van Nuis and Yokogawa's corporate culture

Roger van Nuis showed a graph that showed Yokogawa's revenue growing hugely (outside of Japan.) Inside Japan, knowledgeable sources point out that Yokogawa's market share is about as big as it is going to get, and the only way out of the downward spiral of the Japanese economy is for them to become a true multinational. Van Nuis pointed out (again) that Yokogawa dominates the Asian market...well, sorta. Emerson, ABB, Siemens, and Honeywell, and even little MTL have all made big strikes in Yokogawa's back yard in the past couple of years. But there sure are a lot of little yellow diamonds scattered all over the Pacific Rim and China and the rest of Asia. Van Nuis continued to talk about what Vigilance is: --corporate culture --business style --our values as a company and as people "So how do we take Vigilance to the next level for our end-users?" he asked. Vigilance, he said, "is operational excellence." He quoted Peter Drucker's famous dictum taht a well run plant is a boring plant, where crises are turned to the routine. In order to jazz up the proceedings, a la ABB and Honeywell, van Nuis and Lau showed a video...unfortunately the video consisted of a fruity-voiced woman reading the Powerpoint slides to us. We get it already. What we get: See Clearly Know in Advance Act with Agility Yokogawa insists that these are the keys to Operational Excellence, and they in fact are the ways Yokogawa breaks down their product and service offerings to produce complete plantwide integration. This is the climax: Yokogawa has arrived as a full-service automation vendor, as capable as any of the US or Western Europeans, and they insist on having the respect and the market share that is their due. Based on past history, I'd say they may very well get it. Rodney Dangerfield, they are not. Walt