Managing for Creativity in Japan

“I think that there is a greater need for face-to-face interaction – it’s a very hands-on management environment. The staff takes a lot of a manager’s time. The amount of time spent face-to-face in Japan is probably double or triple what a Westerner would expect from their manager. There is an expectation that you will provide that and you’ll get negative feedback if you don’t. On the other hand I think that Western employees like to have a bit of distance from their manager. In Japan it’s an almost paternalistic situation. When you grow up in the organization your main role is to keep harmony and make sure everybody is happy. So the whole conversation around development planning and setting goals and personal targets is a little bit different to that in the West. It’s hard to get an individual employee thinking in terms of any real change in their working career and they don’t seek that as actively as the foreign employees that I have supervised.”

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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

“When we work for a Western company it’s very much ‘let’s see what comes out of this’ but with this company it was like ‘we want to target male consumers aged 20 to 25 with a new product that sells 25 million units’ – very targeted…which is good in a way, I mean there’s no point in coming up with ideas for the sake of it but on the other hand that’s quite a goal and if you don’t meet that expectation then you’ve failed. A Western company might be more like ‘let’s see what we can come up with and then go from there’.They go into their innovation process in a different way I guess. But once you know that it’s a more effective collaboration because if you can meet their expectations and it does go into product development then I guess it is going to work out a bit better than a company that is just ‘let’s be innovative and come up with a bunch of ideas’…because if the ideas don’t resonate then they will come back to you and go ‘this is pointless’. So, that’s I guess a positive aspect of working with Japanese clients.”

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