English version of Japanese business book comes to USA

— -- The English version of Japan's best-selling business book of 2007 that was originally written as a textbook for seventh- and eighth-graders goes on sale in the USA on March 6.

Should Problem Solving 101 sell well in the USA, author Ken Watanabe will pull off a rare recent instance of transferring business advice from the world's second-largest economy to the largest. That was fairly common two decades ago until the Japanese economy faltered and U.S. executives soured on many things Japanese.

In a phone interview from Tokyo, Watanabe says he has no idea how Problem Solving 101 will sell in the USA, and his U.S. publisher, Portfolio, has delayed a book tour until a flop is out of the question. Soon after its U.S. launch, the book is expected to roll out in Britain, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Thailand.

It has sold nearly 370,000 copies in Japan, according to editor Hiromi Maesawa of Japanese publisher Diamond, benefiting not only from its popularity at companies such as Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Mitsui, but from a snowball of publicity from newspapers, TV and the magazine equivalents of GQ and Vogue. It was even plugged by Junichi Okada, a member of a popular boy band.

The book came out just as many Japanese were casting doubts on "hypercapitalism, and everyone was looking into a purposeful way to live," Maesawa says. "It became a social phenomenon."

Watanabe says he wrote the book in response to a national drumbeat of Japanese criticism about its education system that emphasizes rote memorization. Other Japanese books about problem solving had been written for the business market, but Watanabe made it simple for middle-schoolers. That simplicity struck a chord with business.

Watanabe went to school in Japan until the eighth grade before moving to Greenwich, Conn. He went on to an economics degree at Yale, a Harvard MBA and a job as a McKinsey consultant. He says U.S. schools don't focus on memorization and are much better at teaching critical thinking but still fall short in the discipline of problem solving.

Problem Solving 101 is a practical tutorial of slightly more than 100 pages. Using juvenile-looking illustrations and flow charts, it walks readers through a diagnosis and the steps toward a solution. One example is The Mushroom Lovers, a rock band that can't get an audience at concerts. Watanabe instructs readers to think like doctors trying to cure a patient. He recommends listing potential causes of the problem, arriving at a hypothesis for the most likely cause, analyzing that cause, coming up with possible solutions, then prioritizing action and implementing a plan.

Japanese versions of U.S. books, such as Good to Great by Jim Collins and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, have been popular in Japan. Warren Buffett is revered there, Watanabe says. Mary Buffett, Warren Buffett's former daughter-in-law, says two of her books, The Buffettology Workbook and The Tao of Warren Buffett, are best sellers there.

But the cross-over from Japan has dried up. Books that sold well in the USA that were first written in Japanese include Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno (21 years ago); Made in Japan by Sony co-founder Akio Morita (21); The Mind of the Strategist by Kenichi Ohmae (18); and, most recently, The Knowledge-Creating Company by Ikujiro Nonaka (14), a disciple of U.S. business guru Peter Drucker, who is well known in Japan.

Many popular business models steeped in quality and statistics, such as Six Sigma, have their roots in the 1950s teachings of American William Edwards Deming, who became a hero among Japanese manufacturers decades before his ideas began to catch on in the USA.