“If you followed the advice I just gave your head office might view you as a weak manager. If, when they asked you how things were going, you said that you were still ‘working things out’ they might view you that way but actually you would just be doing your job properly because once it’s agreed it will be fully implemented. But it won’t be even partly implemented until it is fully agreed. (CB: So it is important for the head office to have some kind of understanding of the particulars of the Japanese environment?) Yes, but they don’t, it’s just not the nature of the beast. If you look at the big international companies that have prospered in Japan you will see that they have all had very long periods where they were investing and not taking any money out of the market at all….for 20, 30 years some of them. But now they are established and are making money. Anybody who is coming into the market thinking that they are going to make a quick profit in two years is just delusional. I mean, we were profitable in our first year when I first moved here but that is not usual.”
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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
“What’s the reward for taking a risk here? As I said earlier, creativity and risk taking are one in the same and if you are going to take a risk you want the prospect of a reward. What’s the reward for taking a risk in Japan? I don’t know. Are you going to get paid more? Probably not, and as I mentioned earlier that’s not a big motivator anyway. If you take a risk and it goes wrong then you are singled out as the person that stuffed up. So, why be creative? There is no incentive….”
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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.”
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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
“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.”
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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 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.”
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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
“I have observed that there is a tendency to treat creativity as a commodity. The approach often seems to be that “I’m the client and I’m paying for creativity! – So where is it? Bring me something creative!” Of course it’s not just Japanese clients that do that actually, it’s fairly universal but I can’t say that on the whole I’ve experienced much respect for a creative solution in Japan. And when it is delivered it’s almost like ‘well that’s what we paid for anyway….’”
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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
“One of the key things in this country is that whether or not you are listened to depends on who you are. Your idea or your thinking might be good but if you’re lower on the hierarchy then you probably won’t be so influential.”
“If you are a really famous creative person in Japan, say if you’ve got a name and some grey hair or whatever, you may find yourself having an easier time of it than some young creative guy when you are trying to do something in corporate-land. That doesn’t mean that companies are not open to creativity but things tend to work on seniority and are very formalized.”
****************************************************
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
