he and others had been doing repairs. He saw a chimney and crane swaying like weeds in the wind. Everybody was shouting in panic. 

Mr. Ishizawa, 55, raced to the plant's central gate. But the security guard refused to let him out. "Show me your IDs," Mr. Ishizawa remembered the guard saying.

And where, the guard demanded in keeping with the plant's procedures, were Mr. Ishizawa's supervisors?

That's when Mr. Ishizawa lost it. "What are you saying?" he yelled.

He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow loom over the ocean. Then he asked the guard sharply, "Don't you know a tsunami is coming?"

Mr. Ishizawa was finally allowed to leave the plant and escape the tsunami that hit Japan (see video).

Having lived and worked in Tokyo, I am aware that Japanese companies have such long-term strategies (Matsushita, for example, reportedly still has a 250-year strategic plan) that they tend to be better prepared than anyone, but also too inflexible to improvise.

And it is possible that this lack of flexibility kept Japan from responding swiftly to the triple catastrophe when an earthquake combined with a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown.

But unfortunately, there are countless people in all cultures in the world who stick to prior rules and fail to adapt to the new imperatives when the unforeseen happens.

Look at the Swiss watch industry, which by 1968 commanded over 65 percent of the watch market worldwide, and over 80 percent of industry profits.

Throughout their undisputed reign, Swiss watchmakers had held on to tried and true rules of the game, doggedly producing the same first-class watches with high-quality and expensive manual labor. 

But by 1970 their luck turned; nimble Japanese copycats dumping their low-cost, high-quality watches on world markets outmaneuvered them. 

Unlike their skeptical Swiss competitors, leading Japanese watchmakers like Hattori-Seiko embraced the new quartz technology eagerly and benefitted from a massive drop in costs: The average production price of a quartz watch plummeted from $200 in 1972 to 50 cents in 1984.[1] 

The result: By 1989 Seiko alone produced some 15 pecent of the 690 million watches worldwide, while Switzerland’s watch industry took a nose dive and 50,000 of 62,000 Swiss watchmakers lost their jobs. 

In 1970 there had been 1,620 watch companies in Switzerland; fifteen years later there were 600, and their world market share was down to a meager 15 percent.

Ironically, the researchers who had developed the first electronic quartz watch were, of all people, Swiss. But when they introduced their cutting-edge idea at a 1967 conference of Swiss manufacturers, it was roundly rejected. 

Yes, the quartz watch performed like a watch, it looked like a watch, but it lacked “real watch” components like gears and mainsprings. In short, it did not fit the Swiss watch paradigm.

What do you think? Will leaders of automakers, newspapers, airlines and other industries follow the example of the 1970s Swiss watchmakers and the Fukushima guard and stick to existing rules? Or will they emulate innovators like the late Nicolas Hayek of Swatch or Masayuki Ishizawa at Fukushima, who broke through the rules to make a change? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. For a free copy of my new e-book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP), go to Leading-Leaders.

[1] Lucio Cassia, Michael Fattore and Stefano Palleari, Entrepreneurial Strategy: Emerging Businesses in Declining Industries (Northampton MA: Edgar Elgar, 2006).