Keith,
I like to be absolutely correct in my sources and so I
doubled checked the Sony source and found that instead of two past
CEOs it was one, Norio Ohga, who as near as I can tell is still the
Chairman of Sony. He was a tenor, and my source said a good one,
and he is a conductor who still conducts prominent symphony orchestras
occasionally. I was also told that his skill was more than simply
"ceremonial."
The Japanese musicians and business people that I have worked with
are very well rounded in their business practices and cultural skills.
Of course like all cultures they feel very proud of being Japanese and
capable of mastering someone else's cultural forms. I have no doubt
that this mastery aids their global business skills and understanding
of the Western point of view in any negotiations they might conduct.
Would that we might be so urbane. The process of Western music
seems to tie in some way with the grammatical structure of the
Japanese language. I remember reading that somewhere but I'm not
sure of that source. It could have been the Canadian historical
economist Mike Hollinshead or maybe the Berman "Re-enchantment of
the World" book.
--mcore@soho.ios.com (Ray Evans Harrell)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>