Recently, Professor Kase Kimio, faculty of BNUBS, published a book review on Nonaka (2019): The Wise Company: How Companies Create Continues Innovation in 《Kindai Management Review Vol 8》. Below is the original text.

Some management thinkers, especially those belonging to European management education institutions such as IESE Business School and ESADE Business School, both of which were founded on the Christian belief, have been proclaiming the need to bring back the human centric viewpoint to management. This need was especially brought home after the economic crisis caused by the filing for bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, as it was considered to be the unavoidable consequence of the profit-maximisation paradigm: lucre above all other things and to the exclusion of such basic considerations as human beings, society, ethics, etc.

Professor Nonaka, independently of the above-mentioned Christian belief system (which, because of the similarity despite different ideological, societal and cultural backgrounds, may be a proof that Nonaka approach reflects something that bears universality), has spearheaded many of the efforts to this human centric management perspective. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), their ground-breaking book, is a paragon of this perspective, founding what we may call the School of Knowledge. The shift is made in the focus from profit-maximisation to the doing of business in order to benefits employees, consumers, and society. Motivation, selfrealisation, values, ethics, etc., now have come back to the proscenium.

This new book goes further in depth in the human-centric approach in that the creation of innovation through tacit and explicit knowledge cannot be sustainable unless it is grounded in wisdom possessed by leaders, capable of coordinating, orchestrating and integrating formal and informal shared interactions and communications in order to align organisational and societal benefits.

The wisdom thus referred to is called phronesis in Aristotelian denomination (Aristotle, 2001), and in the belief of many management thinkers such as Kase, González-Cantón and Nonaka (2014) is of pivotal cruciality for the understanding of management.

In conclusion, this book is one step (a big one at that!) towards a right direction in the development of management thinking and “philosophy.” I, for one, expect that this book will usher in more works and research on the (practical) wisdom or phronesis deployed by leaderships from different ideological, religious and societal backgrounds to discern and avail ourselves of the common and shared traits among them for the excellence in management.