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Rudlin Consulting is the European Representative of the Chicago-based firm Japan Intercultural Consulting, offering cross cultural awareness and communications training and HR consulting to Japanese firms across Europe.
Rudlin Consulting also provides Japanese business support, including helping UK-based companies with their Japan market entry and communications with their Japanese partners and subsidiaries and Japan-based companies with their European subsidiaries' communication, strategy and human resources.
Rudlin Consulting has specific experience and expertise in information and telecommunication technologies, both in terms of their use for corporate intercultural communications and their development in various markets.
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Japanese attitudes to social media at work
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 Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Tuesday 29 November @ 22:35:49
As Japanese companies gear up for another round of overseas acquisitions, an additional integration need for 21st century M&A is going to become apparent - alongside the usual headaches of trying to integrate HR systems or IT or procurement across newly acquired companies – the integration of corporate social media activities across the globe.
Social media is deceptive in that residents of the Anglosphere usually mean Facebook or Twitter or Linkedin when they talk about social media, and assume that these social media networks are inherently global, as they are globally accessible. Yet my observation of social media usage in Japanese multinationals leads me to believe that most people’s social networking, corporate or private, is still actually very local.
This shouldn’t be surprising really, as the point about social media is that we use it to connect to people like ourselves. And for most of us, that means linking to people from the same culture as ourselves.
Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook are American companies of course, and their success must surely be in part due to starting in such a large English speaking market, and then being able to access the rest of the Anglosphere from that base, without having to adapt too much.
I am not sure whether American companies are more naturally accepting of social media because of American cultural preferences, or feel more comfortable because the big social media networks are American in origin.
Recent research from Clearswift, a UK based communications security company, shows that US headquartered multinationals are the most proactive in allowing their employees to use social media, but American employees also show the greatest blur between their work and private lives – leading to pressure from employees to access social media from work and also to bring their own personal devices such as smartphones, into work.
Japanese companies, by contrast, showed the least blurring between work and private life amongst employees, so there is less pressure from employees to access social media from work and employers are more reluctant to allow employees to bring their own devices into work. Japanese employers also showed the most concern about data security and least trust in their employees to use social media responsibly. German and Australian employers are more restrictive towards social media use at work than Japanese employers, however.
I believe that Japanese multinationals actually have a great opportunity to develop an alternative global model for corporate social media use. Instead of the giant hub with multiple spokes that US multinationals tend to adopt, not just for social media but for almost any other supposedly global system imposed on their overseas subsidiaries, Japanese companies should think about encouraging the development of multiple hubs of employees using social media.
Each hub would be closely attuned to local customers and local social media networks, facilitated by multilingual employees who are capable of translating messages from Japan headquarters or elsewhere in the network and transmitting them in the way that is most appropriate to the local market.
This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the 19th September 2011 edition of the Nikkei Weekly
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Whistle blowing in Japan, some thoughts relevant to the Olympus case
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Sunday 13 November @ 12:37:46
A significant factor that affects corporate governance in Japanese companies, particularly when it comes to whistle-blowing, is the sempai/kohai (senior/junior) dynamic. These relationships are particularly prevalent in large Japanese companies that retain lifetime employment systems.
Typically, when a Japanese graduate joins a domestic blue-chip firm fresh out of school, he or she will already have acquired a few sempai - literally, "person in front" - who are senior to them in the company hierarchy. There is also an implication, it seems to me, that a kohai comes from or has ended up in the same place as the sempai.
So these sempai may include the person who recruited the graduate on campus, and therefore hails from the same university, or the person who the graduate first shadows in their new team. Or perhaps it could be someone in another part of the company who is linked to the graduate via shared family, friends or neighborhood. Sempai often become mentors, and even more often, strong factions develop among sempai and kohai in a particular department or business unit.
Executive-level appointments are usually negotiated through factional horse-trading and strong sponsorship from sempai. Conversely, it can be very hard to remove someone or shunt them out of the way in the organization, however incompetent, if they have a strong faction backing them.
Strong ties of loyalty and also obligation therefore join sempai and kohai together, cemented over the roughly 30-year career life span of each employee.
It is thus easy to see why it's so hard for anyone to blow the whistle on corporate malpractice, or even to point out damaging mistakes. In general, Japanese and other Asian cultures avoid causing other people in their group to publicly lose face; causing a sempai to lose face is almost unthinkable. When it does happen, you can be sure there has been irreparable damage to the sempai/kohai relationship and an emotionally explosive situation has developed.
In this world, it's tough to be a professional services firm - such as a management consultancy, law firm or auditor - advising from the outside. You may diagnose problems that are clearly damaging and need to be fixed according to your professional code of practice, but you will be warned by the client that you are in danger of fraying the delicate web of intracompany relationships with your prescriptions.
I have even heard of one young auditor who was told by a client that if he refused to sign off on an audit because of a long-standing misrepresentation on the books, then he was going against his own sempai in his auditing firm. In the past, the sempai had happily signed off on the discrepancies.
Taking a stand as a matter of principle, or in the pursuit of what you believe to be the truth, is a hugely brave - some would say downright stupid - thing to do when it harms the people you are completely dependent on.
This article originally appeared in the 31st October 2011 edition of the Nikkei Weekly
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