Strategic Human Resource Development. Defining Its role In Creating And Sustaining Competitive Advantage

The world is a far more complex place than Shiraishi dreams – including a newly unified Europe, a powerful China, and wealthy tigers and dragons in Asia itself, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Japan's internal problems affect its position in Southeast Asia, as the elites of these countries discover that Japan is not the cultural or economic paradise they expected. «Korean business is following America rather than Japan,» says Kang Dong Jin, director of Paxnet, a South Korean financial-information Web site. «Korea has seen America enjoy a decade of prosperity and Japan the opposite, so in some ways the choice is easy.» Foreign observers, Western and Asian alike, are asking whether ideal "human-resources development" means millions of construction workers flattening valleys at government expense- and lackluster tourist and software industries. When Thailand's telecommunications agency suffers huge losses from being forced to install the failed PHS cellular system; when educated Indonesians like Yau-hua Lim start saying, «The Japanese have such pathetic lives,» hopes that the leaders of Thailand and Indonesia will «choose» Japan as their preferred and exclusive model dim ...»