Can Japan Compete?, business guru Michael Porter"s first book for almost a decade, could scarcely be timelier, arriving on the shelves at a moment in Japanese corporate history when many an awkward chicken is coming home to roost, causing collapse and consolidation on a previously unimaginable scale. It addresses at some length a very Japanese enigma. How could an economy with so many apparently fiercely competitive industries have a hidden, darkly uncompetitive side to it? Porter and his co-authors set out to challenge the conventional wisdom on the driving forces behind national competitiveness in Japan, and show that Japan is not a special case. "Its industries succeed not when the government manages competition but when it allows competition to flourish. For various political and cultural reasons, it has been appealing to believe that Japan had invented a new and intrinsically superior form of capitalism, one more controlled and egalitarian than the Western vision," say the authors. What they claim to have found instead is that none of the conventional wisdom is true. Japan"s much-celebrated bureaucratic capitalism is not the cause of the country"s success. In fact, it is most closely associated with the nation"s failures. Can Japan Compete? sets off at a brisk pace that quickly proves difficult for the authors to sustain. Sharp prose gives way to hard data and plentiful charts. Stick with it, though. In among the thickets of facts and figures there still lurks an array of interesting propositions, leading up to a simple and pretty incontestable final statement. If mindsets in Japan change, the nation has the capacity to move rapidly. --Brian Bollen