Page 212 - The Drucker Lectures
P. 212
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Deregulation and
the Japanese Economy
1998
ll over the world, senior bureaucrats descend from heaven.
AThe most extreme case is not Japan, where only the top
people do that. The most extreme cases are Germany and
France. Every real power position in Germany is filled by a for-
mer, upper-mid-level government bureaucrat who didn’t make
it to the top and then becomes either the executive director of a
trade association—which is compulsory in Germany and has real
power—or, if you are a Social Democrat, the executive director
of a trade union, with is equally compulsory and equally pow-
erful. And France goes much further. In France, every power
position in business and every university director comes out of
the government.
So we are the exception. In all other developed countries, the
bureaucracy is the leading group. And therefore, as we look at
Japan, it might be a good idea to start out with what we can learn
from the rest of the world.
The first thing you can learn, perhaps, is that bureaucracies
are far more resistant and far more tenacious than we assume.
The leading bureaucratic group in France in the late nineteenth
century was a military bureaucracy. It was totally discredited
by the Dreyfus scandal in 1896. Totally. And yet it held onto
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