“(CB: And that new product development function, where is that located in Japan? Who takes on that role?)
Advertising agencies don’t take on that role here, it’s usually companies. This is one of the issues that we find. A lot of Japanese companies do innovate but they do it incrementally. For example they will take a product and next week it will be in green paper and the week after that it might be in washi (Japanese-style paper)..the week after that they might change the design. It’s just incremental. They will never think something like ‘oh let’s put this in a see-through plastic container…or let’s not put it in a container at all let’s hand it over to consumers and get them to take it home in their own furoshiki to make it more eco…’ things that might be a big jump. Innovation here is incremental as opposed to reinventing the wheel. And the other thing is that in Japan it is almost never done with consumer insight. 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”.
Consumers will never tell you what they want so never ask them directly but what you can do is study them, talk to them, and see what their issues are. And then using those insights you can then go away and come up with some real ideas. I think that that is the big problem here, they don’t do that. (CB: Do you have any idea why it is this way?). No I don’t, not really…..Companies here like to innovate because it is such an innovative market. They have to innovate incrementally because it’s so competitive that you need to have a product on the shelf in two weeks. It’s all about how you produce, not picking a product that will resonate and sit on the shelf for not just one year but perhaps even five years.”
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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
“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.”
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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
“In terms of the creative process it is almost like the Japanese work on a pyramid basis – building and building and finally reaching the answer at the top. Western agencies are more a funnel approach – you’ve got all these ideas and then you flush them out.
I think that this is a trait of both team-based and individual work and it’s actually quite challenging for me because I tend to come up with ideas quickly and then want to pursue and refine them. This puts me at odds with the majority of people that I work with who are thinking the opposite way. That’s where relationships, friendships and trust help the organization work. What happens in a lot of organizations is that a battle usually ensues and the organization starts to split between the foreigners and the Japanese and it sometimes ends up terribly. Here though, partly because we are small and partly because we have gotten to know each other so well, we have respect for both ways of doing things. One isn’t better than the other, they’re just different. As a result, we have had to find ways of accommodating each other.”
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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 we work for a Western company it’s very much ‘let’s see what comes out of this’ but with this company it was like ‘we want to target male consumers aged 20 to 25 with a new product that sells 25 million units’ – very targeted…which is good in a way, I mean there’s no point in coming up with ideas for the sake of it but on the other hand that’s quite a goal and if you don’t meet that expectation then you’ve failed. A Western company might be more like ‘let’s see what we can come up with and then go from there’.They go into their innovation process in a different way I guess. But once you know that it’s a more effective collaboration because 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 than a company that is just ‘let’s be innovative and come up with a bunch of ideas’…because if the ideas don’t resonate then they will come back to you and go ‘this is pointless’. So, that’s I guess a positive aspect of working with Japanese clients.”
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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
“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.”
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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
“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 organisational learning. The other good thing about it is that if you have changes in staff, and you’ve just got it in your memory what went wrong you can’t pass it on – it’s a good way of capturing that organisational learning and making sure it’s available for future people.”
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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
“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 about someone fiddling their expenses or things like that. We have a pretty efficient team who work hard and don’t take enough holidays – all that is a joy. It goes back to the long service, but I think that most of them know their job pretty well. Well, they know the way that they’ve always done their job so you don’t have to worry too much about quality control, but the corollary is that if you want to change the way that things are done it’s difficult. That goes back to the change management.”
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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 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) better relationships Japanese to Japanese – that’s what they can do – and as I say, once we have the relationships the business will follow.”
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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
“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 though.
What is more likely to happen is that you will be presented with opportunities which will require creative responses in terms of management. If, for example, we are suddenly presented with a big opportunity and we have to address it with limited resources then we have to work out how we are going to address the opportunity within our constraints. This will require a creative response. However, if there is no business imperative then it is difficult to be creative.”
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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 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 time – staff turnover is very low, so whoever comes into the job will find that you don’t get shouting matches in the office or anything like that. I suppose that someone who doesn’t know Japan needs to understand that that doesn’t mean that everything is completely cake and roses and that there are tensions between certain people, or historic questions about who is supposed to do which job. You won’t pick these things up if you stand here and look around the room. You won’t really spot it at first, but then 3 months in you’ll get someone coming and knocking on your door saying “did you know that this person did this?” That’s one thing that I would highlight, that HR and people management is probably going to take up a lot of time.”
“Certainly in my career history this has been the job where people management has been the most challenging. Part of the reason is that it’s the biggest team I’ve ever had. When I was here last time it was a big team and it was challenging then, but when I’ve not been in Japan I’ve only ever had one or two people reporting to me. But beyond that, one thing is that turnover is quicker in other countries so if two people don’t get along you can grin and bear it for a year if things really can’t be resolved and typically after a year or two years in my home country someone will be promoted or change jobs or whatever. So the longevity of service here makes it more challenging - put you and me in the same room for 18 years we’d, y’know… And that’s what these guys have had. They’re like a family, they know each other very well but at the same time there are embedded issues because of the length of time they’ve spent together. That’s one. And I supposed in Europe people are more vocal. Well, they’re not more vocal but they are more direct. If they have an issue with someone then they are more likely to discuss it directly with that person whereas here they are more likely to shy away from raising it directly but they will talk to their own boss about it, and gossip in the coffee room about it – that kind of stuff. Sometimes you have to deliberately bring the issues to light whereas in my home country it would naturally come to light. We are basically a happy team though, I just mention it since you are asking about differences.”
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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
