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This time a year ago, Yuji Kuroiwa, the governor of the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa, tried to make a light pun in the face of a new terrifying disease, an economic spasm and life-changing strictures.
The “golden week” of early May of the national holidays, usually cheerful, should be rebranded “fun week ”for 2020 – a reference to Japan’s prized quality of solid perseverance and no teeth. A year later, with the golden week of 2021 about to begin, infections are on the rise, the country is in a renewed state of emergency and less than 3 percent of Japan population receiving the first dose of vaccine, Kuroiwa threw the same gag for the second time.
After twelve months of trusting the public to keep Covid-19 in check with self-control, the repeated demand for inflexible resistance – from fun no visible end to the game: being a much heavier imposition. Perhaps he would feel less, say Japanese friends, if the authorities did not simultaneously promote his determination to allow many thousands of athletes and their teams to enter the country for the Olympics, without offering any firm goal to vaccinate the general population. .
This tense atmosphere is creating a moral dilemma for the leaders of Japan’s most globalized companies who are desperate to get back on the road (or the private jet). The ability to fun it is one of the deepest natural resources in the country: both the public and private sectors are constantly relying on it. But debates on Japanese social media reveal an outrage that the store has been oversized, rather than treated as precious and finite. Faced with this tension, say CEOs of several of Japan’s largest companies, business leaders don’t know if they should get vaccinated outside the country and sneak into a fun-elite exempt.
The motivation to do so is serious. In recent years, many Japanese companies have decided that the best growth options are abroad. The calculation is based on the declining Japanese population, but companies have also perceived an exceptional window for conducting overseas transactions in which investors are actively pushing them to increase the performance of equities and Chinese competitors. they are (for now) less affordable globally.
The result has been one boom in overseas acquisitions that is, pre-pandemic, generating an average of approx $ 23 billion bids per quarter. In a relatively short space of time, this has left several Japanese companies (from insurers to brewers) with vast global trading empires and the urgent need to patrol them in person.
The problem with all this acquisition is that it was undertaken with what were previously reasonable assumptions about how the new assets would be integrated. Not only would a substantial number of Japanese executives visit the acquired transactions and report, but there would normally be multiple trips by the CEO and his leadership team during the months following the agreement.
Japanese buyers often aim to keep the management of a target under close observation after acquisition, a control that depends on pre-pandemic mobility and that executives consider impossible through Zoom. The surprise visit to the farthest corners of their empires, which several CEOs have murmured in recent weeks, is a weapon of much lost management.
The business leaders they face now fall into two camps. One of them (particularly those with acquisitions in the U.S.) is actively pursuing schemes to be vaccinated abroad (or to make spirits vaccines at home for personal use) and to allow immediate travel.
Earlier this year, when Japan’s vaccination program seemed even more remote, national media reported in outrageous tones that the heads of “some of Japan’s most famous companies” had gotten vaccines from China.
A CEO of one of Japan’s largest family names was not part of this scheme, but it is easy to justify: thousands of employees trust him to run the empire to the best of their ability and it is necessary to receive a vaccine before to get it.
But several CEOs in the second camp, who also ran companies with recent overseas acquisitions, said the idea was unthinkable. Whatever the short-term benefits of taking months ahead in a slow, successful vaccine program, as a leader unable to fun – It would be irreparable.
He tells me that Japanese business leaders exist in a realm where, despite their revered elevation, they have to affect to share the quiet resistance of their staff, especially when fun it claims a resource that once seemed in such a plentiful national supply to bring everyone a second and painful golden week.
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