Akira Kōdate

In the early 1980s, Kōdate stated that many business people in Western countries could feel the need and appreciate the knowledge of the contents that had been formalized in Japan to date. A number of effective techniques could be applied to Western countries and provide businesses with results similar to those in Japan in the decades after World War II and throughout the economic boom had allowed the Japanese industry to rise and prosper. Kōdate decided to move to France and offer the Japanese there his own perspective about business management. He established a permanent residence in France and worked with French companies to upgrading their management best practices. In 1988, he repeated the experience in Italy, creating the first Japanese-Italian management consulting joint venture in Milan.

In the 1950s in Japan, promising small and middle-sized companies were trying to define a growth strategy, by taking advantage of support offered by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, of which the Japan Management Association (JMA) had always been a major operational body. As a non-for-profit association of companies, the JMA offered training and consultancy, while formalizing the know-how developed by workers, and publishing manuals and papers (along with a variety of documents) for consultation and reference.

After having been engaged with production control, having run several improvement projects (kaizen), and having dealt for long periods with the reorganization of business operating systems at plenty of enterprises, in the late 1950s and early 1960s Kōdate and colleagues from JMA developed knowledge and consulting approaches about productivity and efficiency in the management of product development processes. In 1960, he published the book Sekkei Kanri (The Management of Engineering), which won a prize for best technical paper of the year in Japan. The work was later published in Italian (1990) and English.

Kōdate graduated in mechanical engineering from the University of Ibaragi in 1948, when postwar Japan was still recovering from World War II During university, he started working as a lathe turner operator, which gave him a solid foundation for his future endeavors.

Akira Kōdate (高達秋良、こうだて・あきら) was born in Kanagawa District, Japan on 6 October 1925. He is an engineer and a Japanese business manager, considered one of the greatest international experts in R&D and production management, as well as a master of lean thinking-related methodologies. Since 1953, he has been working as a consultant with the Japan Management Association (JMA) and JMA Consultants Inc, where he works as a principal consultant and technical advisor.