Dr. Paul Hong with the new book he co-wrote
Building Network Capabilities in Turbulent Competitive Environments: Practices of Global Firms From Korea and Japan, written by Dr. Paul Hong, professor of information operations and technology management in the UT College of Business and Innovation, and Dr. Young Won Park of the University of Tokyo, compares strategic management practices of Korean and Japanese firms, and analyzes how their global market performance has driven economic growth around the world.
“The book analyzes the way companies in Korea and Japan compete,” Hong said. “Previously, they competed by how or what they made. Now companies cannot compete by what they do in isolation, but instead compete with their extended global network capabilities.”
Building Network Capabilities in Turbulent Competitive Environments is divided into three sections: network capabilities and how to build them, global competitive reality, and case studies and interviews profiling Korean and Japanese companies.
“There are many books describing Japanese companies in the 1990s, but very few about the global competitiveness of Japanese companies after 2000,” Hong said. “The book highlights changes made by Japanese and Korean firms during the past 10 years, as they have strived to establish their new global position.”
Hong added, “Understanding of their supply chain strategies required extensive personal interviews with senior executives of global firms from Korea and Japan. Our research reveals valuable insights from in-depth case studies and field visits. In this regard, this book is quite unique.”
Building Network Capabilities in Turbulent Competitive Environments is the first in a series focusing on network capabilities, and licensing for translation to Korean and Japanese is under way. The second book will focus on networking capabilities of global companies in emerging global markets — Brazil, Russia and China — and the third, still in planning stages, will focus on how small and medium enterprises compete in the global market.
