Managing for Creativity in Japan

“Japanese employees in my experience place a very high value on pleasing a manager. A lot of that is appearance, being there, face-to-face, and being on time. How you do things really matters. But they put less emphasis on pushing the envelope, on challenging, on doing anything they haven’t done before. There is an innate difficulty with managing something they haven’t got a formula for, that they haven’t got a template for. If you as a manager provide a template or formula and say ‘go for it’, they’ll do a beautiful job. But if you just say ‘here’s the problem, find a solution’, they’re lost.”

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This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
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