ABSTRACT
A subsidiary of Japan Railway (JR) East, TESSEI is the cleaning company responsible for turning around the famous Shinkansen trains in under seven minutes. Founded in 1952 to clean train cars on the Japanese National Railways, the company cleans more than 2,000 Shinkansen trains per day across four stations: Tokyo, Ueno, Oyama, and Tabata. In addition to operational performance issues, TESSEI faced rapidly declining employee morale as well as a significant problem with its brand in the marketplace. The condition of management was not much better than that of the employees. Managerial misconduct in the early 2000s had led to a loss of trust and revenue from JR East, to which the response was a significant increase in managerial monitoring and controls. Leading at TESSEI was all about designing and implementing systems to control individual behaviors, thereby producing the desired result.
