“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.”