“DISTANT-THROW MANAGEMENT” OF EVER-CHANGING ORGANIZATIONS

<p> In recent years, many Japanese companies have suffered from low labor productivity and a lack of vitality. This paper focuses on the possibility that organizational inertia makes organizational unlearning difficult as one of the reasons why such conditions have occurred. I hypothesized that organizations can change if they generate outward forces that extend beyond inward forces by inertia. What is considered necessary for this is two kinds of “distance.” The first is a high level of aspiration, that is, “distance” from the status quo by top management. The other is the “distant” learning sources for organizational members beyond the existing boundaries of organizations and technologies. This paper calls such a management style “distant-throw management.”</p><p> In order to investigate this research framework, three companies that meet the research criteria were selected and analyzed. Every case shows that the top management presents a high level of aspiration. In addition, organizational members made use of both internal and external learning sources. In particular, it was confirmed that whenever discontinuous leaps were made, the organizational members used external sources of learning such as requests from customers that were different from their existing work. These organizational members' behaviors are considered to be the result of each company's change in business model that accompanied the change in its aspiration level, as such changes semi-compulsorily enable organizations to achieve organizational unlearning.</p><p> In this paper, the organizational conditions for supporting this “distant-throw management” were also found: an outsider's perspective of top management, focusing hiring on personnel quality, ensuring psychological safety, and so on.</p>