Page 212 - The Drucker Lectures
P. 212

25







                                       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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