Managing for Creativity in Japan » Dynamism

On Being a Foreign Employer

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:00:44 +0000

“First of all, it’s a risk to work for foreigners. Two, it’s not a safe, established Japanese company – there isn’t that cliché status of working for a well known Japanese company. Even if you are an established company like Unilever or something people still think ‘oooh no, a foreign company’ even though they are like the biggest manufacturer in the world.
Also, people like security and hierarchy and they like to know their position. They don’t like to know that they have to do a bit of everything whereas in a foreign start-up they do have to do a bit of everything. Our people who do research do have to do client presentations and this, that and the other and you know what? If there are bowls in the sink at the end of the night we don’t have an office manager who just sits there all day waiting for people to go home so he can wash the dishes we wash our own dishes. For some people that is shocking.
Also, younger companies, especially foreign start-ups, tend to be a lot less structured. We don’t say ‘this is what you need to do, this is the checklist’ we tend to be a bit more creative and say ‘this is your time, we need you to achieve this…and what else can you come up with’. People don’t know what to do with that. (CB: So how have you dealt with that in your company?) There has to be a lot of mentoring and that’s an area that we really need to improve on. You have to mentor people, hold their hands, give them the confidence to say ‘I know I’m doing this but there is a possibility that I could do this or this’. In contrast, I think that people in London and New York are very keen to prove themselves. They also know that it’s not a job for life and they want to get the most out of it that they can and then go on to the next bigger, better place. Here the attitude is that you join a company and might possibly stay there for a long time. So perhaps they have a view that longevity is better than immediate results.”

Advantages to being Non-Japanese

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:00:02 +0000

“There are advantages to not being Japanese though. You can start jumping up and down and yelling ‘come on!’ but you could not do that if you were a Japanese person. There would be too many rules and obligations. Being a foreigner means that I can break those rules. I’ve been in brainstorming sessions with Japanese people sitting there silently and me thinking that the whole thing is rubbish. In order to liven things up a bit I have been able to say ‘come on, we can do this’ and start getting excited and acting like a cheerleader. And you know what? You start to get results. Maybe they feel that they can talk because it’s not a formal Japanese room.
We’ve done workshops in Japanese with foreigners in the room who spoke fluent Japanese and it’s learning the devices that people need to use – the icebreakers etcetera to get things moving. It’s having that cultural knowledge that the ‘brainstorm’ in the classic sense of the word does not work in Japan. You need to understand what works and what doesn’t work, and how you get the same results but in a different format. I don’t think that a Japanese person would put themselves in the same positions that I do. Sometimes I have seen moderators here, when we have used them to facilitate conversations and I have wanted to go over and shake them and tell them that we’re not getting what we need…that’s a bit frustrating….”

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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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Influence and Losing Your Edge

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:00:21 +0000

“You have to be able to influence the Japanese. Unfortunately it’s also a culture where most foreigners come in and out, and your average Japanese staff who still is life-time employment oriented will just survive the current foreigner. Working as a long-term employee side-by-side then, you are forced in a sense to reign back your ‘blue-sky tendencies” and so in a way I think it does put a damper on your creativity and people that are here a long time who aren’t the ‘template bringers’ can really lose their edge.”

Kaisha vs. Company

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:00:54 +0000

“The concept of a company in Japan is I think different. The term ‘kaisha’ (Japanese for company) is in my mind a group. The word itself has more of a nuance of a group of people doing something together than does the term ‘limited liability company’ (which is a non-person). The Western idea of a company is that of a non-person – a non-human legal entity with no objective other than to make a profit. Of course they have to exist in society and have good human relations (which are good for business) though.

You may have seen the movie ‘The Company’ which likens a company to a psychopath – obsessed with its own survival, lacking empathy and whatever….That’s not really how it is in Japan. Everybody has a vested interest in the stability of the system rather than, perhaps, genuine progress. It’s not that genuine progress doesn’t occur but it occurs within that controlled and less chaotic environment. People will experiment with concepts and products but they won’t touch the core of the organization so readily.”

On Building Trust and Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:00:33 +0000

“(CB: So building trust and relationships is very important. How do you approach that?)

You need to have either done some business with them before or they need to have met you before…There needs to some kind of introduction….That’s the way to do it, you can’t just cold call. We haven’t tried that but I don’t think you can. There really does need to be some kind of introduction. Past that there are a number of meetings….meetings where you don’t really talk about things, you just turn up and then you hope. They do test you out, you know. And then, if the person that you have been dealing with gets replaced then you have to start the process again. That happened recently in fact. It’s a bit like ‘wow..back at square one..how did that happen?!’

In this regard there is a massive difference between here and London or New York. People are more willing to take you on face value overseas. They are also very business oriented. If people think that you can bring business to their company it’s like ‘OK where do we start?’ But here, it doesn’t matter if you can say that you are going to bring them the biggest idea they’ve ever had (which would be bullshit of course)…there would still be the need to find out about you and think about where the relationship is going to go. It’s all very much for the long term. To compare, in London you might just get together for one project….it is much faster moving.”

Slow Moving (2)

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:00:22 +0000

“We have to make sure that we get the creativity we need while still getting things done. And that’s the hard part. That can be very frustrating. How can you say to someone ‘give me you best creative thinking by Thursday at 4 o’clock’? Creativity doesn’t really work that way, it happens when it happens – so that puts a lot of pressure on people. That kind of pressure is a risky thing for a creative agency.

This is characteristic of most places but I find that things in Japan are a little different from when I worked in the U.K. or the U.S. Over there people tend to generate ideas faster and then there is a longer period of eliminating ideas and refining the final thoughts. Here what I have seen in a lot of agencies in Japan including ours is that people are building and building and building but you don’t get the ideas until much much later in the process and the risk in that is that you run out of time to finalize and finesse them. Usually, when you come up with an idea you are 50 or 60 percent of the way to completion so if you can come up with the ideas early in the piece then you will have a long time to finish them off. But if it is a couple of days or hours before the deadline then you find that it becomes a problem.”

Slow Moving

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:00:47 +0000

“Well I guess the biggest negative factor is that people don’t in general move as swiftly in the decision making process in Japan when compared to a lot of other places around the world. Even if you look at it from an historical/military perspective for example, in terms of military strategy or political decision making processes things have always moved very slowly. There is that classical consensus building kind of thing. Compare this to the environment where I grew up, where you kinda just go for it and if you make a mistake you apologize for it afterwards or clean it up along the way. Here, everybody tends to want to make everything perfect first and then move forward together.
That’s a great thing from a manufacturing point of view, especially if you are spending millions of dollars tuning up a factory line or something but in a creative environment where so much depends on experimenting with ideas then you have to be able to move forward quickly.”

Focus Groups in Japan

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:56 +0000

“If you did a focus group in America you’d have 9 or 12 people in the room and some people would ‘love this’ and ‘hate that’ and there’d be big fights and arguments and maybe a couple of people would sit there numb or play with their blackberries or whatever and when it came to scoring what they did or didn’t like there would be a lot of polarization.
In Japanese focus groups everybody is pretty polite and nobody really likes to point their finger and say ‘that’s crap’ or ‘that’s amazing’. They tend to be very moderate in what they say, and particularly in a group environment social mores demand that people not be too rude or overly expressive. There are always exceptions to the rule of course but in general that is what we have found.
So, if you had a score in your research it would always be ‘moderately acceptable’ or ‘moderately unacceptable’ which makes it hard (I think) to get insights. One-on-one interviews may be a little bit better because people tend to open up, but the best way to do things here is through real life observation.”

Process Focused Behaviour

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:00:33 +0000

“One thing I have noticed is that while people always talk about how polite the Japanese are I don’t really think that it is politeness. Actually I think that it is formality. It is a process driven way of doing things. There’s a way to drink tea, there’s a way to place your chopsticks on the table, there is so much process in how to do things that the casual observer says ‘how polite’ – but it’s not politeness it’s form. If I was ever to write a paper on human behaviour that would be my particular area of interest. I think that part of the reason behind this might have to do with the fact that so much of the population lives on a very small amount of land, and to keep people from killing each other I think that a lot of these ways of interacting and acting were developed over time (I think if you took the 35 million French that there are and squeezed them all into Kanto/Kansai we would be pulling each other into the streets). Maybe this started in the Edo period where suddenly there was no more war. If you become very process focused then you avoid a lot of aggressive and anti-social behavior.”

You always get what you always got

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:00:37 +0000

“The old adage “if you always do what you’ve always done then you always get what you always got” is very true in Japan. You get very consistent results, but where does that leave you on the creativity and innovation barometer?”