Managing for Creativity in Japan » Time and Workload http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan Talking with Foreign Executives in Japan Wed, 30 Nov 2011 07:02:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Ease http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/ease/ http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/ease/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:00:54 +0000 Chris Berthelsen http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/?p=499 ….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.

]]> http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/ease/feed/ 0 Pyramids and Funnels http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/pyramids-and-funnels/ http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/pyramids-and-funnels/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:00:59 +0000 Chris Berthelsen http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/?p=326 “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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