The companies we deal with constantly, constantly, fuck up in their dealings with the West – you know all that ’shou ga nai’ (‘it can’t be helped’) attitude. That kind of thinking just doesn’t cut it when you are dealing with international brands in the international stage. The Japanese way, you know, works in Japan but it doesn’t work anywhere else. You have to like it or lump it. Japanese companies that are smart are working out that it is very important to have a more Western way of thinking if you are going to be working internationally.
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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
Previously everything was hand written and while I find that disgusting Japanese people really like hand written stuff. I find it inefficient, slow, ugly, and also I can’t read it. I also figure that, from an international viewpoint it just looks unprofessional. The Japanese agencies we deal with don’t view it that way, but I do.
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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
It is important for me to have [Japanese staff in my company] because we need to have a strong Japanese face – I don’t want to be seen as just a gaijin company. I want to have a certain level of respect from Japanese people and because there are very specific Japanese ways of doing things here I need to have Japanese staff. I hope to start to implement more international ways of looking at things into the industry but this is still the beginning.
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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
“If you’ve just finished a project what you could have done better is fresh in your mind, and the hanseikai is a good way to capture and document that, before you forget it. So, when you come to do it again, you pull out a bit of paper and improve. It’s a way of capturing organisational learning. The other good thing about it is that if you have changes in staff, and you’ve just got it in your memory what went wrong you can’t pass it on – it’s a good way of capturing that organisational learning and making sure it’s available for future people.”
****************************************************
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
“There are office routines that are quite uniquely Japanese. Like for instance every morning there is a ‘chorei’ which is like a stand up, quickie meeting, just to get everyone on side, introducing media clippings and that kind of thing. This is a very healthy thing but I think that very few Western companies would have anything like that.”
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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
