“People don’t want to take a risk, it’s mendokusai (bothersome) to change things. Another thing that is characteristic of Japan is that once a system is in place then it is very hard to change that system. Everything comes to support the existing system.
On the other hand though, you look at a company like Toyota who has become famous for their worker driven productivity improvement. That’s a part of their culture. So it is hard to say whether it is really a cultural thing or if it is something else. But definitely there is an aversion to change in this country. Of course this is true of all countries but it seems to manifest itself particularly strongly here.”
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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
“Many of the employees have worked together for a very long time, between 10 and 20 years and sometimes on the same team. This means that there are old, established interpersonal relationships on the teams, which is increasingly rare in a Western company. Very few westerners would be satisfied in that context. So there is a little bit of complacency and contentment in an organization like that.”
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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
“Initially however, it was assumed that the way they were doing it was the only way to do it. We had to sit down and say “no, you are free to do what you want as long as you meet the needs of these internal customers”. To assume that the person before you must have been right, to never question that older more experienced person or office manager was a very Japanese mindset – “how could she have been wrong? She actually taught me for the first six-months in this job.” Well yes, but now she’s gone, she retired after 18 years service so some of the requirements that were around 18 years ago – before computers and before these software packages – are irrelevant.”
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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
“When people are working in an office in this country they are probably about a third as productive as workers in a Western country, I think. That is a number I have run by a few people and there seems to be a consensus about this. People take three times as long to do things so they’re in the office longer. Everyone always looks like they are doing something but when you ask if they have started that task you gave them a day ago, the answer is no. That’s just the way it is, people have a slower, more deliberate working style where as I am more like “just get it out there”…… I know people who work in Japanese companies who want to leave the office at five but they won’t because nobody else does and if they do people will notice it, or they won’t take a holiday because everybody will know that they took a holiday. Nobody is telling them to do these things though.
How can you reconcile that very strict unwritten code of conduct and those expectations with creativity?”
****************************************************
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
“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.”
“Creating an innovative environment of change in Japan is a tricky cross-cultural thing. You have a foreign manager driving change and potentially creating discord. If you do it well maybe you don’t have to be disliked though, as long as everyone understands what you are trying to do. That comes down to good communication.”
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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
“Here they tend here to take the cookie cutter and cut the same cookie. It’s a good cookie, I mean once they get the design right its great and I think, as I said, that’s why their products are so great. Because once they design it, it’s designed with that reliability built in. They know how to make the same copy again and again and again. If it was Spain there would be somebody cutting a corner somewhere thinking that they could actually do it quicker. And that introduces some variability which results in difficulties or bad quality.”
****************************************************
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
“I would never say that the Japanese are not creative or even less creative, but their orientation and their approach is not blue sky. They have a great deal of difficulty with blue-sky thinking.”
“Look at Japan, it’s the home of more than 50 global headquarters. More than double that of either the U.S. or the U.K. This is not a country that can’t innovate or be creative. But the Japanese pull it out through kaizen and that, for me as a foreigner, has been the biggest lesson that I’ve learnt – providing the template and the formula and then ‘kaizening’ it from there.”
****************************************************
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
“In terms of being creative it’s a bit of a paradox. You come here and it is definitely the most creative place in Asia but that doesn’t mean that it’s creative. People think that it’s creative and crazy but it’s not. It’s not creative. If it was a creative place then brainstorms would be a dream…but they’re not. The problem is that people have an image of Japan as a creative place and then they go to Harajuku and see 200 people dressed up in fancy costumes and think it’s creative. No it’s not. Two-hundred people in a population of 130 million people does not make a creative society. It’s a very small pocket. So you do have creativity but it is very limited, very controlled. It’s not the same sort of “I want to be individual and spontaneous” creativity you might see somewhere else. So whenever I go back to Sydney (and I’m not nationalistic at all) I look at places there and am amazed at how creative it is. People strive to be different, they strive to be an individual, they strive to come up with something that no one else has. Here, people don’t do that. They look at a magazine to study how they can be different…different with another 50 people how are different in the same way. That’s a big difference.
When you go to a cafe it’s a study in creativity. You walk in and think “this is so cute and cool”. Yes, it is but that’s only because the owner has literally, fastidiously made it creative looking. That’s why it stands out against the greyness and the hum-drum of Tokyo. It’s a very ugly city – I mean we’re sitting here looking at a view of the expressway. There are no redeeming features about this and that’s why you go to Yoyogi park and there are a million people throwing frisbees there. It’s the one place where you can have a bit of fun…but then there are a million other people having fun there along with you. You’ve got your one metre square patch and that’s not even a park anymore is it? It’s the equivalent of a carpark for people – they get in there and then they can’t move for fear of losing their space. They can’t throw their frisbee too far because it might hit someone on the head. It’s a funny place.”
****************************************************
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
