Being in charge of relatively small country offices in Japan can be a liberating role – the lower formal gateposts risk to the parent company makes for quicker discussion and execution of ideas – “…we’ve got the whole train set to play with on a smaller scale, and the financial risk to the company if we make a mistake is smaller. We can move more quickly with less bureaucracy is we have a creative idea here.”(i)
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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
Japanese employees (unless specifically hired for their flexible thinking skills) are seen as having an innate difficulty with ‘managing something that they don’t have a formula or template for’.
‘Need for structure’ is perceived to be rooted in (1) the education system and (2) the rule-based nature of art/culture of Japan – “If you study Japanese art like sumi-e or ikebana you will notice that everything is run by rules”(i).
This necessitates the provision of security and structure around a creative idea or process. This need could be higher in foreign companies due to the risk inherent in working for them.
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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
My staff are foreign educated. One went to the London School of Economics, has lived in Paris, speaks three languages and really loves our industry. Another was educated in America. So, we are dealing with people who are a little bit different, who have a different way of looking at things and have seen other systems in other parts of the world. They are young, and not necessarily steeped in the old ways. They haven’t worked underneath other Japanese companies in our industry so they don’t have this kind of robotic (or moronic) way of working instilled in them. They have a Western outlook towards work, but they are still respectful Japanese individuals…the Japanese companies we deal with on the other hand are just ridiculous.
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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
“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.”
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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
“Don’t teach. Learn. The logic process here is different and I think that the approach is too. Whereas Western culture tends to focus on the individual Japan has succeed on focusing on a ‘we’re all in it together’mindset. As a result I think the education system is quite different and how prepared or not prepared people are straight out of university is quite different and this has a huge impact on how people behave. Again, it’s not right or wrong it’s just different.
Any foreign manager coming into Japan who is not open-minded and not willing to learn cannot succeed. Maybe if they are given total authority they will be able to demand results and in the short term that will be OK. But what have I noticed with the big companies who have overbearing ex-pats at the top is that people just kind of put their heads down with the view that in two or three years the ex-pat would be gone. They just had to endure it. For people who are committed to being here and spending their careers here though you can’t be that way.
Put yourself in the opposite position in America or New Zealand. If some Japanese guy came over said “OK I’m going to tell you how to do things here” what would your reaction be? – It’s obvious what you would think, so why would you expect any different here?
(CB: Why do you think that people come here with that attitude?) I can only speak from the point of view of the industry I’m in because I haven’t worked for other companies but from that point of view, they come here with a mission. When you have foreigners here on business, whether they are in management or whether they are engineers or whatever they are usually coming here for a set period of time with a mission from head office – ‘Your job is to go and accomplish this.’ Because they don’t have a long-term commitment to be here they need to get results quick. They’re not being measured by local standards, they’re being measured by their boss back in wherever. If it is the case that their boss back wherever doesn’t want to hear about cultural differences in creative approach or whatever and they just say ‘where are the results John?’ then they will have to do things that they feel will get them the required results in a short period of time so that they can move on to their next assignment.
In this light I think one advantage we have here is that we don’t have those short-term management staff. We can take the long-term approach just as if we were building this place back home. We are going to be here forever so we want to do it the right way. All the other managers need short-term results to show to their bosses back home that they are worth their ex-pat packages. A lot of ex-pats come here and have a really good experience – “I loved Japan, I went to Kyoto, the cherry blossoms were lovely” and so on – It’s kind of like a really nice tour of duty.”
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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
“On the one hand you have an ecology which is not supportive of creativity and on the other you have an education system which is not supportive. If you are a green plant in the middle of the desert you are going to die, basically. People don’t like to speak out here, harmony (a key value in a Confucian society) is too important.”
****************************************************
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
“The creative person is the weirdo. The creative person is the one that talks a bit funny (not necessarily). He is the one that you’ve just got to give space. Let him do whatever he does. You can’t have him as one of the battery hens, how can you have creativity in that scenario? It’s impossible.
The whole ecology of the way offices in Japan are set up doesn’t support it. Creativity is rule breaking, it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before, so naturally a creative person is going to upset people. They are mavericks. They are people that will dare to say ‘we need to change this process’. I spoke to a Japanese girl a few weeks ago. She works in a call center and they have to do all these tallies using pencil and paper. She said to her supervisor “I could do this with Excel or something” and the supervisor who was in his late forties just came down on her for coming up with an idea. The whole ecology…it just doesn’t support questioning the system.”
****************************************************
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 you are a country manager overseas, you can short-cut a lot of that. If you want to do something that isn’t directly touching the customer, that doesn’t need head office funds, then you don’t really have to have the same degrees of people involved in the decision or have the same formal gateposts. Something like the office move is similar to the client facility in scale so there are processes for that, but more locally. If we wanted to run a campaign or something we don’t have the administration to go through and we don’t have to seek approval of directors x, y and z. I suppose it’s because we’ve got the whole train set to play with on a smaller scale, and the risk to the company if we make a bad decision is not as financially damaging as spending a whole lot of money on a company wide scale. We can move more quickly with less bureaucracy if we have a creative idea here.”
****************************************************
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?”
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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
“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 strength is in coming up with creative solutions for a client’s marketing problems and working out a way to measure them – developing a framework for looking at the problem. But if you have a client that is very prescriptive then, to be brutally frank about it, they tend to ruin the process for themselves. Of course not all clients are like that but in general they tend to be so controlling that it destroys any creative aspect. Creativity involves taking a risk, right? If I do something in a new way, or use a new technique, then there is a risk that it may not work. But clients in this country do not want to take risks, and they have a need for control and detailed input. That can tend to kill the creativity. This is something that I have found frustrating at times.”
“The bottom line on everything with client-service businesses is that the client sets the standard. It’s the level of openness of the client towards new ideas that will determine how many new ideas are put forward. Clients will complain about there being no new ideas but when they are presented with a generally new idea they can’t cope with it. There sometimes tends to be a bit of bitching and moaning about the fact that their ad agency is not creative enough or that their research company doesn’t come up with interesting solutions but in 9 cases out of 10 it’s not that there is a lack of will on the agency side. The issue is that the companies themselves are not demanding it. If a company says something like “I want something highly creative” then the agency will go out and find someone who can do it, or if they can’t another agency will. You can’t provide a service in a vacuum. The buyer is the party that actually sets the scene for everything. So if there is not a demand for creative response then there will not be such a response. I think that the whole structure of the way decisions are made mitigates against creativity.”
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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
