When I was in Narita Airport I was browsing in a bookstore while we waited for our flight, and I wandered over to the business section. Just as in the U.S., there are business books that analyze the lives and management styles of the world’s most famous CEOs, and it was interesting browsing various Japanese-language books about Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to see how these enigmatic empire builders might look from the viewpoint of the Japanese. (According to J-List’s Tomo, they’re so far removed from the “plain and uninteresting” company founders in Japan they might as well be kami in the mountains.) I’ve written before about how the spirit of entrepreneurship works somewhat differently in Japan, which is to say, it doesn’t work very well — for a variety of reasons, the number of young, smart people willing to take risks to create new companies (like J-List) is very low. It’s a given that paradigm-changing companies like Google or YouTube or Facebook could never have occurred in Japan, a country where many Internet users think of the Yahoo (Japan) homepage as “the Internet,” where many forgo owning computers entirely, making do with a sleek keitai (cell phone) for their email needs, and almost no one has a favorite Linux distro.
Business books about foreign CEOs abound in Japan.
