The Joy of Mergers in Okayama

He used to own and run a small telephone maintenance business. It was good work, but then there were mergers and there were more mergers, and soon he found that his company had ended up four steps away from the customer. Multi-level non-work is a very Japanese solution to recession. The customer requests the product from a major company. The major company subcontracts the actual work to another company who sub-sub-contract it, until it has finally been sub-sub-sub-contracted to a small family operation like the one that my taxi driver ran. The one he ran until the unification in the industry meant that his profit lines had been cut to a meaningless figure - and he gave it up for the simpler life of driving a taxi.

Only the big places remain. There is no meaning left for the small companies.

As usual, I had heard the same story the night before in a different context. An American friend runs a computer software company. Much of his work is at the fifth step removed from the customer. On one assignment, he went into the major company and saw 120 programmers sitting around. Why do they need me if they have 120 programmers?

I find it hard to answer that question. Why shift the work further down the gravy chain, adding nothing except your own percercentage? Is it diffusion of responsibility? Is it laziness? Is it greed? Is it a feasible feature of our future?