Automatic translation by Google Translate.We cannot guarantee that it is accurate.
Skoða vefinn á Íslensku
Gestagangur // Yuki Tokunaga
Living Traditions –What Japan’s Long-Lived Businesses Reveal About Cultural Continuity
This lecture explores how long-established Japanese companies make decisions and sustain continuity over generations. Based on field research with traditional businesses, it highlights a distinctive decision-making model shaped by culture rather than short-term economic rationality. Instead of optimizing for a single metric such as profit, these companies balance multiple perspectives, including customers, employees, community, and even predecessors. A key concept is “visible stakeholders,” where decision-makers refer not to abstract categories but to specific people and relationships grounded in experience. This creates a process in which diverse considerations are not eliminated but integrated into a final decision. While this approach may appear slow, it enables long-term trust and resilience. The lecture also connects this model to contemporary discussions on diversity, suggesting that the challenge is not diversity itself, but how to integrate multiple perspectives into coherent decisions.