….there is not that sense of ease in a normal Japanese company. (C: And that’s something that you can offer them?) Yeah, but at the same time we do work really really hard. I’m not sure about whether they would work this hard in a Japanese company. They would probably work longer hours but not do so much. I am trying to reduce the hours, but long hours are inevitable in this business because we are dealing with multiple time zones and we can’t call people in the middle of the night – that’s one of the limitations with being located in Japan, I guess.
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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
