DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami: How One Mobile Telecom Created a New Market and Became a Global Force [Hardcover]

John Beck (Author), Mitchell Wade (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2002

"Almost a quarter century after their core management principles put them in nearly unassailable positions of market dominance, Japanese firms like Toyota, Sony, and Honda are still the standards to which other corporations aspire. Today, Japan's NTT DoCoMo is on the verge of attaining equal stature. DoCoMo is the world's second-largest mobile phone operator and, with its I-mode system, the first to roll out real, viable third-generation applications like Internet-ready mobile phones. This quantum leap in technology will very soon change the way we all send and receive information, from e-mail, paging, and voice to graphic business applications and entertainment. But DoCoMo's success came not as a result of following the hard-and-fast models of its illustrious predecessors. In fact, it is much more a reflection of the ability of DoCoMo's management to carve out a creative niche within the confines of legendarily traditional Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. Beck (co-author, The Attention Economy) and Accenture senior consultant Wade examine the enormous risks that DoCoMo took in pursuing a "bleeding edge" technology which analysts thought was superfluous, and how their daring almost single-handedly brought an entire global market into existence. It is this extraordinary story and the simple, powerful management themes ingrained in it that will drive companies the world over to emulate DoCoMo as they did the previous giants of Japanese industry."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

America is just waking up to the vast potential of the wireless Web. In Japan, nearly a third of the population already works, plays, and shops with wireless, continuously connected to a universe of data, services, and communities. The force responsible is a young company with a name that means "anywhere" in Japanese: DoCoMo. Another case study that examines a specific corporation for management lessons it can share with others, DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami takes a riveting look at the world’s second-largest mobile phone service that has, after only two years, a customer base as big as AOL’s. Don’t think of this book as an apology for the languishing telecom industry. Instead, it’s an inside look at how creativity and innovation were nurtured at one of the world’s stodgiest companies--Nippon Telephone and Telegraph--and how a small team of committed visionaries never said "Never" and created DoCoMo’s extraordinarily popular I-mode technology.

For those who've read of the importance of "intrapreneurship" in corporations, here is a real-life exploration of that principle in action. Noted business strategists John Beck (The Attention Economy) and Mitchell Wade give us story upon story of the dynamic personalities behind I-mode, from NTT Chairman Kouji Ohboshi--who saw DoCoMo through a series of crises that would have meant early death for most U.S. startups--to CEO Keiji Tachikawa, whose post-WWII childhood gave him a keen grasp of the economics of disparity.

With chapter headings like "People-People Who Need People" and "Passion Is Destiny," this book sends the strong message that every successful business model depends so heavily on the human factor--a point that seems lost in the venture-capital-dominated model of the West. With lessons for all business leaders, in any industry, this book stands as a testament to the pivotal role of conviction, integrity, and personal passion in business success. --Charles Decker

From Publishers Weekly

NTT DoCoMo is among the most exciting and profitable companies in the world. In three years, it has sold Internet wireless telephones to 29 million Japanese residents, despite a recession and low consumer spending. DoCoMo's I-mode phones are not just, or even primarily, for talking. They can take and transmit pictures, access the Web, send and receive data and transact business without credit cards or currency. When the company announced plans for 500% market penetration (by selling wireless services for pets) and replacing paper currency, no one laughed. DoCoMo is working hard to replicate its success outside Japan, and in March listed its stock on the New York and London stock exchanges. As a spinoff of the stodgy Japanese national telephone company, DoCoMo has unrivaled appeal for trendy hipsters and geeky gadget-heads alike. It spends $10 billion a year on research and development, a field most service providers have abandoned. Unfortunately, this book on the company written by two thinkers from Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change is outrageously padded. It provides only the sketchiest information about I-mode and the company's history and strategy. There are two pages about scheduling an interview with Chairman Kouji Ohboshi, but the interview itself is a six-year-old newspaper reprint, short and far from incisive. Much of the book consists of sidebars, such as a table of 1998 world steel production by country and a World Bank analysis of land redistribution in Japan, information seemingly irrelevant to DoCoMo and not referenced in the text.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 17 and up
  
• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM (October 29, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814407536
• ISBN-13: 978-0814407530
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,809,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars simply the worst, October 1, 2005

By 

Declan Hayes "Declan Hayes" (Tokyo Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami: How One Mobile Telecom Created a New Market and Became a Global Force (Hardcover)

Chapter one of this pathetic book begins by informing us that "Business cases aren't romance novels. Things begin, and end, with the numbers". Not so this book. As well as seemingly endless diversions into such eclectic themes as post war land reform in Japan, General MacArthur's victorious cavalcade into Tokyo, hitch hiking in New England, some unfathomable nonsense about the "mystic Southwest" of the United States, a reference to Mary Poppins, a couple of paragraphs on Bruce Springsteen, the problems of mowing lawns in Utah, the relatively high mortality rates of upper class Britons during both world wars, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the usual sociological drivel of upwardly pointing nails getting hammered down in Japan, some buzz words from complexity theory, some tips on putting golf balls and interminable pages of insipid tips on how to turn your (non Docomo related) work into fun, we are given six shallow chapters respectively titled Love, Inequality, Impatience, Luck, Fun and Strength with a further appendix called Intimacy and M-Commerce. That is followed by a mercifully short interview with Docomo President Kouji Ohboshi, which, because it was originally carried in 1996, is, like the entire book, totally irrelevant to the current market conditions Docomo faces.
Although the book's blurb claims the authors had unprecedented access to Docomo's top executives, there is no evidence of that in this over priced book. We are, however, told that Ohboshi "looks like a conventional Japanese executive. He is tall". We are also told that he has the style of a cockroach, meaning that he is impatient and hurries around a lot. Because cockroaches tend to get stamped on, it is a dangerous and, at best, very silly metaphor to describe a dynamic CEO of a thriving company.
It is almost as silly as the 20 or so pages given to the digital experiences of Yasuko Sato who, we are told, had to overcome the sad fact that "Mama and Papa Sato lovingly, relentlessly instilled good old-fashioned analog values in their daughter." Although Mama and Papa Hayes did the same, I have used mobile phones in the jungles of the Golden Triangle and the Andes Mountains as well as in a fishing trawler 300 miles off the coast of Iceland. Talking about the wonders of i-mode or mobile phones in the tones Mitch and John (as they annoyingly call themselves throughout the book) is like talking of the wonders of black and white TV; they are old news.
To impress on us how successful Docomo has been, we are supposed to be amazed that its headquarters are in "a skyscraper so large that each elevator holds sixty-three people. Sixty-three! In just one elevator!" As if that was not penance enough for us to bear, the authors appeal to our vanity by telling us that we are the new "cosmopolitan, global kind of thinker" because we are reading a "whole book" on Docomo.
Instead of giving us a "whole book" on Docomo, all they serve us up is the most shameless padding that would make the laziest high school student blush. Only two paragraphs after mentioning "those alphabet soup economics equations that make so little sense to most of us", we read "Okay, enough about boring economic theories" and we are back to the problems of mowing the lawns of Utah.
Technical details are also, we are told on page 127, "perennially boring" even though they are vital to understand Docomo's short history as well as its prospects for future success. The mobile telephony industry Docomo finds itself in is a young industry, one that will mature in time just as wireless, television and the Internet did before it. Until that happens, the industry's many intangibles will complicate our best efforts to predict the industry's future trends. Instead of trying to identify those intangibles, the authors let us know that "what we can tell you, after years in think thanks and universities and high-powered consulting firms" is that luck is paramount in a successful business.
This is easily the worst business book I have ever read, let alone reviewed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why the Japanese are so in love with Technology., March 20, 2005

By 

Carla Killetti "carla_k_killetti" (melbourne, australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami: How One Mobile Telecom Created a New Market and Became a Global Force (Hardcover)

I've been looking for literature that explores why Japan is so technology obsessive, they have to have the latest of everything and feel utterly out of touch if they dont. Technology is fashion.

Having lived there a year i instantly recognised the name 'DoCoMo' and thought it was the perfect forum to analyse this exact phenomena, DoCoMo is the mother of all technology companies over there and really has become a part of the way of life there.

This book separates into chapters based on emotion, an odd idea, but one that works quite well. For me the Love and Fun chapters accurately depict the passion the Japanese have for technology and how DoCoMo capitalized on that.

However I wasn't looking at this book as an example of a business model. I skipped most of the facts and figures, though they are easy to read and very relevant. People who are skepical of this books practical use offering a business model that has a totally different approach, probably havent spent enough time in Japan to see how successfully DoCoMo has been. I believe this may be the future of the business model. But essentially i think this book would fit much better in the 'Technologies Influence On Society' section of the bookshelf.

Those who are researching technology as part of society are the ones who will really get a kick out of this book, there are so many interviews with developers, users, fanatics and novices, it is a feast of information that explains just why the Japanese are atleast a year ahead in the Mobile Industry. And why the Japanese are so passionate about their gadgets.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing relevant, November 16, 2002

By 

Olaf Rieck (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: DoCoMo--Japan's Wireless Tsunami: How One Mobile Telecom Created a New Market and Became a Global Force (Hardcover)

Why would a couple of guys think they should write a book about DoCoMo? Most of us naïve book store browsers would assume that they have something interesting to say. They must have some insight into the company, some insider knowledge that would make such a book an interesting read. Well, think again. The writers of this book have absolutely no insider knowledge of DoCoMo, they also do not have anything interesting to say. They have records of one interview with the president of DoCoMo, and they have some newspaper-level information about the company. Possibly they also chatted with some employees. But that's it.
How then, you wonder, do they fill a whole book on DoCoMo? The answer is: They don't. Only a fraction of the book is directly related to DoCoMo. The rest is just...stuff. I'm not even sure how to call it, but it is blah-blah of no value.

Just imagine, the book's discussion of wireless business models, revenue sharing models with content providers, DoCoMo's 3G strategy, the FOMA service, their international expansion strategy...all of that together takes up about 8 (in words: eight) pages. Eight measly pages filled with common knowledge on all of those issues that are regarded as the most critical issues in today's wireless industry.

On the remaining 200 odd pages, we find trivia such as a graph of the rental prices in Tokyo (1/2 page) and a table of the top 20 Japanese companies (1 page). Give me a break. And then there are plenty of fuzzy-warm discussions about Love, Inequality, Luck, Impatience, and Fun. Let me warn you of this book...for me, it's too late. I already wasted my money.