Managing for Creativity in Japan » Openness and Trust

Obstacles Involved with being Non-Japanese

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 02:00:28 +0000

“One major obstacle is that you have to speak the language. If you can’t speak Japanese you better be really good at what you do. You need good personal introductions. You need to prove yourself quite quickly. You need to be there. Also, I think that foreign companies are still viewed with suspicion. There is still a sense of ‘what can someone as a foreigner tell me about Japan?’ I think that is a problem. As a foreigner myself, if another foreigner came up to me and said ‘I’m a marketing consultant, I can do this that and the other’ I would say ‘Well what do you know about Japan?…are you Japanese? ‘no’ Well do you speak Japanese ‘no’….well then what are you basing this insight on?

I don’t speak fluent Japanese but you need to at the very least be able to navigate around an office and understand how protocol and meetings work. At least play the game. You can’t not speak the language and not play the game either. You have to know what you’re doing, for example, turning up for meetings. You might think that the meeting is pointless and that you don’t need to go along but you do…they want to see your face. That’s important. In the West you might get away with not turning up to meetings…you really do have to play the game here.”

Advice for New Managers

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 02:00:17 +0000

“You have to be enormously thick skinned. When a client says “no I’m not interested in that” three months later you have to be able to ask them what they are interested in. Then you need to be able to get enough information from them so that you can write a proposal. If you are entrepreneurial you have to be able to not take no for an answer and think about how you can make it a yes. I have been told ‘no’ so many times but I have turned them into a ‘yes’ a lot of times.
Perseverance is important. Client relationships take a long time to establish. If they don’t happen in five minutes (and they won’t) you have to believe that they might happen in a year’s time. You need to be able to keep up the cheery demeanor the whole time because it might turn into something.
Never burn bridges and never piss of a client. Once trust is broken it’s pretty much permanent. You can’t go back – this is true for all clients but particularly for Japanese. In Japan people tend to stay in their jobs for 30 years but overseas that marketing role is going to be filled by someone different in two year’s time, you know it is.
Also, don’t discount your rate too much. If you discount they might wonder what your problem is and start thinking that you might not be very good. Always have a good attitude about your pricing and stick with it. It’s not a barter society and I don’t think people are overly impressed if you come back with something cheaper because that is an indicator of being substandard.”

Hard to Pinpoint

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:00:43 +0000

Because I don’t speak Japanese I was treated pretty rough – everyone was fascinated with me but not fascinated enough to employ me. I think one reason for this was that they couldn’t pinpoint me. They couldn’t say “well you’re a computer engineer” or “OK you’re a this or a that”. What I do is very creative and therefore hard to summarize in a couple of words.

Bringing Value, Building Trust

Chris Berthelsen — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 07:00:33 +0000

I certainly do feel quite often (just as a gaijin walking down the street) that I am different and the way people treat me is different. It happens all the time. You’re never going to be Japanese and of course I don’t want to be Japanese but you know, there was never a problem when I was in Hong Kong. I didn’t need to be Chinese there but here there is a really big difference between being Japanese and non-Japanese. It was really great when I got to the stage where I could take a kind of ‘fuck you’ attitude (which I wasn’t able to when I was out looking for work in Japan). Now that I’m not looking for work and people actually need me it’s more interesting. (C:So that was a way to overcome the barrier of being non-Japanese?) Totally, there was and is a wall – a communication and understanding wall. But now people see me and they think ‘now this guy can actually teach me something’ – now, when I go and meet managers they ask me to introduce them to new things or ideas. Perhaps it’s a source of inspiration for them and they are using me as that bridge with the West. It’s an interesting position to be in and it does take a while to build that trust.

Influence and Losing Your Edge

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:00:21 +0000

“You have to be able to influence the Japanese. Unfortunately it’s also a culture where most foreigners come in and out, and your average Japanese staff who still is life-time employment oriented will just survive the current foreigner. Working as a long-term employee side-by-side then, you are forced in a sense to reign back your ‘blue-sky tendencies” and so in a way I think it does put a damper on your creativity and people that are here a long time who aren’t the ‘template bringers’ can really lose their edge.”

In-Betweens add the Polish

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:00:16 +0000

“It takes a long time to build trust and relationships. You can’t just walk in and do it overnight. You can’t just overlay everything from the top down. The most successful programmes that I have run have been working through other functional heads and line managers where you actually have to use ‘in betweens’ – where you can bring the ideas and they push and pull and shape it till it makes sense to them. Then they can do really great things, they can add the polish and the detail and that’s where they really excel. It’s hard to find Japanese managers that will stand up in a meeting and present a new idea that might not be immediately accepted.”

Being a Change Agent

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:00:13 +0000

“The difficulty with this is that, if you really want to manage change, you have manager who has been rewarded his whole career on creating harmony and we know that it takes some positive dissonance to create any change. You have to push people out of their comfort zone to create change of any kind, and creativity and innovation are kinds of change. So it would be very difficult for a Japanese manager to reverse his whole set of behavioural characteristics and suddenly become a change agent. You might be able to take that same manager and drop him into another corporate culture where he doesn’t have all this history and maybe he would have the personal capabilities to do it, but in his own organization it’s very difficult. So Japanese managers have to rely on some external motivations to effect change; in a sense they have to blame other people for having to force their people to do these things.”

Characteristics of a Successful Manager

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:00:57 +0000

“The first characteristic is probably the ability to receive advice – the ability to identify allies and build a team of people who are able to influence the organization. It is also important to be able identify who the opinion leaders are and who the change agents might be, and to work with them effectively.

I also think that the ability to create positive dissonance but still maintain harmony is important. In a way that has to do with generating goodwill, so it’s a personal characteristic - being warm and human and at the same time creating understanding of the need for change. I guess a lot of that comes down to good communication skills. But before communication comes listening, so the ability to listen well, and listen well across cultures is important. I think you can learn that in other countries, not just in Japan. I’ve worked with CEOs who have never been to Japan before, but who have a lot of global experience. The successful ones have the abilities I just mentioned.”

“The leadership characteristics are not so different from what you would require for success as a leader in any other culture, but there is probably a heavier emphasis on the ability to trust and rely on others, and to listen intuitively.”

Risk, Trust, Experience in the West

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:00:08 +0000

I think that people are more willing to take a risk or gamble in other countries than they are here. I think that it is harder to earn trust here. It takes longer. Whatever you have, whatever experience you have in the West doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t translate.

Building Trust Takes Time

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:00:39 +0000

When we were starting out we didn’t get one sale. Not one. We had all the buyers come and have a look at our collection but nobody bought anything. They were all waiting to see whether we would be around in six-months. Then, six-months later we had our sales exhibition and almost no one came. We were thinking that we would need to re-work the company because we were obviously not doing things right. Then the next day one buyer came and bought three of our brands. Then a major department store chain came in did a small buy. At that point we promised that we would really work it in the press and make sure that the pieces that they bought would sell out. We did what we promised and they came back and then bought up big……so there definitely is value in building up trust. After four years we still have to earn it, and we work really hard, but we have had an incredible year this year especially considering it’s a recession.