Managing for Creativity in Japan » conformity 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 The Weirdo http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/the-weirdo/ http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/the-weirdo/#comments Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:00:59 +0000 Chris Berthelsen http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/?p=159 “The creative person is the weirdo. The creative person is the one that talks a bit funny (not necessarily). He is the one that you’ve just got to give space. Let him do whatever he does. You can’t have him as one of the battery hens, how can you have creativity in that scenario? It’s impossible.

The whole ecology of the way offices in Japan are set up doesn’t support it. Creativity is rule breaking, it’s doing something that hasn’t been done before, so naturally a creative person is going to upset people. They are mavericks. They are people that will dare to say ‘we need to change this process’. I spoke to a Japanese girl a few weeks ago. She works in a call center and they have to do all these tallies using pencil and paper. She said to her supervisor “I could do this with Excel or something” and the supervisor who was in his late forties just came down on her for coming up with an idea. The whole ecology…it just doesn’t support questioning the system.”

]]> http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/the-weirdo/feed/ 0 Focus Groups in Japan http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/focus-groups-in-japan/ http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/focus-groups-in-japan/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 23:00:56 +0000 Chris Berthelsen http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/?p=313 “If you did a focus group in America you’d have 9 or 12 people in the room and some people would ‘love this’ and ‘hate that’ and there’d be big fights and arguments and maybe a couple of people would sit there numb or play with their blackberries or whatever and when it came to scoring what they did or didn’t like there would be a lot of polarization.
In Japanese focus groups everybody is pretty polite and nobody really likes to point their finger and say ‘that’s crap’ or ‘that’s amazing’. They tend to be very moderate in what they say, and particularly in a group environment social mores demand that people not be too rude or overly expressive. There are always exceptions to the rule of course but in general that is what we have found.
So, if you had a score in your research it would always be ‘moderately acceptable’ or ‘moderately unacceptable’ which makes it hard (I think) to get insights. One-on-one interviews may be a little bit better because people tend to open up, but the best way to do things here is through real life observation.”



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

]]> http://a-small-lab.com/managing-for-creativity-in-japan/focus-groups-in-japan/feed/ 0