LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- In 1999 I was invited to participate at a conference held in Tokyo under the title of "Management Challenges for the 21st Century." The first and keynote speaker was Jack Welch, former chief executive officer of General Electric, followed by about a dozen CEOs of major Japanese companies and, lastly, the president of IMD, Peter Lorange, and myself.

I prefaced my remarks by saying that having reached my mid-50s, I very often find myself to be among the oldest at many meetings, reunions, etc. Fortunately, however, there are two places where I can still feel comparatively young: one is the Vatican, the other is corporate Japan. As the organizers had distributed brief biographies of all the speakers, it appeared that among the Japanese CEOs, the youngest had been born in 1936 and the oldest in 1921. As remarkable as these men (there were, of course, no women) may have been, they belong to the 20th century, not the 21st. Welch, at the age of 60, was about to retire from GE, after 20 years at its helm, at an age when most Japanese CEOs are just beginning their tenure.

This and many other examples one could draw on point to the undeniable fact that is ultimately the root of all of Japan's problems: Japan is a country run by old men, for old men.