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  3. I have come here to meet Hiroshi Mikitani, 47-year-old leader of a pack of rebel entrepreneurs that has shaken up business pract

I have come here to meet Hiroshi Mikitani, 47-year-old leader of a pack of rebel entrepreneurs that has shaken up business pract

admin2012-08-05  40
问题     I have come here to meet Hiroshi Mikitani, 47-year-old leader of a pack of rebel entrepreneurs that has shaken up business practices in Japan. Confident, internationally minded, brash,even flash, they have founded enterprises and wielded business techniques—the hostile takeover, merit-based pay, cut-throat competition and unapologetic self-promotion—that are alien to Japan’s postwar corporation-as-family culture.
    Many in Japan find this group distasteful, even un-Japanese. Others regard them as role models for a new Japan. Some, like Takafumi Horie, a dishevelled internet entrepreneur whose briefly dazzling career ended behind bars in 2007 when he was sentenced for securities fraud, have fallen by the wayside. But Mikitani, who in 1997 founded Rakuten, Japan’s largest online retailer, has flourished. He owns nearly half the company, a sort of Japanese Amazon and eBay rolled into one, valued at $14bn. According to Forbes’ latest rich-list, Mikitani is Japan’s fourth-wealthiest person, with a net worth of $6.5bn.
    Mikitani arrives. He speaks in English, a language he insists his Japanese employees use as part of what he calls, rather disturbingly, the "Englishisation of Rakuten". It is a policy some in Japan applaud and others condemn as an idiotic charade.
    Mikitani tells me about his move, in the mid-1990s, from banking to internet start-up. He had been one of 120 people—117 of them men—recruited to the fast-track team of the Industrial Bank of Japan, then the creme de la creme of Japanese finance. The bank had sent him to study at Harvard Business School, where he encountered brash new American ideas. "I didn’t even know the word ’entrepreneurship’," he says, sounding it out phonetically the way Japanese do when discussing an alien concept. "The first time I heard it I thought: what is this ’entrepreneurship’?"
    Though he began to think of striking out on his own, he felt a strong obligation to the bank that had sponsored his Harvard studies and the place where he had met his wife. The final nudge came in January 1995 with the Kobe earthquake. After helping as a volunteer, he was resolved: "I realised anything could happen. Nothing is eternal," he says. He decided to take the plunge—or, in his rather quaint phrase, to "jump off the bridge".
    The model is not to link customers to a single big store like Amazon but rather to provide what Mikitani calls individual "shopping experiences". That creates the same sense of connection as "buying fish from your neighbourhood fish shop," he says.
    Mikitani says his push at Rakuten has broader ramifications for the country. "Japan is so pleasant. There’s no crime. The food is great. Everything is getting so cheap. You don’t need to learn another language," he says, spreading his arms in metaphorical acknowledgement of the comfortable lifestyle the Japanese have created. "My point is: this is very pleasant long-term decline," he draws out the last word to emphasise the point.
    "A language will open your eyes to the ’global’, and you will break free from this conventional wisdom of a pure Japan. English is a tool to globalise you, to make you change."
    "We need to be more fluid. Keeping extremely expensive older people when there are lots of very competent, capable young people, this as a system is wrong." He drains his coffee.
    He’s not pessimistic, he assures me. With better English, more flexible labour laws, relaxed immigration policies and more investment in science, Japan can bounce back. "We need to fix just a couple of simple things and we’ll have a bright future."
                                                        From NPR, June 15,2012
What kind of business is Rakuten in?
选项 A、online retail
B、hospitality and restaurant management
C、management consulting
D、law practice
答案A
解析 本题为细节题。文章第二段提到：“who in 1997 founded Rakuten．Japan’s largest online retailer,has flourished．”因此答案A正确。
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