“Here they tend to take the cookie cutter and cut the same cookie…and it’s a good cookie. Once they get the design right it’s great, and it’s designed with reliability built in. Compare this with Spain where somebody would be cutting corners to try to do things faster – resulting in variability and difficulties or bad quality”.(i)
Fear, need for structure, and intense client relationships result in risk averseness which equates to consistent results which in turn form the stable base for conscientious, continual, incremental innovation (kaizen).
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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
“The old adage “if you always do what you’ve always done then you always get what you always got” is very true in Japan. You get very consistent results, but where does that leave you on the creativity and innovation barometer?”
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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
“Here they tend here to take the cookie cutter and cut the same cookie. It’s a good cookie, I mean once they get the design right its great and I think, as I said, that’s why their products are so great. Because once they design it, it’s designed with that reliability built in. They know how to make the same copy again and again and again. If it was Spain there would be somebody cutting a corner somewhere thinking that they could actually do it quicker. And that introduces some variability which results in difficulties or bad quality.”
****************************************************
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
