This book analyzes the strategy and structure of successful Japanese manufacturing corporations. In spite of the depression during the 1990s, Japanese firms in high technology products have kept strong competitive power in the world market, revealing the strength of Japanese management systems. The authors analyze 10 years worth of data for 200 manufacturing companies.

New product development is not just about creating successful new products. It is about creating new products that will help companies succeed in the global economy. It is also about eliminating products that no longer contribute to the success of the firm. This book presents a blend of cases, original survey research, and theory, to show the principles used by successful firms in developing new products and pruning those that hold the company back.

The period of economic decline during the 1990s produced a wave of studies focusing on the failure of Japanese management according to western criteria. Yet Japanese manufacturing firms have continued to hold competitive power in the world market. This book identifies the institutional specificity of Japanese Management and the reasons behind its continued competitiveness. Through an exploration of the strategy and structure of Japanese manufacturing corporations the authors discover the essential features and strength of Japanese management systems, their problems and new trends, and consider how management strategies have been developed for future success. This new, sophisticated analysis of Japanese manufacturing corporations, based on data from over two hundred corporations, will enable the reader to better understand Japanese management systems and their potential to lay a foundation for successful management systems throughout the world.

AFM 1-1 and the United States Air Force's new vision paper, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, allow significant flexibility in the employment of Air Force resources. However, as doctrine or the core for doctrinal development, both documents intimate significant flaws in the process of creating guidance from theory, then applying that guidance to warfighting. An incongruent relationship exists between the creation of formal Air Force doctrine and the development of operational weapon systems. More specifically, the Air Force's inventory of long-range strategic bombers, although conceived as weapons of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, must now fit within the parameters of post-Cold War air power doctrine. In the B-2 in particular, the Air Force justifies the existence of a platform not entirely compatible with its overarching doctrine of global reach, global power, and global attack--an aircraft whose technological advances belie anachronistic origins.