Managing for Creativity in Japan » clients

Obstacles Involved with being Non-Japanese

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 02:00:28 +0000

“One major obstacle is that you have to speak the language. If you can’t speak Japanese you better be really good at what you do. You need good personal introductions. You need to prove yourself quite quickly. You need to be there. Also, I think that foreign companies are still viewed with suspicion. There is still a sense of ‘what can someone as a foreigner tell me about Japan?’ I think that is a problem. As a foreigner myself, if another foreigner came up to me and said ‘I’m a marketing consultant, I can do this that and the other’ I would say ‘Well what do you know about Japan?…are you Japanese? ‘no’ Well do you speak Japanese ‘no’….well then what are you basing this insight on?

I don’t speak fluent Japanese but you need to at the very least be able to navigate around an office and understand how protocol and meetings work. At least play the game. You can’t not speak the language and not play the game either. You have to know what you’re doing, for example, turning up for meetings. You might think that the meeting is pointless and that you don’t need to go along but you do…they want to see your face. That’s important. In the West you might get away with not turning up to meetings…you really do have to play the game here.”

Advice for New Managers

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 02:00:17 +0000

“You have to be enormously thick skinned. When a client says “no I’m not interested in that” three months later you have to be able to ask them what they are interested in. Then you need to be able to get enough information from them so that you can write a proposal. If you are entrepreneurial you have to be able to not take no for an answer and think about how you can make it a yes. I have been told ‘no’ so many times but I have turned them into a ‘yes’ a lot of times.
Perseverance is important. Client relationships take a long time to establish. If they don’t happen in five minutes (and they won’t) you have to believe that they might happen in a year’s time. You need to be able to keep up the cheery demeanor the whole time because it might turn into something.
Never burn bridges and never piss of a client. Once trust is broken it’s pretty much permanent. You can’t go back – this is true for all clients but particularly for Japanese. In Japan people tend to stay in their jobs for 30 years but overseas that marketing role is going to be filled by someone different in two year’s time, you know it is.
Also, don’t discount your rate too much. If you discount they might wonder what your problem is and start thinking that you might not be very good. Always have a good attitude about your pricing and stick with it. It’s not a barter society and I don’t think people are overly impressed if you come back with something cheaper because that is an indicator of being substandard.”

Handwritten

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:00:06 +0000

Previously everything was hand written and while I find that disgusting Japanese people really like hand written stuff. I find it inefficient, slow, ugly, and also I can’t read it. I also figure that, from an international viewpoint it just looks unprofessional. The Japanese agencies we deal with don’t view it that way, but I do.

Mid-Level Creativity Killers

Chris Berthelsen — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:00:47 +0000

“There can be tension with the foreign management of the client company. The management may have a certain set of goals which may require creativity but the executional team may not be so creative. Japanese people do not tend to be and are not educated in such a way as to be creative and to take risks in their approaches to things. So, you can have conflict. The management would come to me and we’d have a discussion and say ‘let’s try this, that sounds good’ and then through the process of working with the local team the idea would get crunched into something that is extremely mediocre. This would then result in feedback and evaluation that the process was mediocre. Well of course the process was mediocre – nobody took any risks and the process was kind of hijacked.

I’m not saying this with any bitterness, it’s just part of the way things work but 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

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:00:49 +0000

“There are benefits to working with Japanese clients. It does take a long time to establish relationships. Trust takes a long time to build. In my case, a white woman walks into a Japanese office and says “I can help you increase market share and come up with new ideas” – they look at me and go “what the hell?”. But once they can get their heads around the fact that we can provide value……Let me put it this way, it’s like being an anthropologist – you can’t study your own kind. I’m from Canada and I can’t study people from Canada because I can’t see them. So the beauty of what we do is that we can always see what is happening but then we can look to the West and contextualise. That is obviously very valuable.
So, with Japanese clients, once you have established a relationship and trust they are more likely to go ahead with you the following year in business. Even if budgets are tight they might try to renegotiate but they won’t drop you whereas Western companies will say that the budgets are tight and call you in a years time and hope that the relationship is still there. Japanese clients might try and support you a bit better. The flip side of that is that in the relationships you do need to work much harder.”

Intensive Client Servicing

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:00:29 +0000

“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, just to have a chat, you know. Compared to this my experience of clients back home was economical, like ‘here’s what we are going to do, I’ll come back when it’s done’ – and they would accept what you have done because they are paying for you as an expert to do that. Here though, everyone has to have their fingers in everything – and that is intensive. Also, the margins are low so I think that the only person who has the opportunity to be creative in the company is me. But while I think that to some degree I am more inclined to be creative as part of my personality, I just don’t know that if you gave people the opportunity to be creative that they would be……especially if you’re coming from a culture like this where people seek direction.”

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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.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail

Employee Turnover

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:00:54 +0000

“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 is one of the hidden costs of a company. The company I worked for was a big international company (not so much in Japan) there was huge turnover. The whole staff would turn over (except for a few people at the top who were probably incentivised to stay). I don’t understand how you can maintain decent relationships with your clients in such a situation. When people leave a whole lot of knowledge disappears with them and that’s a real hidden cost. It’s a gross inefficiency having a lot of turnover but the upside of that is that you can get new people and new ideas into the company. Also, while having the stability that comes with low turnover is a good thing there will always be people that you would like to get rid of and there is a very strong bias against getting rid of people here.”

Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:00:38 +0000

“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) better relationships Japanese to Japanese – that’s what they can do – and as I say, once we have the relationships the business will follow.”

Business Imperative

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:00:27 +0000

“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 though.
What is more likely to happen is that you will be presented with opportunities which will require creative responses in terms of management. If, for example, we are suddenly presented with a big opportunity and we have to address it with limited resources then we have to work out how we are going to address the opportunity within our constraints. This will require a creative response. However, if there is no business imperative then it is difficult to be creative.”

****************************************************
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.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail

Stable Client Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:00:33 +0000

“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 competition. You don’t want to wake up to find that your key client has gone to your competitor. Here, I can at least be reasonably certain that the client-staff relationships which are the key to our business are relatively stable. I would manage the situation a bit differently if I wasn’t so certain – I would be more interventionist – but it’s not necessary. Everyone is comfortable and we get along – like a family. But the trade off is that it’s not creative.”