Asahi Glass Corporation's Case

Japan’s Asahi Glass Corporation’s (AGC) bid for shared vision

AGC or Asahi Glass Corporation is a manufacturer of flat glass for construction and automobile glass. It has 50, 000 employees around the world and generates US$12 billion in annual revenues. Mr. Shinya Ishizu is the CEO of this company and he felt that the organization’s globalization was not faster than the other Japanese manufacturers. With this kind of difficulty, he created a vision; a shared vision which failed to instil on some of the employees and foreigners working in AGC.

As a solution, he had the leadership development forum for global managers. It is his way of engaging the managers to act out the vision imposed in the organization. They had it in an activity of film-making session. This has garnered the managers to be creative and to internalize the mission and vision statements. It also turned out to be fun and it has developed the teamwork among the managers.

Questions

A. As a CEO, one of your tasks is to communicate well to your employees your envisioned concept for the company’s welfare to be able remain competitive in the industry. However, in case of AGC, the vision that Mr. Ishizu implemented was not been clearly understood by his workers and was not carried out by his foreign workers which resulted to failure. According to Mr. Truman Capote, “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour”. Coming from this catastrophe, how are you going to have a vision successfully?

B. How would Mr. Shinya address the issue of being unable to instil the company values to his employees around the world?

C. How would he maintain communications to his employees for further advancement of policies that would address the issue?

Stated in an article, “You do not own your