Komatsu Ltd. And Project G (A)

The Komatsu case is an example of evaluation case and we try to analyze and understand the main problems and the strenghts of this company focusing on the unstable management due to the different leadership style. In particular we deal with Autocratic leadership, diplomatic leadership and partecipatory leadership.

The Kawai's Era (1964 - 1982)

The mission of the company was to catch up and surpass Caterpillar. In order to reach this goal, kaway introduced the system of Total Quality Control which leaded the company to be innovative,to raise the quality and increase the efficiency. To manage this new system and reach the goals, he introduced a new style of "management by policy" and a new system of control, the "Plan, Do,Check,Act" cycle. These strategy run successfully and he also tried to settle with the economic stagnation of Japan (1965) with a "cost down" program and also making Komatsu more internationally competitive in quality and cost to avoid that the dangerous economic situation of the domestic maket could affect the company.

We can say that he had a good strightforward vision and strategy but it failed when the costruction market demand failed.

TheNogawa'sera (1982 -1987)

In this era the economic recession and declining in costruction market demand happened and it leads to a price war. The Nogawa approach was definetly wrong for this situation because he focused more on traditional policies like cost-cutting and aggresive sales strategy. His market myopia has worsened the komatsu performance undertaking extensive capital investment to cut costs, expanding the product lines and . I think the main problem of Nokawa is that he was an engineer, therefore he hadn't right skills to manageand lead the company in this complicated economic environment. His short vision couldn't works in such complexed environment.