Rupert Murdoch’s pend­ing acqui­si­tion of the Wall Street Jour­nal intrigues me. As the New York Times pointed out last week, oppo­si­tion to the deal is nearly uni­ver­sal within the ranks of the Journal’s staff. Clearly it doesn’t appear to be in the best inter­ests of the paper. But the Journal’s par­ent, Dow Jones & Co., is a pub­lic com­pany. Board mem­bers of a pub­lic com­pany are not expected to act in the best inter­ests of their com­pany, but to act in what­ever way puts the most money in the pock­ets of its share­hold­ers. Said Reuters:

“After all the high-minded con­cerns about edi­to­r­ial inter­est and jour­nal­is­tic excel­lence, it gets down to who pays the legal fees for the Ban­crofts,” Bench­mark & Co. ana­lyst Ed Atorino said. “And some of the trustees bailed, fear­ing they’d get sued by some of the younger trust ben­e­fi­cia­ries if they voted against the deal—so much for principles.”

This behav­ior is grounded in cul­tural expec­ta­tions. I had a meet­ing with a Japan­ese busi­ness­man this morn­ing which high­lighted the dif­fer­ences very clearly. In Amer­ica, many exec­u­tives are seem­ingly over­paid, dis­con­nected, and per­son­ally insu­lated from the daily activ­i­ties of their orga­ni­za­tions. I don’t know what pay is like in Japan, but you can bet that exec­u­tives aren’t exempt from stay­ing involved: in Japan, the pres­i­dent of a com­pany is per­son­ally liable any time the com­pany breaks the law. Ship a prod­uct with­out the proper label­ing, and the pres­i­dent could go to jail. In fact, the pres­i­dent of caliper man­u­fac­turer Mitu­toyo recently spent some time in prison because his com­pany shipped 3D coor­di­nate mea­sur­ing machines to Malaysia with­out fill­ing out the proper cus­toms paper­work. The dif­fer­ence between Japan and Amer­ica in this regard is astonishing.