Managing for Creativity in Japan Talking with Foreign Executives in Japan
Japanese Work Practices
On NPD
“….It’s almost like a bunch of scientists in an office in their white coats who walk around saying “ooh must come up with an idea, here’s a wacky idea, let’s see if it resonates”….”
On Being a Foreign Employer
“….First of all, it’s a risk to work for foreigners. Two, it’s not a safe, established Japanese company…”
Obstacles Involved with being Non-Japanese
“…you have to speak the language……If you can’t speak Japanese you better be really good at what you do….”
Advice for New Managers
“You have to be enormously thick skinned….”
Handwritten
“….I find that disgusting Japanese people really like hand written stuff. I find it inefficient, slow, ugly…”
What’s the Reward for Being Creative?
“…What’s the reward for taking a risk in Japan? I don’t know. Are you going to get paid more? Probably not….”
Kaisha vs. Company
“…Everybody has a vested interest in the stability of the system rather than, perhaps, genuine progress….”
Fuck Ups
“…it is very important to have a more Western way of thinking if you are going to be working internationally…”
Broad Minded Employees
“…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…”
Need a Japanese Face
“…because there are very specific Japanese ways of doing things here I need to have Japanese staff…”
On Building Trust and Relationships
“…here, it doesn’t matter if you can say that you are going to bring them the biggest idea they’ve ever had…”
Slow Moving (2)
“…Creativity doesn’t really work that way, it happens when it happens…”
Pyramids and Funnels
Pyramids and Funnels
Approaching Innovation
“…if you can meet their expectations and it does go into product development then I guess it is going to work out a bit better..”
Slow Moving
“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 [...]
The Hanseikai
“If you’ve just finished a project what you could have done better is fresh in your mind, and the hanseikai is a good way to capture and document that, before you forget it. So, when you come to do it again, you pull out a bit of paper and improve. It’s a way of capturing [...]
Things to Embrace
“Well, things to embrace. I’ve talked a lot about the challenges, but the people are pretty reliable so rates of sickness are just not an issue here, where as some of my counterparts in other countries might have to monitor that. I have an extremely trustworthy team so you don’t have to worry too much [...]
Relationships
“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) [...]
Business Imperative
“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 [...]
Advice to New Managers
“I suppose that I would let them know that people management is quite a big part of the job here. I wouldn’t talk about individuals at that point because they need to form their own opinions on the team – who’s good and who isn’t. But the team here has worked together for a long [...]
The Chorei (朝礼)
“There are office routines that are quite uniquely Japanese. Like for instance every morning there is a ‘chorei’ which is like a stand up, quickie meeting, just to get everyone on side, introducing media clippings and that kind of thing. This is a very healthy thing but I think that very few Western companies would [...]
Advice to Newcomers
“Take it easy. Take a good look around before you change anything. Don’t come in like a tornado – unless of course there is some kind of crisis and you have to do something in an emergency fashion. Go through the process. Make sure that the staff sees that you are trying to learn, you [...]
Following the Person Before You
“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 [...]
Stuck in the Office
“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 [...]
Stable Client Relationships
“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 [...]
Cutting Good Cookies
“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 [...]
Stable Relationships
“We are very reliant on a couple of key clients, so the relationship with those clients is very critical to our business. That’s one of the funny things about doing business in Japan. The relationships are hard to establish but once they are established they tend to be quite enduring. On the surface there can [...]
Personal Relationships
“First of all you don’t have those personal relationships so you need get out socialising. You need to do the Japanese thing. You need to go out in the evening and you need to drink. You need to drink and you need to go to karaoke. You need to do whatever it takes to get [...]
Recruitment
“It is also more difficult to attract a Japanese person to a non-Japanese company. I think that the reason for that is that they probably think it’s just a one-way ticket meaning that they think they won’t get back into a Japanese company afterwards, although that perception might be changing. (C: why would that be [...]
Team Spirit and Loyalty
“They’re hard working and very accurate – good attention to detail. I know I couldn’t get the same team spirit and loyalty and willingness to go over and above to get the task done in another country, but I can get it here. It would be extremely difficult even in Ireland. In Spain you would [...]
Negotiation
“Some of the training that we have done has been targeted specifically at the Japanese culture. Because of the reluctance to have a conflict situation some of the local staff find it difficult to negotiate. They are almost embarrassed to ask for a price reduction. We have run training programmes to explain that negotiation isn’t [...]
Who are You?
“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 [...]
