Managing for Creativity in Japan » clients

On Building Trust and Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:00:33 +0000

“(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.”

Client Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:00:49 +0000

“There are benefits to working with Japanese clients. It does take a long time to establish relationships. Trust takes a long time to build. In my case, a white woman walks into a Japanese office and says “I can help you increase market share and come up with new ideas” – they look at me and go “what the hell?”. But once they can get their heads around the fact that we can provide value……Let me put it this way, it’s like being an anthropologist – you can’t study your own kind. I’m from Canada and I can’t study people from Canada because I can’t see them. So the beauty of what we do is that we can always see what is happening but then we can look to the West and contextualise. That is obviously very valuable.
So, with Japanese clients, once you have established a relationship and trust they are more likely to go ahead with you the following year in business. Even if budgets are tight they might try to renegotiate but they won’t drop you whereas Western companies will say that the budgets are tight and call you in a years time and hope that the relationship is still there. Japanese clients might try and support you a bit better. The flip side of that is that in the relationships you do need to work much harder.”

Intensive Client Servicing

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:00:29 +0000

“The client servicing process in Japan is incredibly intensive. The guys sometimes come into the office after lunch because they’ve been working through to 10 or 11 at night. And our experience is not really that extreme, I think. The client will be on the phone to them constantly the whole day about details, stuff, just to have a chat, you know. Compared to this my experience of clients back home was economical, like ‘here’s what we are going to do, I’ll come back when it’s done’ – and they would accept what you have done because they are paying for you as an expert to do that. Here though, everyone has to have their fingers in everything – and that is intensive. Also, the margins are low so I think that the only person who has the opportunity to be creative in the company is me. But while I think that to some degree I am more inclined to be creative as part of my personality, I just don’t know that if you gave people the opportunity to be creative that they would be……especially if you’re coming from a culture like this where people seek direction.”

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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

Employee Turnover

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:00:54 +0000

“The stability of the relationships is a really good thing. If you have worked with someone for a long time it does make your work with them more efficient. You don’t have to discover how they work and you don’t have to train them. It’s terribly time consuming when you’ve got someone new and turnover is one of the hidden costs of a company. The company I worked for was a big international company (not so much in Japan) there was huge turnover. The whole staff would turn over (except for a few people at the top who were probably incentivised to stay). I don’t understand how you can maintain decent relationships with your clients in such a situation. When people leave a whole lot of knowledge disappears with them and that’s a real hidden cost. It’s a gross inefficiency having a lot of turnover but the upside of that is that you can get new people and new ideas into the company. Also, while having the stability that comes with low turnover is a good thing there will always be people that you would like to get rid of and there is a very strong bias against getting rid of people here.”

Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:00:38 +0000

“One of the benefits would be that our Japanese staff has the ability to make relationships like no foreigner could, even with all the entertaining and the best Japanese language skills. It’s very difficult for a foreigner to get under the skin of a Japanese person. I would expect (and I think we have achieved) better relationships Japanese to Japanese – that’s what they can do – and as I say, once we have the relationships the business will follow.”

Business Imperative

Chris Berthelsen — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:00:27 +0000

“There are creative ways of making the business more efficient and I think that we are already quite efficient as it is. But creativity as a characteristic of your service to market towards a domestic audience is, I think, not much of an advantage. It may be when you are talking about overseas based clients though.
What is more likely to happen is that you will be presented with opportunities which will require creative responses in terms of management. If, for example, we are suddenly presented with a big opportunity and we have to address it with limited resources then we have to work out how we are going to address the opportunity within our constraints. This will require a creative response. However, if there is no business imperative then it is difficult to be creative.”

****************************************************
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

Stable Client Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:00:33 +0000

“You get stable client relationships over an extended period of time. This equates to stability of income for us. Of course you like growing but the one thing that businesses hate is uncertainty. You do not want to wake up one day and find that your key client services person has left to join the competition. You don’t want to wake up to find that your key client has gone to your competitor. Here, I can at least be reasonably certain that the client-staff relationships which are the key to our business are relatively stable. I would manage the situation a bit differently if I wasn’t so certain – I would be more interventionist – but it’s not necessary. Everyone is comfortable and we get along – like a family. But the trade off is that it’s not creative.”

Stable Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:00:59 +0000

“We are very reliant on a couple of key clients, so the relationship with those clients is very critical to our business. That’s one of the funny things about doing business in Japan. The relationships are hard to establish but once they are established they tend to be quite enduring. On the surface there can be a lot of conflict but the underlying relationship tends to be quite stable in this country compared to other countries.”

****************************************************
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

Personal Relationships

Chris Berthelsen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:00:11 +0000

“First of all you don’t have those personal relationships so you need get out socialising. You need to do the Japanese thing. You need to go out in the evening and you need to drink. You need to drink and you need to go to karaoke. You need to do whatever it takes to get that personal trust before you even start talking about the business. I think that once that starts you get a nucleus, and the network spreads and they tell their friends that you can be trusted, that you are a person that they can do business with, and then you start to get more contacts. So you have to behave, and obviously you have to act with high integrity and be honest and assume you are under scrutiny all the time.”

“I’ve had to do the five nights a week and use the weekends on the golf. I have managed to build relationships to the point where I’ve been to clients’ children’s weddings. That was the ultimate, to earn that kind of trust and respect. If you can get that, I think that there is huge potential for your company and that person or group of people working here. At the end of the day the Japanese, like most Asians, fear a loss of face and personal embarrassment. They don’t want to take a risk with somebody that they don’t know. Every purchase is a risk and we are talking about high value components in our case and they don’t want to take a risk with someone they don’t know and isn’t going to help out their friend when something goes wrong. They want someone who’s not just going to refer to the contract and say “it’s not specified here”. They want someone who is flexible, and can work outside the contract and fix it for them without their boss knowing.

I think that’s what you have to do here. I’m not saying that we give everything away but we respect the personal relationships and we make sure that the people who put the trust in us don’t regret it later.”