Managing for Creativity in Japan Talking with Foreign Executives in Japan
clients
Obstacles Involved with being Non-Japanese
“…you have to speak the language……If you can’t speak Japanese you better be really good at what you do….”
Advice for New Managers
“You have to be enormously thick skinned….”
Handwritten
“….I find that disgusting Japanese people really like hand written stuff. I find it inefficient, slow, ugly…”
Mid-Level Creativity Killers
“…if you want to offer something which is a bit creative and involves some level of risk then you might find that very frustrating….”
Client Relationships
“…The flip side of that is that in the relationships you do need to work much harder….”
Intensive Client Servicing
“The client servicing process in Japan is incredibly intensive. The guys sometimes come into the office after lunch because they’ve been working through to 10 or 11 at night. And our experience is not really that extreme, I think. The client will be on the phone to them constantly the whole day about details, stuff, [...]
Employee Turnover
“The stability of the relationships is a really good thing. If you have worked with someone for a long time it does make your work with them more efficient. You don’t have to discover how they work and you don’t have to train them. It’s terribly time consuming when you’ve got someone new and turnover [...]
Relationships
“One of the benefits would be that our Japanese staff has the ability to make relationships like no foreigner could, even with all the entertaining and the best Japanese language skills. It’s very difficult for a foreigner to get under the skin of a Japanese person. I would expect (and I think we have achieved) [...]
Business Imperative
“There are creative ways of making the business more efficient and I think that we are already quite efficient as it is. But creativity as a characteristic of your service to market towards a domestic audience is, I think, not much of an advantage. It may be when you are talking about overseas based clients [...]
Stable Client Relationships
“You get stable client relationships over an extended period of time. This equates to stability of income for us. Of course you like growing but the one thing that businesses hate is uncertainty. You do not want to wake up one day and find that your key client services person has left to join the [...]
Risk Averse Clients
“Clients in Japan don’t generally ask for advice from their suppliers, they generally tell their suppliers what to do and tend to be very prescriptive. They tend to go into great detail about how they want something to be done. The client generally wants to have a very detailed input into everything. I think my [...]
Personal Relationships
“First of all you don’t have those personal relationships so you need get out socialising. You need to do the Japanese thing. You need to go out in the evening and you need to drink. You need to drink and you need to go to karaoke. You need to do whatever it takes to get [...]
