Managing for Creativity in Japan » Risk

On Being a Foreign Employer

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:00:44 +0000

“First of all, it’s a risk to work for foreigners. Two, it’s not a safe, established Japanese company – there isn’t that cliché status of working for a well known Japanese company. Even if you are an established company like Unilever or something people still think ‘oooh no, a foreign company’ even though they are like the biggest manufacturer in the world.
Also, people like security and hierarchy and they like to know their position. They don’t like to know that they have to do a bit of everything whereas in a foreign start-up they do have to do a bit of everything. Our people who do research do have to do client presentations and this, that and the other and you know what? If there are bowls in the sink at the end of the night we don’t have an office manager who just sits there all day waiting for people to go home so he can wash the dishes we wash our own dishes. For some people that is shocking.
Also, younger companies, especially foreign start-ups, tend to be a lot less structured. We don’t say ‘this is what you need to do, this is the checklist’ we tend to be a bit more creative and say ‘this is your time, we need you to achieve this…and what else can you come up with’. People don’t know what to do with that. (CB: So how have you dealt with that in your company?) There has to be a lot of mentoring and that’s an area that we really need to improve on. You have to mentor people, hold their hands, give them the confidence to say ‘I know I’m doing this but there is a possibility that I could do this or this’. In contrast, I think that people in London and New York are very keen to prove themselves. They also know that it’s not a job for life and they want to get the most out of it that they can and then go on to the next bigger, better place. Here the attitude is that you join a company and might possibly stay there for a long time. So perhaps they have a view that longevity is better than immediate results.”

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.

Be the Template Bringer

Chris Berthelsen — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:00:35 +0000

“Japanese employees in my experience place a very high value on pleasing a manager. A lot of that is appearance, being there, face-to-face, and being on time. How you do things really matters. But they put less emphasis on pushing the envelope, on challenging, on doing anything they haven’t done before. There is an innate difficulty with managing something they haven’t got a formula for, that they haven’t got a template for. If you as a manager provide a template or formula and say ‘go for it’, they’ll do a beautiful job. But if you just say ‘here’s the problem, find a solution’, they’re lost.”

Mid-Level Creativity Killers

Chris Berthelsen — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:00:47 +0000

“There can be tension with the foreign management of the client company. The management may have a certain set of goals which may require creativity but the executional team may not be so creative. Japanese people do not tend to be and are not educated in such a way as to be creative and to take risks in their approaches to things. So, you can have conflict. The management would come to me and we’d have a discussion and say ‘let’s try this, that sounds good’ and then through the process of working with the local team the idea would get crunched into something that is extremely mediocre. This would then result in feedback and evaluation that the process was mediocre. Well of course the process was mediocre – nobody took any risks and the process was kind of hijacked.

I’m not saying this with any bitterness, it’s just part of the way things work but if you want to offer something which is a bit creative and involves some level of risk then you might find that very frustrating.”

What’s the Reward for Being Creative?

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:00:21 +0000

“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….”

Kaisha vs. Company

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:00:54 +0000

“The concept of a company in Japan is I think different. The term ‘kaisha’ (Japanese for company) is in my mind a group. The word itself has more of a nuance of a group of people doing something together than does the term ‘limited liability company’ (which is a non-person). The Western idea of a company is that of a non-person – a non-human legal entity with no objective other than to make a profit. Of course they have to exist in society and have good human relations (which are good for business) though.

You may have seen the movie ‘The Company’ which likens a company to a psychopath – obsessed with its own survival, lacking empathy and whatever….That’s not really how it is in Japan. Everybody has a vested interest in the stability of the system rather than, perhaps, genuine progress. It’s not that genuine progress doesn’t occur but it occurs within that controlled and less chaotic environment. People will experiment with concepts and products but they won’t touch the core of the organization so readily.”

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.

Working with Established Models

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:00:46 +0000

“Because they are risk averse they want to work with proven approaches and methods. If we are able to develop something completely new it is a bit of a victory. This is a pity because if the clients were more creative in their approaches then suppliers would meet that challenge and they would employ more creative people. But the research industry in Japan? I wouldn’t describe it as being creative at all. Not that it is completely nowhere in terms of the actual skill level, abilities and so forth, but it is a fact that it is not particularly cutting edge.”

Becoming More Collaborative

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:00:13 +0000

“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.”

A Green Plant in the Desert

Chris Berthelsen — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:00:59 +0000

“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.”