When I first went and talked to people here they all told me that if I couldn’t speak Japanese I wouldn’t get a job. I asked them if they spoke Japanese and they would always say no. So, I thought that they were either lying to me or they were trying to hold on to their own jobs and were afraid of competition. I found that a lot of people were incredibly threatened by me when I first came. I had never experienced that before because I had always felt that if I was good enough for the job then I should get that job, but here there is only a certain amount of jobs going for gaijin and people really want to hold onto what they have got and they get really nasty. My advice for people when they come in is to be wary of that, first of all.
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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 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.
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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 being a manager of Japanese staff, my experience has been that it is very different to get local staff to be creative in their problem solving. Not impossible, people do differ, but there is a general bias against taking risks. People want to discuss everything and make sure everybody agrees with a particular course of action before they take it. This has influenced me to a degree and over the years here I’ve become much more collaborative in the way that I make decisions. I used to just dictate but now I hardly ever dictate, I suggest. It’s better that way, it works better. If you have a culture where people are afraid to make a mistake that’s like death to creativity and in Japan when you’ve got fear of being shamed, fear of being shown up, fear of making a mistake, fear of making someone else look bad, fear of making yourself look bad it’s hard. I want to be very careful about making those blanket judgments but nevertheless if you are in a culture where people are afraid to make mistakes and they’re nervous, and they feel like someone will come down on them if they make a mistake…..and you also don’t want to make your clients look bad by knowing more than them…… That’s fatal to 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
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.
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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
“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.”
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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 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.”
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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
“(CB: So building trust and relationships is very important. How do you approach that?)
You need to have either done some business with them before or they need to have met you before…There needs to some kind of introduction….That’s the way to do it, you can’t just cold call. We haven’t tried that but I don’t think you can. There really does need to be some kind of introduction. Past that there are a number of meetings….meetings where you don’t really talk about things, you just turn up and then you hope. They do test you out, you know. And then, if the person that you have been dealing with gets replaced then you have to start the process again. That happened recently in fact. It’s a bit like ‘wow..back at square one..how did that happen?!’
In this regard there is a massive difference between here and London or New York. People are more willing to take you on face value overseas. They are also very business oriented. If people think that you can bring business to their company it’s like ‘OK where do we start?’ But here, it doesn’t matter if you can say that you are going to bring them the biggest idea they’ve ever had (which would be bullshit of course)…there would still be the need to find out about you and think about where the relationship is going to go. It’s all very much for the long term. To compare, in London you might just get together for one project….it is much faster moving.”
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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
“In Japan, the most successful managers are people that care about people. I think that you can make a lot of mistakes (and get away with it) if people think that you are doing it for the right reasons. You can create a lot of change and discomfort if people understand that your motivations are not manipulative or self-serving – that it’s really for the good of the organization or the good of the individual concerned.
Also, particularly in Japan, people won’t push back very much. They won’t challenge a lot so you have to be careful that you don’t railroad people and force people along a path that they haven’t bought into. Go more slowly than you otherwise would or you’ll miss the signs that they aren’t on board and get the passive aggression at the end.”
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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
“It is a real challenge for a foreign manager to build that kind of trust. If you enter any organization where the employees have a 20 year working relationship you are not only the newcomer but you are a foreigner. You don’t socialize in the same ways and you have a different need for relationships with your colleagues. You want to be friends with them but you don’t want to go drinking every night. As a female manager maybe I’ve felt that even more so. I have four kids at home and I’m not going to spend my evenings drinking with people I’ve been working with all day. I love to socialise and create opportunities for team building and but I’d rather have lunch. Some of those work-life balance things are different.”
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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
