d initiative of an officer who seizes an opportunity to advance, not that of an American-style entrepreneur.
Beneath Japan's image of conformity is a a subtle sort of flexibility, richly conveyed by Sony magnate Akio Morita (1986, pp. 189-90). He compares American and Japanese corporate cultures respectively to brick and stone walls. Every brick in a brick wall is uniform, and those that don't fit are rejected at the outset. In contrast, every stone in a stone wall is different, but an appropriate place is found for each. "In Japan recruits are hired, and then we have to learn to make use of them," says Morita (1986, p. 190). "They are a highly educated but irregular lot." Whether or not Morita is entirely fair to American business hiring practices, his view says a great deal about the Japanese approach.
Thus, the Japanese found it wholly plausible, in the early 1980s, to launch the "Fifth Generation" project to leapfrog existing and even readily foreseeable developments in pursuit of a radical new level of artificial-intelligence technology (Fe
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