Is striving strictly necessary? Westerners think of commitment in terms of climbing mountains, vying with others, applying (to quote the Prussian general and master-strategist, von Clausewitz) the 'maximum exertion of powers'. In war and sport, the need for immense effort and superior resources is self-evident. They must be directed, true, by superior strategy, for which read thought, and at least equal mental vigour, for which read will; but battles and games won against vastly superior forces are rare.
The mighty (like the All Blacks at their all-conquering peak) make themselves mightier still by the application of their power, and not by its sheer weight alone. As every rugby player knows, it's mass times velocity that breaks the defence. Like war, sport is a very useful source of inspiration for business success. Virtually all the moves can be fully documented and observed in retrospect. The armchair strategist or coach can spot where all errors were made, where the golden opportunities were missed.
But the differences are as important as the similarities - not least in the rarity of total defeat in business. Managers talk of 'blowing the opposition out of the water', but defeated opponents may not only stay in the game, they can rise from the ashes of defeat. The dazzling comeback of the down-and-out is a Japanese speciality - with the rise of Komatsu to world power in earth-moving machinery as just one convincing example of commitment in adversity.
Left to die by its own government, Komatsu built an astounding rise on the war cry of 'Maru-C', or 'Encircle Caterpillar', its seemingly invincible American opponent. Such Japanese victors seem to epitomise Clausewitzian warfare. No effort is spared. With terrifying thoroughness, their deeply committed companies press on until the opposition has melted away. Yet these supreme strivers come from a culture whose most influential philosophy is the antithesis of striving.
The core of Zen is meditation. Its heroes are not men of action, but teachers, artists, poets and dreamers. While its literature revolves around self-improvement, the ultimate objective of improving the self is to obliterate sense of self altogether. 'Success' is enlightenment, which to Westerners is both incomprehensible and nothing to do with any worldly success.
The black-and-white Western mind insists that worldliness and spirituality are opposed - that they are different worlds. The idea that you can succeed without striving is also foreign to the Puritan ethic: whatever their nominal religion, most Westerners are Calvinists at heart. If you believe that high success is the reward of the righteous for hard work, the Zen approach sounds like Eastern gobbledegook.
What would a Western trainer do, for example, if he had a wrestler named O-nami (or Great Waves) who, despite wonderful strength and skills, loses every public bout - beaten not by better wrestlers, but by his own fears? Exhortation and effort would almost certainly be the remedy. O-nami would not, for sure, be advised to spend the night in a temple, living up to his name mentally: 'You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing all in their path. Do this, and you will be the greatest wrestler in the world.'
By morning, the waves in the wrestler's mind had swollen gigantically, drowning the temple in 'the ebb and flow on an immense sea'. The beautiful book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, says: 'In the morning the teacher found O-nami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler's shoulder. "Now nothing can disturb you," he said. "You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you." The same day O-nami entered the wrestling contests and won. After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him.'
The East-West conflict is less real than it seems in this anecdote. The wrestler's objective was still total commitment and maximum success. Every sportsman knows that mental attitude is as important as strength and skill in achieving success - that's the essential message of this book. And the wrestler actually was stronger and more skilled than his opponents. The Zennist, like any sporting champion, seeks to master two things: his art and himself. Great Waves had succeeded in the former, but not the latter.
Nobody who saw Kurosawa's Seven Samurai will forget the swordsman, first seen sparring with a belligerent opponent, who refuses to accept that he has been out-sparred and insists on fighting for real - against the swordsman's wishes. Forced to fight, the latter kills his challenger, in an amazing slow motion sequence. The senior samurai, looking on, comments that the victor lives only to perfect his art: commitment indeed. Japanese literature is full of similar stories about unwilling champions compelled to put down unwise challenges.
The object of the martial art aikido, is to develop the inner force that, writes Michal Random, 'can easily master brute force'. Ueshiba Morihei, founder of modern aikido, failed 'to convince one powerful adept of karate'. The adept declared that 'I don't care what you say. I weigh eighty kilos, and if I hit you, you will fly six metres off the ground.' The smiling, fifty-seven-kilo Ueshiba begged to differ, but the karate champ insisted on a public duel.
Ueshiba bared his chest, the opponent ran up and struck him a violent blow - but 'he might as well have hit the air. The master stood looking calmly at him, not blinking an eyelid.' Begged to try again, 'The young man ran up again and hit out with all his strength. This time the master remained as motionless as the first time, but the karate expert shrieked with pain. His wrist had been broken.'
After using non-resistance to absorb the first blow, Ueshiba had 'produced a rebound' of his opponent's energy to the power of ten. While that sounds like scientific nonsense, we wouldn't want to test our scepticism in practice. The lesson is that perfection is an end in itself, from which success can indeed flow; but that the person who over-commits, who tries to bully success into being, to force it to happen, will always be defeated by the opponent who is more in harmony with what Ueshiba would call 'The Universe'.
To relax while applying the 'utmost exertion of powers', to try by not trying, to resist by not-resisting - all these are really familiar to Western thought; the phrase 'He's trying too hard' is common enough; athletes of the highest class 'tie up' in a race and lose their vital rhythm. The basis of avoiding the trap, of keeping your neck intact and your wrist unbroken, is that perfect mastery of the art - what you are doing - and of yourself: the person who is doing it.
The combination won't be achieved unless you take time out to think, to contemplate: to acquire the 'serenity and self-mastery' which are the apparently paradoxical objectives of the Japanese martial arts. Serenity is hard to reconcile with breaking someone's neck by a single blow. The ability to reconcile opposites without turning a hair, however, is basic to Zen and provides a basic strength to Japanese management - not because of any mystical values, but because paradox is basic to business life, and to all life.
Organizations and individuals must continually make trade-offs, sacrificing the maximum on one dimension for the sake of a better overall result. You can't simultantaneously plough back the maximum investment into new plant, machinery, technology and products and show the maximum short-term return on capital. You cannot, as an individual, serve both God and Mammon with equal devotion: at least, not if you're an orthodox Westerner.
The Japanese find no difficulty in the God-Mammon paradox or the investment-profits conundrum. Since return on capital is depressed by high investment, which they account a higher good, they cheerfully concentrate instead on return on sales. Their reckoning (eminently sound) is that, so long as profit on sales is maintained or increased, the other ratios will look after themselves - and that, anyway, it's long-term profit that counts if you're committed (as they are, passionately) to the long-term future.
They refuse, moreover, to agree that Mammon has no part in the spiritual life of man. Nobody has chased the money-changers out of their temples. Rather, the money-changers have created their own. Japan's premier industrialist for decades was Konosuke Matsushita, who began making plugs and sockets in Osaka just as the First World War was ending. His National Panasonic brand became a world-wide symbol of the Japanese advance in consumer electronics: the plug-maker, through its JVC subsidiary, tore the world market in video cassette recorders from Sony's hands.
Matsushita, a multi-billionaire, set up his own college to teach and research 'a new philosophy of government and management based on a new conception of man'. The initials of his monthly magazine, PHP, stood, not for any management or business nostrum, but Peace, Happiness and Prosperity. If you're like Matsushita, you are committed to seeking external success through the successful development of inner resources; and combine the two to provide material and spiritual benefits to the external world, which in return rewards you with still greater success.
The programme translates easily into Japanese business philosophy. You conquer markets and the competition by developing and strengthening all the firm's resources to provide goods and services that so benefit the customer that you can conquer markets and the competition...and so on and on. It's the most benevolent of circles (benevolent, that is, if you're not the competition). The development of corporate and individual skills fits perfectly into the circle of commitment.
Perfectly is the perfect word. When Japan's superior product quality first hit the West, the response was to equate it with harder work by a docile work-force. But what is higher product quality other than higher deployment of skills? The decisive force in this success - for quality has been a most powerful weapon in Japanese's commercial drive - is the commitment to perfection, a quest brilliantly demonstrated at Toyota.
The business was originally built by a patriotic manufacturer of sewing machines who didn't like seeing all the motor vehicles in Japan foreign-made. For most of its pre-war career the firm flopped; the first truck broke down on the way to its first public airing; its successors broke down in the hands of unhappy purchasers. After the war, when the badly blitzed plant had been heroically restarted, Toyota suffered from still worse breakdowns - in its own operations.
As the Arthur D. Little book Breakthroughs! recounts, in 1949 'Toyota management started to run out of operating cash. Inventories grew, salaries were cut, and finally, for Japan, the unthinkable happened. First, rank-and-file Toyota workers were laid off. Then the workers went on strike.' The rise from this grisly failure to astounding success owed much to an inspired production boss, Taiichi Ohno. His philosophy could not be simpler:'I feel strongly that the word "work" refers to the production of perfect goods only. If a machine is not producing perfect goods, it is not "working".'
On that foundation, Ohno erected the Toyota Production System, in which built-in sensors stopped machines whenever they began to malfunction: the machines were operated by human beings who could likewise stop the line when imperfections occurred. This jidoka is a literal application, in large-scale manufacturing, of Zennist perfectionism. The analogy goes far. Like a great Zen masters, Ohno became a revered sage, whose students were 'the apostles of Mr Ohno'. The sage or sensei, moreover, used Zen indirection to achieve results.
Thus, Ohno once found a bunch of defective cars. He removed the keys from one vehicle, which couldn't be driven off until the key cylinder was replaced. Then Ohno took the keys from another car, but left a note to say they were in his office. When the foreman showed up, he was told to find and bring back the first car - wherever it was. In the ensuing shouting match, Ohno yelled nothing except 'Bring back that car!' Finally, the foreman said, 'Well, I will take a day off tomorrow. We'll cover our tracks to Kyushu.'
At that point Ohno relaxed and said, 'That's all right. Never mind that car. You can go.' This elaborate play-acting, which has innumerable Zen parallels, was designed to force the foreman to divine and learn the real lesson: no more defective cars. To the Westerner, this seems absurdly roundabout. But Zen teachers believe that enlightenment comes only from within. Yell at somebody for producing defective cars, and you won't change his habit of mind. Yell about not bringing back one car, and you force him to work out the real fault.
The deepest learning and commitment arise not from teaching, but from absorbing - witness the would-be swordsman, in another story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, whose master, Banzo, told him never to speak of fencing, never to touch a sword. After three years of doing chores, Matajuro Yagyu had learnt nothing. 'But one day Banzo crept up behind him and gave him a terrific blow with a wooden sword.' Like Peter Sellers with his Japanese manservant in the Pink Panther movies, Matajuro never knew when another attack was coming - but by constant, instant dodging 'he learned so rapidly he brought smiles to the face of his master. Matajuro became the greatest swordsman in the land.'
Much the same thing happened to Takashi Oyama in the early 1970's, when he wanted to study pottery under the immortal Shoji Hamada. After six months in which he was merely entitled to watch, Oyama was allowed to do the thankless, unpaid task of kneading the raw clay - for a whole year. It was eighteen months before Oyama was allowed to sit at a potter's wheel; even then Hamada 'taught' Oyama nothing in words or explanations. But the young man became one of Japan's most successful potters.
There's a similar story, again, about Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of modern aikido mentioned above. Over five years, his master gave him just a hundred days of very expensive teaching. The clue lies in the swordsman story. When that pupil first asked how long his lessons would take, Banzo said ten years. Asked how long it would be if the pupil worked intensively, the answer was thirty years. Pressed still further, the master said 'In that case, you will have to stay with me for seventy years. A man in such a hurry as you are to get results seldom learns quickly.'
Western managers complain about the inordinate delays and expenditure of time as their Japanese counterparts make up their minds. Once a decision has been taken, though, the Japanese are committed to acting with a speed and determination that can leave Western partners breathless. But there's no hard and fast set of Japanese principles to help Westerners achieve equally successful results - the whole essence of Zen is that nothing is hard and fast, that everything is fluid.
It's a state of mind. That's where true commitment starts, with the acceptance of fluidity, of change within the unchanging, of the combination of opposites. Move on to the value of taking time out to think - about yourself, about what you're doing, about life, about the organization, about the long-term future, about whatever means most to you - and regard time spent in reflection, or meditation, as time well spent, even if no material results follow. They will, eventually.
Use time in which nothing is happening to set the scene for making things happen: watch, look at and absorb the events and the people from which or whom you can learn. Don't hurry this process, or try to hasten anything that can't or shouldn't be hurried. And think of yourself always as both pupil and teacher - the more you learn, the more you can teach; and the more others learn from you, especially by example, the more valuable their work will be.
Also, never forget that what people realise through their own efforts, convictions and commitment gives them greater stronger. Allow people time to make their own mistakes and their own successes - in which you will inevitably share. Insist on perfect performance - or trying to achieve it - for yourself and others. Finally, look back over this very bald rendering of Zen, and note that the precepts are precisely those that progressive Western firms are seeking to apply. There's nothing foreign here, nothing mystical, nothing but common sense and common humanity.
The Eastern spirit, however, gains enormously from the sense of unity that binds everything together and helps provide the confidence to strive for success by relaxing, to seek external victory through inner strength. Again, it's a lesson which should be familiar to Western managers and players. The most successful periods in the histories of the most successful companies and teams come when the culture provides an especially strong unifying force, when everything 'fits', when commitment is total.
The peak periods of achievement for individuals also tend to be those when they are most in harmony (a very Zen concept) with themselves and their environment. But the Japanese didn't achieve their economic miracles without the mixture of worldliness and spirituality that's beautifully demonstrated by a third story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
The great warrior Nobunaga attacked an enemy force which outnumbered him ten to one. That's no way to win. But Nobunaga turned to the spiritual world for help. He stopped at a Shinto shrine and told the troops that, after praying, 'I will toss a coin. If heads come, we will win; if tails, we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.' He prayed silently, then tossed the coin. It came up heads, and his soldiers, inspired by the omen, shattered the enemy.
'No one can change the hand of destiny,' said his attendant. 'Indeed not,' said Nobunaga, showing the coin he had tossed. It was double-headed.
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