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News > Cross cultural communications
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Articles on cross cultural communications issues for Japanese and Europeans in the workplace
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The monozukuri of customer service
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Thursday 27 May @ 16:24:45
I mentioned in my previous article that there seems to be a monozukuri (literally “making things”) of customer service in Japan. This may seem an odd way of putting it, as monozukuri is often used to mean that manufacturing, and not the service sector, is given the most importance in society. In this case I am using “monozukuri” to mean “craftsmanship” – a pride in using ones hands to create something of high quality.
I remember when I was a little girl living in Sendai, coming home from school one day to find that the builders who were repairing our strange old ijinkan (purpose built for foreigners) house, had made tiny origami cranes out of some of my stamp collection. I was quite cross that my stamps had been ruined but my parents were delighted that these rough handed men could create something so delicate and fiddly.
I had learnt origami at kindergarten in Japan although I was never very good at it, lacking the patience to be as precise in the folding as is necessary to get the best result. Nonetheless it has given me a great appreciation of the skill of the assistants wrapping my purchases in Japanese department stores – especially at this time of year, as I make such a terrible mess of wrapping Christmas presents!
I also learnt Japanese dance as a child. Along with origami and the many other arts widely taught in Japan such as tea ceremony and kendo, there was emphasis not only on the way the body moves but how objects are handled – learning to fold a kimono or open a fan - which I am sure influences the way customer service is so gracefully and skilfully delivered in Japan.
Equivalent skills are not widely taught in British schools, so not only is it rare in the UK for gift wrapping to be offered but when it is, it is done badly. Usually you have to ask, and sometimes there is a charge. The only shop I have been to recently where gift wrapping was free, and beautifully done, was Floris, a family owned traditional perfumers in Jermyn Street, London. The assistant was not one of the family, as far as I know, but seemed to have pride serving me well, and was very knowledgeable about the products on offer.
This pride in being knowledgeable about the products is true of another retail chain which is consistently praised for its good service - Majestic, the wine merchants. Majestic consciously emphasises customer service as being a key value of its brand, and supports this through plenty of training for its staff. It probably helps that the customers Majestic attracts are wine enthusiasts, and therefore more likely to appreciate the knowledge and service that Majestic offers.
Monozukuri needs to be two-way to work. Both the provider and the customer need to appreciate the craftsmanship and knowledge involved. British customers are not as well educated as Japanese customers in this appreciation and therefore British service providers do not feel much pride in what they do.
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Why some Japanese people prefer British customer service!
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Thursday 27 May @ 16:23:44
I described in my previous article how when a customer in the UK is facing a service sector employee, he or she is usually facing 150 years of social class resentment, a loss of pride in manual labour and no sense that the company that person is working for has any care for employee well being or duty to the customer or society as a whole. Consequently, it is hard to inspire employees with a strong, positive customer service culture in the UK.
There are some exceptions to this. The most well known exception is the John Lewis Partnership, which includes the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarket chain. As the name implies, the company is a partnership, which means that all 69,000 employees are also owners of the company, and are known as “Partners” rather than “employees” or “staff”. The founder, John Spedan Lewis’ vision was of employee co-ownership with “the happiness of Partners as the ultimate purpose”. Partners share in the profit of the company through bonuses – in 2007 this was 18% of total salary, for every person regardless of their position in the company. Five out of thirteen board directors are elected by the staff.
I am sure this company structure explains their ability to maintain high customer service standards and I would like to think it also explains why the company has weathered the current recession pretty well. The Partners do not feel demeaned by serving people, they believe in what the company is doing and feel they are equal in social status to the customers.
It is this inferiority complex that people in UK service sector jobs have that poisons the customer service they provide. If the customer is able to show that they do not hold themselves superior to the person providing the service, then it is possible to get friendly, if not always competent, service in the UK.
I noticed that when I discussed customer service in the UK with a group of Japanese residents recently, it was the youngest residents, who had been waiters or shop assistants in Japan and in the UK, who felt the most positive about British customer service culture, as they felt they were treated better by British customers than they had been in Japan when they had done similar jobs.
In Japan, historical Confucian influences mean that there is more acceptance of unequal power relationships and different status in society, without there being any implication that the person with the lower status is somehow a worse human being, worthy of contempt. It can mean that the person with the lower status is not treated in a very friendly or equal way, however, and is expected to be deferential and respectful.
Along with deference and respect , Confucianism also emphasises performing the correct rituals and observing etiquette, and this has a visibly positive impact on the conduct of customer service. This emphasis on etiquette links up with a “monozukuri” of customer service in Japan which seems to be lacking in the UK, as I will examine in the next article.
This article originally appeared in Japanese in the 17th December 2009 issue of Eikoku News Digest
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What are companies for?
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 21 April @ 22:59:30
I mentioned in my previous article on customer service that there were multiple reasons for the differences in customer service between Japan and the UK and that these reasons could be traced back to different features in Japanese and British corporate cultures.
The first aspect I would like to look at is kigyou rinen (the mission of a company) and the historical beginnings of Japanese and British companies. As is well known, the Industrial Revolution started in the UK, but being first has not necessarily meant the UK got the best (London Underground rail would be one example). In fact we often ended up making lots of mistakes that others can then learn from.
An awareness of the social problems that arose from the Industrial Revolution in the UK is still strong in British people’s mentality. We tend to think of company owners as rich “fat cat” capitalists, ruining our green countryside with their “dark satanic mills” (from the famous British hymn, Jerusalem) and exploiting their workers, without any care as to their living conditions and health.
Japan’s later industrial revolution had its social problems too, but there were other strong forces, such as the urge to modernize Japan, and to be equal to Western nations in industrial and military power. The rinen or mission of Japanese companies that matured in the late 19th century reflect the idea that companies should be for the benefit of the nation, and this mission continued through to companies such as Matsushita, founded in the early 20th century, with “national service through industry” in its Seven Principles. Then after the Second World War, there was the amazing “Japanese Economic Miracle” where the whole nation worked so hard to bring Japan back to being a leading industrial nation. Again, companies founded around then, such as Honda, very much emphasised the happiness of its workers and the company’s social obligation.
If you look at the UK’s post-industrial companies and their corporate mission statements, you do not see much about contributing to society or the happiness of workers - until recently, when Corporate Social Responsibility became fashionable. Working class pride collapsed when traditional industries were demolished in the 1970s and 1980s, and people lost any faith in companies as caring employers thanks to the mass redundancies that happened around then. The service sector jobs that were meant to replace the jobs lost in mining, steel and engineering are seen as demeaning “Mc Jobs” and very insecure.
In Anglo Saxon capitalism, companies are meant to be shareholder oriented – profitability and returns to shareholders are the only goal. Unlike Japan’s stakeholder oriented companies, where the stakeholders are employees, customers and society, and shareholders come a low fourth in priority. Consequently, when a customer in the UK is facing a service sector employee, he is usually facing 150 years of class resentment, a loss of pride in manual labour and no sense that the company that person is working for has any care for their well being or duty to the customer or society as a whole. There are some exceptions to this, and I will investigate these in my next article.
This article originally appeared in Japanese for the 3rd December issue of Eikoku News Digest
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Third Culture Kid
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 11 December @ 11:01:11
I don’t think my parents quite realised what an impact their decision to move to Japan when I was six years old would have on my life, even into adulthood. Now that I consult on cross cultural matters as a profession, I increasingly appreciate how influential such childhood experiences are. There is of course some disagreement amongst experts, but many psychologists and anthropologists would agree that the formative years are from around five or six years old through to eleven or twelve years old, when the personality and cultural values of the future adult are shaped.
It was precisely during those years that we lived first in Sendai (a city in the north of Japan) and then Kobe (a port in the south of Japan). The Sendai experience was particularly intense. There weren’t many foreigners in Sendai in the 1970s – just some missionaries and a few academic families like mine. As there was no international school, I ended up being the first foreign pupil at the local girls' Catholic school - blonde haired, blue eyed but wearing the same traditional sailor top, skirt and hat as all the other Japanese schoolgirls.
For the first few weeks I was in tears most days, and pupils from throughout the school would come to stare at me in the break times, touch my hair and stare into my blue eyes. When my father or mother came to pick me up from school a riot would almost break out. But children at that age are amazingly adaptable and sponge like, and also bore easily. Within six months I was speaking reasonably fluent Japanese and had made friends who accepted me as basically the same as them, just a bit odd looking. I even got the top mark in Japanese composition once. I thought that was nothing special, and couldn’t understand why my parents made such a fuss about it.
Kobe was a lot easier – a cosmopolitan port city with several international schools. At the school I went to, there were many children like me, mongrels of various nationalities and cultures. I later realised that they, like me, are what are known as TCKs – Third Culture Kids. Third Culture Kids were brought up in a country different to their country of nationality and consequently do not feel totally at home either in their country of birth or their adopted country. They instead create a “third culture” where they attempt to mix the best of both countries, and hang out with other TCKs who understand their hybrid identity. They also tend to have “itchy feet” and want to move somewhere else every few years. When they do settle, it is usually in communities where there are many other TCKs, such as London, or Brussels or Switzerland.
Perhaps many of you reading this article are TCKs yourself. If you are the parent of a TCK you might worry from time to time that your life choices have had such an indelible impact on your children. But on balance I would like my son to be a TCK too. So far though, he’s very English.
Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting
This article originally appeared in Japanese in the August 6th 2009 edition of Eikoku News Digest.
三つの文化を持つ子供
私が6歳の時に両親と一緒に日本に移住しましたが、このことがその後の私の人生に与えた影響の大きさを、両親は当時十分には理解していなかったと思います。異文化コンサルタントとして活動する今、日本での子供時代の」経験の大切さをあらためて感じています。専門家の世界で色々な議論がある中、多くの心理学者や文化人類学者は、人間の人格形成期といわれる年齢層は5-6歳くらいから11-12歳くらいの時期とみています。つまり、この期間に人間性とか、文化的理解が形づくられるとのことです。
実際、私が仙台と神戸で生活をしたのは、まさにこの時期でした。1970年代の仙台には宣教師や私の家族のような学者しか外国人としておらず、この時期の私の経験はまさに強烈そのものだったのです。インターナショナルスクールもなく、白百合小学校初の、セーラー服の金髪少女であった訳です。
通学を始めた数週間は涙ながらの日々でした。休み時間といえば学校中の子供たちが物珍しげに寄って来て、私の髪に触ってみたり、青い目を覗き込んでみたりするのです。下校時間に私の父母が迎えにきたりする時は、いつも大騒ぎでした。とは言え、その年頃の子供はすぐに環境に順応し、スポンジのように物事を吸収する上、すぐにまた目新しいことに心を移します。半年も過ぎる頃になると、私の日本語もかなり上達し、ちょっと変わった見かけだけど、私達と同じよね、と受け入れてくれる友達も出来る様になりました。ある時などは作文で、一等賞をもらったことさえあるくらいで、その時は両親が私の涙の日々からの成長・順応ぶりに、声を上げて大喜びしたものでした。（はじめの頃の私の苦労や辛い思いを見ていたので、私の成長ぶりに胸が一杯になるくらい嬉しかったのだと思います。）
その後移り住んだ神戸の生活は仙台に比べとても順調でした。国際港都市ゆえインターナショナルスクールもあり、私のように色々な国籍や文化を持つ子供が沢山いました。ちなみに、後で知った事なのですが、わたしの様な背景を持つ子供はTCKと呼ばれるそうです。これは即ちThird Culture Kidsということだそうで、自分の祖国以外で育ち、それ故に祖国とも、育った国とも故郷としての強い絆を感じない感覚を持つのです。その代わりに彼らに特有の『第3の文化』なるものを作り上げるのです。そして価値観を共有する他のTCK達と交流しながら、生まれた国と育った国の両方の良いところを取り入れていきます。また、このTCK達はひと所に腰を落ち着けるよりも、数年毎にそわそわしはじめ何処か他のところに移住したがる傾向があるようです。そうしてやがて落ち着くところが、TCK達のコミュニティーである、ロンドンやブルッセル、スイスなどの国際都市となるのです。
読者の中には、ひょっとしてご自身もTCKでは？と思われる方もおられるでしょう。または、TCKなるお子さんをお持ちの親御さんであれば、ご自身の選択が、多大な影響をお子さんの将来にもたらしてしまったかと心配されるかもしれません。でも総合的に考えると、私は自分の息子がTCKになることをむしろ望んでいるのです。と言っても、我が息子はこの英国で典型的な英国人に育っていますけれど。
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The freedom of a foreign life
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 11 December @ 10:59:38
In my previous article I described how I am, thanks to my upbringing in Japan, a Third Culture Kid – a child who was brought up in a different country to that of their birth. There are more and more of us in this increasingly globalising world, and I wonder if other TCKs, like me, find it hard to answer any questions about whether we love or hate the two countries we semi-belong to. For me, Japan and the UK are just a part of my life, like brushing my teeth. I tried to escape the influence of Japan on my career once or twice, but it didn’t work, both because it is the subject that I am most passionate about, and also because, frankly, it is this expertise that people are most willing to pay me for.
A more interesting question is what leads people who are not TCKs to choose to settle in another country. My parents and I stayed in Japan for five years initially. Then, when I was eighteen, they decided to move back to Japan again, to Hiroshima and then Tokyo, staying for a total of twenty years. If you were to ask my mother what caused them to leave the UK again, she would probably half jokingly say “British Rail”. At that time the trains were even more unreliable than they are now and my mother was commuting every day to London to quite a high powered job, chairing various meetings, so if she was late, the meetings did not happen. She became ill, and the stress of the daily commute was making it worse.
Japan is, of course, a country where things work – trains run on time and people are punctual, reliable and polite. This is a big attraction for many of the foreigners who choose to live there permanently and they get a terrible shock when they return to their home country where things don’t work, people are rude and the streets are littered. After a long time away you feel like a foreigner in your home country. My parents actually look like foreigners in the UK now – they are too well dressed!
I know Japanese people who have lived abroad for a long time no longer feel like they belong in Japan. But I do find it puzzling that they chose to live in the UK, with its terrible customer service, bad weather and unreliable transport system. Some Japanese acquaintances have said that they like the freedom and tolerance they find in the UK. I would argue that this is not unique to the UK – anyone living in a foreign country can feel liberated by being out of the reach of the expectations and judgements of their society of birth. Believe it or not, foreigners living in Japan feel that way too.
Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting
This article originally appeared in Japanese in the August 20th 2009 edition of Eikoku News Digest.
海外生活
前回のコラムで、祖国でない日本で育ったことによって、私がいかにTCK（a Third Culture Kid 、3つの文化を持つ子供）となり、そのことで私が受けた恩恵についてご説明しました。世界規模で国際化が進み、このように祖国以外で育つTCKが増えている中、当のTCK達は生まれた国と、育った国とに対して好き嫌いを聞かれたら、きっと答えるのに困るだろうな、と思ったりします。私にとっては日本も英国も、言ってみれば歯磨きをするような、日常生活の中にあるのです。これまでのキャリアの中で、私は何度が自分と日本とを切り離して、全く違った方向を試みたりしましたが、どうもうまく行きませんでした。一つには日本というのは、私の心を捉えて放さない国であるということ、そして結局は私の日本での経験や知識が職業上の価値となり、今日の収入にもつながっているからなのです。
一つ興味深いのは、TCKでなく、祖国で生まれ育った人が、なぜあえて祖国を離れて海外への移住を希望するのか、ということです。私が両親と元々日本に住んだのは幼少期の5年間でした。そして私が18歳になった時、また日本に戻る事になりました。広島、そして東京と、結局通算して20年日本に住む事になったのです。ちなみに、もし読者の皆さんが私の母に、“どうしてまたイギリスを離れることにしたのですか？”と聞いたら、母は多分冗談交じりに“英国の鉄道とさよならしたかったからよ。”と答えると思います。というのも、その当時の国鉄サービスは、今よりももっとアテにならない状況だったのです。毎日ロンドンへの通勤を余儀なくされていた母はその当時、重要な職務についており様々な会議の中心でした。だから交通事情で到着が遅れると、会議が中止ということが多々あったのです。結局母は体調を崩したのですが、それに輪をかけたのが日々の通勤ストレスだったのです。
勿論日本といえば、万事うまく運ぶ国で電車は定刻に走り、人々は時間厳守し、任せて安心かつ礼儀正しい国です。多くの外国人にとってはこれが魅力となって日本を移住先とするので、祖国に戻って大ショックを受けたりします。物事は思うように運ばない、人々は礼儀知らず、おまけに街はごみだらけ。実際、長いこと祖国を離れていると、いざ自分の国に戻っても、自分こそが外国人のように感じてしまうのです。英国に戻った私は、今でも自分の両親が外国人に見えてしまいます。彼らはいつもきちんとした身なりをしているんですもの！
私の知る限り海外に長く暮らす日本人は、もはや自分が日本に属していないように感じていると思います。そういう人がよりによって、ひどい接客サービス、当てにならない天候や鉄道を持つ英国を滞在先に選ぶということが凄い驚きです。以前私の日本人の知人が、イギリスの自由さとか、寛容さが居心地いいと言っていました。ただ、これはイギリスだけに言えることではないと私は思います。誰しも海外に住むと、自分の祖国で求められる一定の基準とか文化的な束縛から解放され、翼を広げられるような気持ちになるのは当然の事だと思うのです。冗談かと読者は思われるでしょうが、日本に住む外国人もそう感じているのですよ。
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The san-thing
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 11 December @ 10:56:08
Almost without fail someone will ask me during my training seminars “are we going to deal with the –san thing?” When I get to the point where I deal with Japanese business etiquette in the session, I try to emphasise that it is really not that complicated. Surname plus san will almost always work.
Except that it is of course much more complicated than that. It’s true that most Japanese men feel uncomfortable being called by their first name, and often their first name is rather long and difficult to pronounce for Westerners. But Japanese women, whose names are usually shorter and easier to pronounce, are happier about being on first name terms.
I also talk about how some Japanese men, particularly those that have lived in the US, might have adopted a nickname, either a shortened version of their own name, such as Masa, or Tets, or they may have taken a Western name that starts with the same letter as their own name, which (causing added hilarity for the Brits), may well be a very American name, such as Hank, or Duke, or Tex.
In this case, it is not necessary to put “–san” on the end. In fact one of our Japanese client contacts specifically asked me to let his European colleagues know that “Keith” rather than “Keith-san” was his preference. If I reverse the situation, I can see how he feels. Some Japanese colleagues did try to call me “Miss Pernille” when I worked in Japan, and I found it irritating. It overemphasised the cultural difference, and the added politeness put too much distance between us. I was trying to blend in with the Japanese corporate environment, and being addressed by rather quaint forms like “Miss Pernille” just made me stick out more.
Sometimes Japanese bosses called me “Pernille-chan”, ("chan" being a dimunitive, usually used for little girls), which was just about acceptable when I was in my twenties but I presume that as I have reached “obasan” (auntie) status in terms of years, most Japanese people would not dream of calling me that now. In fact, one Japanese female participant in one of my seminars, expatriated to Belgium from the Japan headquarters of a major Japanese electronics company, told me that “-chan” and “-kun” (dimunitive for boys) have been banned from the Japanese offices, as they are deemed to be “power harassment”.
In contradiction to that, some very senior European executives at a financial institution recently acquired by a Japanese company told me that their Japanese counterparts had advised them to call their Japanese male subordinates “surname-kun”. I felt I couldn’t overrule such advice, but warned them that this would constitute a very strong power statement.
Ultimately it might help if we either ask the other person how they like to be addressed, or volunteer that information about ourselves, right at the beginning of the relationship, or later on when we feel more comfortable with each other. Or if we’re not so comfortable with over-familiarity, as one of my American friends used to say “That’s Mr. Mr. Fleming to you”!
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Scarves, champagne and the complex art of gift giving
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 10 July @ 12:33:05
I asked the chief executive of a British firm that had recently been acquired by a Japanese company how the relationship was developing between her and the senior management at the Japanese headquarters. It was great to hear that she felt trust had been established and that she had reached the point where she felt she could say no, and as long as she gave good reasons, her view would be accepted. The real clincher for me was when she mentioned that one of the Japanese directors had brought a present for her when he visited the U.K.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into this. I find gift giving one of the trickiest parts of Japanese business life. It is an integral part of Japanese non-verbal communication, so the meaning is often not at all clear to non-Japanese. Sometimes, there is not much meaning at all - it's just an automatic gesture. Yet anyone who does business in Japan knows gift giving is part of the giri obligation/debt reciprocation culture.
When a senior Japanese executive of a company to which I act as a consultant gave me a beautiful scarf last month, I wasn't sure what to make of it, as we had never met before. Neither of the other two (male) consultants from other companies was given a gift. So maybe it was just gallantry. Or it could mean he was hoping for my best efforts and advice to his company over the long term. One of his colleagues told me "he just wanted to show off the products of our company."
Once a gift is given to you, you do of course have to reciprocate. I dithered for a while about the scarf, and in the end I decided to be British and write a nice thank you card.
Gift giving is more straightforward between employees of the same Japanese company. Whenever I visited my Japanese headquarters from the London office, I would line the bottom of my suitcase with boxes of tea from Fortnum & Mason. "Divisible, edible, local" was my mantra, with a gift for each team I was to meet and some to spare, just in case. My London colleagues were not as big fans as I was of the adzuki bean paste cakes we would get from HQ visitors in return. But as I said to the European staff in a company recently acquired under rather tense circumstances by a Japanese firm: "Once the shortbread and rice crackers start flowing back and forth across the oceans, you know relations have improved."
Even so, it is difficult to know how to deal with big personal debts inside Japanese companies when the routine box of cookies just won't cut it. To say thank you for a recommendation he wrote for me, l once gave a couple of bottles of vintage champagne to one of my most important mentors in my Japanese company. But this turned out
to hit entirely the wrong note, not least because he didn't really like champagne. My (much cheaper) present the next year of a paperback book on a topic I knew he was interested in was far more warmly received.
This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the May 4th 2009 edition of The Nikkei Weekly.
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When telepathy is not enough
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 27 May @ 23:10:42
It seems that the only opportunity for new business at the moment, for those of us who supply services to Japanese companies, is the continuing wave of Japanese acquisitions. Faced with a saturated, aging market at home and good companies going cheaply overseas, it's no wonder Japanese companies see acquisitions abroad as a way to revitalize and grow.
Western companies are in the mood to accept new Asian owners, too. Weary of the destruction brought about by Anglo-Saxon capitalism, there is plenty of debate going on in Western business circles as to whether it might not be time for a more long-term, stakeholder-oriented - rather than short-term, shareholder-oriented – way of running companies.
We have, of course, been here before. Japan's economic success in the 1980s was attributed to Japanese values - lifetime employment, group orientation, taking the long-term view, striving for growth rather than profit and so on. But then in the 1990s those same values were blamed for Japan's economic failure. The debate as to whether an alternative to the current form of capitalism is truly needed – and whether Confucian capitalism is the best alternative - will no doubt continue.
While the discussion rumbles on, Japanese companies that have acquired overseas companies face the question of how or how not to adapt their distinctive corporate values and cultures.
Regardless of what path is chosen, many Japanese companies have failed to use a vital tool – internal communications. Case in point: A participant at a seminar I gave at a British company that had been acquired two months earlier by a Japanese company carne up to me afterwards, on the verge of tears, to say thank you.
Apparently I was the first person to talk to her team since the acquisition who was able to explain at a deeper level what was going on. The team members felt they had been left in the dark.
Another participant at a different company mentioned to me that the local operation had only found out a vital piece of news about their company through a U.K. trade magazine.
I have lost count of the number of times Europeans working for Japanese companies have complained to me about information being withheld. When I ask them if they had asked Japanese colleagues for this information, it often transpires that they had not, that they expected to be told.
Many Japanese companies do not have internal communications departments. One director of corporate affairs told me that he could find no counterpart at the new owner's Japan headquarters.
There is an assumption that Japanese employees will pick up corporate strategy and culture through time-honored methods such as ishin denshin, or telepathy. While this assumption cannot, of course, be made for employees who do not work in Japan or who do not speak Japanese, there nevertheless seems to be a fear that translating even innocuous internal documents into English will cause vital secrets to be leaked.
Deliberately leaving it up to employees to work out values and strategies for themselves is itself a corporate value. Once I got used to this, I rather liked it, as it means employees are treated as mature adults. Paradoxically, however, if Japanese companies want to preserve this value as they globalize, it has to be explicitly communicated.
This article originally appeared in the March 30th edition of Nikkei Weekly.
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Three tips to get Japanese people to read and respond to your emails
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 24 April @ 11:40:59
A British participant in one of my recent training sessions asked me why her Japanese colleagues so often start their e-mails with "Hoping this finds you well". She found it quaintly polite. I explained that in the days before e-mail, when business correspondence was more formal, it was standard practice to begin letters in Japanese with comments regarding the seasons, gratitude for the continued custom, and solicitous remarks regarding the recipient's health and fortune. Perhaps, therefore, her colleagues were trying to carry on that tradition.
A Japanese acquaintance has added a second explanation. I mentioned to him that one of the major frustrations for Europeans working in or with Japanese companies is the lack of response to e-mails sent to Japanese counterparts in the company headquarters. He said that often if the e-mail is very short, with no opening remarks, his colleagues assume it is not an urgent request and just an informal comment. Also, if the e-mail does not have "Dear X-san" at the start, they think they are just being copied on a message, and therefore no reaction is required.
Although I do often recommend a "personal touch" to start an e-mail to Japanese people, it does seem to contradict my other recommendation, which is to keep e-mails as short as possible. I know I have an allergic reaction to long e-mails in Japanese, resisting reading them until I've had at least one cup of coffee, and you can be sure that many Japanese have an equally allergic reaction to densely written English.
If the e-mail is too long, particularly with big chunky paragraphs of English, and the action point is buried near the bottom, the recipient may not read it all, and therefore miss what response was required. Chopping long paragraphs up into numbered bullet points is one tactic that many Japanese have told me they appreciate. The action point or conclusion should be brought up to the top of the e-mail, or if the logical flow does not allow for this, highlighting it in bold, and in a different color, will help the English-phobic spot what is required of them.
The third recommendation for getting a quicker response does not have so much to do with the format as with the personal relationship. The plain fact is that e-mails written in English are going to get a lower priority than e-mails written in Japanese because most Japanese companies still prioritize domestic sales and domestic customers over foreign ones. If the e-mail is in English, the chances are it is about a foreign customer. In fact I have found in the past that some Japanese companies' spam filters throw almost everything in English into the junk-mail folder.
The only way to overcome the mental spam filter is to have met your counterparts and established a good relationship with them. Then, when they see your English e-mail in a sea of other Japanese e-mails, instead of putting it off to another day, they will spot your name and take a quick look to see what you are asking because they feel personally obligated to you. A gentle reminder of the personal relationship in your opening remarks will reinforce this - another explanation as to why Japanese sometimes put "hoping this finds you well" in their e-mails.
This article by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, originally appeared in the 23rd February 2009 edition of the Nikkei Weekly
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Sumo or Judo: how Japanese firms embrace or exclude diverse staff
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Monday 20 April @ 09:50:44
This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the 19th January 2009 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
I miss not being able to see the hatsu basho (January sumo tournament) that is now under way in Tokyo, as they don't show sumo on the television here in the U.K. anymore. It would be great if Harumafuji, the new Mongolian second ranked ozeki, does well*, but it seems this year will be another challenging one for sumo's credibility, particularly in the way it deals with the foreign rikishi wrestler.
When I was still working at my Japanese company in Japan, trying to develop and implement policies to improve the career opportunities for our "foreign rikishi," in other words our non-Japanese employees, we had many discussions about what we nicknamed "sumo vs. judo" problem.
In a "sumo" company such as ours, the traditional view was that in order to become a senior manager, you needed to join the company (the "sumo stable") at an early age and spend several years doing menial jobs, pouring the beer for everyone and living in a company dorm.
The sumo equivalent would be cleaning out the sumo beya stable, making chanko nabe stew and undergoing grueling training. So if any foreigner wanted to become a manager, that was fine, but they had to have undergone the same process as other Japanese employees.
As for training, this was mostly on the job, learning from your seniors, as indeed in sumo, where the kata, or form
of sumo, is learned by observing others rather than through any formal guidance or manuals. In fact, there weren't many manuals or formal appraisal processes at all in our company. People just "knew" how to behave and what was expected of them.
For many Japanese companies, this changed in the 1990s. This was partly due to the restructuring needed to deal with the slowing down of Japanese economic growth, but also a recognition that the Japanese company had to become more diverse, not only in terms of nationalities, but in the gender and career background of its staff. It was not only the foreigners that objected to being treated like sumo, but other Japanese people, particularly in the younger generations. Also, the vagueness and lack of transparency often led to cover-ups, verging on what could be deemed corrupt practices.
If you force diverse groups of people to conform to one mysterious way that can only be learned through many years' apprenticeship, a way most easily learned by a group who share one particular cultural background, then those who deviate from this norm will find that, despite their best efforts, they are only a pale imitation of the mainstream group.
In other words, if you want all employees to behave like traditional Japanese salarymen, then hiring people from nontraditional groups is pointless, because they end up being unhappy, fake Japanese salarymen, or, more likely, quit.
My colleagues and I contrasted sumo with judo, which is also a Japanese origin sport, and has much of the same Japanese ethos regarding the importance of kata and diligence through practice, but is much more transparent in its rules and its teaching methods, a prerequisite, I assume, for it becoming an official Olympic sport for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I have to say though: I find sumo more charming and fascinating than judo.
* Unfortunately he didn't. He made a majority of wins 8 to7, and did better in the March tournament that has just ended - 10 wins to 5 losses.
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Tipping point for car ownership in Japan and Europe?
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 27 March @ 12:23:07
This is the twentieth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, appearing in the 18th December 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly:
For the past three years I have been facilitating a management development program for the Japanese and European managers of a large Japanese electronics company. As an icebreaker, to help the participants get to know each other, and also have some fun with first impressions and stereotypes, we put them into groups and ask them to guess the favorite car, sport and drink of people in the other groups.
After all the guesses have been made, the participants reveal their actual favorites. I then have to confess that I don't have a car, I'm not very sporty but like watching cricket, and wish I could afford to drink Puligny Montrachet wines.
I thought the lack of a car (and liking cricket) would mark me as somewhat eccentric,' but this year, for the first time, two of the Japanese participants and two of the Europeans said they too do not have cars. All four live in major cities and said they feel it just isn't necessary to have a car - and, in fact, that having one would be more of an inconvenience and expense than a benefit.
For the past few years I have been a member of a city car club in the U.K. The club owns several cars parked throughout the city that can be booked online or even just by going up to a car and unlocking it with a membership card, then using the onboard device to book it wirelessly.
When I first joined, I wondered if this kind of club would ever become popular, and perhaps would only work in our city, which is famously eco-conscious and trendy, with a heavily used bus service. Apparently, however, I need not have wondered. Car clubs are going from strength to strength in the U.K.
We have since moved to Surrey, England, a county that is famously car-centric, but we have not felt the need to buy a car. Instead, whenever we need a car, we rent one from the car rental company opposite our house. I have even heard that there is talk of a car club starting here.
Car-sharing companies already exist in Japan - Orix Corp., a forerunner, got into the business about five years ago. No doubt the current economic situation will give Japan's car clubs a boost.
There are other factors that lead me to now wonder if we haven't reached a turning point in people's attitudes toward cars, at least in Japan and Europe – the trouble that U.S. auto manufacturers are in, the cuts in production being made by Japanese auto manufacturers and the impact of the spike in gasoline prices earlier this year.
Cars are no longer an essential symbol of prosperity in developed nations. Indeed car ownership has started to decline in Japan. The Japanese participants in the management development program also did not conform to stereotype in terms of their favorite sports. Baseball and golf did not even get a mention; volleyball, soccer and bike riding were mentioned instead.
I suppose 10 or so years of stagnant economic growth have led younger generations of Japanese to question standard consumer tastes and to try to find their own way. Beer, however, was still the most popular drink!
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Subtle factors that motivate workers differ in Japan and the West
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 18 March @ 10:55:36
This is the nineteenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the 3rd November 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly:
Every time a Japanese company acquires a Western company, there is a concern about how the Japanese organization will deal with the "high risk, high reward" culture that is prevalent not only in the financial industry but across many Western business sectors.
Actually, Japanese multinationals have been dealing with this issue for some years, and the solution has usually been to pay the local market rate. It does, of course, result in some anomalies. Presidents of Japanese blue-chip companies are paid only around 10-20 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, whereas at Fortune 500 CEO can earn anywhere from 300-500 times a junior employee's salary.
So it may turn out that the Japanese president is earning significantly less than the foreign directors reporting to him from the acquired company. Lower down the ranks, more junior Japanese find that when they are posted overseas, they are having to manage locally hired hotshots who are earning salaries and bonuses that add up to the equivalent of an extra zero on the end of a normal Japanese expat salary.
Many Japanese working for foreign banks and consultancies in Japan have also been making 10 times the average salary in Japan. Of course, Japanese on traditional salary packages can comfort themselves with the thought that they have more secure jobs, especially given what has been happening recently. But I think there is a danger in oversimplifying this risk/reward trade-off.
Knowing that you won't be laid off when times get tough, or conversely that you are being paid handsomely, is not sufficient for most people, Japanese or Western, to feel completely fulfilled and motivated in their work. These factors may ensure people stay in their jobs but not that they perform those jobs to the best of their abilities.
High salaries and bonuses are in some ways proxies for the things that really motivate people to work. Being paid well should indicate that an employee is doing something that has had a major impact on the company. It should also reflect the employee's authority and responsibility to make an impact. Getting quick raises should show that one's career is advancing and that one's skills and capabilities are developing.
These are all drivers of engagement - pride and motivation in work - for people working in Western companies. Surveys show that the drivers of engagement for Japanese people working in Japanese companies are subtly different. Career advancement opportunities and ability to make an impact are important, but so are other factors - immediate personal relationships, having input to department decisions, and having a manager who understands what motivates each employee and who has good relationships with them.
All people, regardless of nationality, want to feel recognized for making a positive difference in the world through their work. For many Japanese, the traditional way to do this has been through becoming a longtime respected member of a major company. For many Westerners, this route does not exist, so impact on society has to be more visibly rewarded through pay or status.
Japanese and Western companies need to avoid two extremes when trying to combine corporate cultures. Paying people well but not giving them the authority to make an impact and advance their careers will eventually lead Westerners to leave a company. Offering lifetime employment but without good, enduring personal relationships and mutual respect may mean that although Japanese employees stay, their morale is low.
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Humour easily crosses cultures but be careful with sarcasm
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 17 December @ 18:10:15
This is the seventeenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the 29th September 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
A British client attended some customer satisfaction survey interviews I conducted recently with Japanese companies. Later, I asked her if there was anything she had found surprising about the meetings. It was her first trip to Japan and she did not speak any Japanese. Her response was that the Japanese customers laughed a lot more than she was expecting.
British people who are not very familiar with Japanese people tend to assume that Japanese are formal, polite and very serious. Anyone who has spent some time working with Japanese people or living in Japan will know that in fact it is completely wrong to assert that Japanese do not have a sense of humour. Actually, Japanese people sometimes mention to me that they wish British people would relax and lighten up a bit more, especially "after five."
I wasn't cracking jokes during the customer interviews, nor am I fluent enough in Japanese to be able to pull off Japanese "share" humour - word play and puns. I would like to think the laughter wasn't embarrassed laughter, either. I was also not being sarcastic, ironic or teasing. These are types of humour the British use frequently, even in formal business settings, and they can cause misunderstandings in crosscultural situations.
A British marketing director working for a Japanese car company told me of a disastrous board meeting he once attended. The Dutch and German directors were arguing, vehemently putting their points of view forward and aggressively disagreeing with each other. The Japanese managing director became increasingly uncomfortable with this atmosphere and intervened, saying, "Perhaps now you would like to hear my comments." The British sales director responded, "Oh, we don't want to hear your comments." The Japanese managing director then walked out of the meeting, presumably to avoid losing face as he was close to losing his temper.
The marketing director ran after the managing director to impress upon him that "Mike was just joking." The Japanese managing director replied, "I realise that, but it was not appropriate." Clearly Mike was trying to lighten the atmosphere with a bit of sarcasm, but it went badly wrong.
Most British wince when I tell them this story. I explain that Japanese are perfectly capable of being sarcastic and tease each other regularly, even in the workplace. But humour does not translate well if it transgresses cultural values too aggressively, particularly in formal business settings. In this case, the Japanese need for harmony - and also respect for hierarchy - was threatened by Mike's remark.
So what did I say that was so funny in my meetings with Japanese clients? To be honest, I don't really know. I suspect it was more about being witty, showing that I had a sense of the absurd and being self deprecating - humour traits the British like to pride themselves on and which the Japanese also enjoy. It seems wit, absurdity and self deprecation cross cultures much more successfully than sarcasm, jokes or puns.
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Processes and rules
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Tuesday 07 October @ 11:19:10
This is the sixteenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the July 21st 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
Japan is usually presented as a highly process-oriented society. One example of this is the emphasis given to kata, form or way of doing something in Japanese martial arts, over the actual result. Martial arts training consists of repeating the same action over and over again until a desired body position and movement is achieved and has become second nature to the practitioner.
I have bitter memories of the weekly kanji tests I used to fail when I went to Japanese elementary school. I thought the characters I wrote looked the way they were supposed to, but the teacher would mark them as incorrect; somehow she knew I had drawn the strokes in the wrong order. There is one, and only one, right way of doing things in many areas of Japanese society.
Maybe this is why a Japanese acquaintance said that when he alights at Heathrow Airport, he breathes a sigh of relief that he is now in a country where he can relax. He was replying to a comment I had made that when I reach Narita International Airport, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I am now in a country where everything works.
Many British working for Japanese companies, while recognizing the attention to detail and highly disciplined work ethic of their Japanese colleagues, also complain that Japanese are often less respecting of British rules and processes. When I ask for more details of the situations in which British rules or processes are bypassed, it usually turns out that a customer or someone else inside the company has asked for an exception to be made. Deadlines that were supposedly set in stone suddenly become flexible.
As the customer is not just king in Japan but "god," it is easy to understand why rules are easily broken for customers, but the exceptions made for colleagues are less excusable in the eyes of many British people. The British sense of fairness kicks in, and any attempt to ignore rules governing the treatment of people is seen as unfair or evidence of favoritism.
British people regularly flaunt work-related rules or crash processes, however – whether it be in customer service or on the factory floor - if they think the result is the same, or, less admirably, if it makes life easier and they can get away with it. They do not unquestioningly obey rules and processes the way Japanese workers are taught to.
One British manager with Japanese subordinates told me how delighted he was with his Japanese team. "You tell them, just once, about a process that needs to be done each day and they will do it, exactly how you told them, without fail," he said. "There's no need to check up on them all the time. In fact, I even forgot to tell them not to do it any more when it was no longer necessary and, of course, discovered they were still doing it months later."
With his British team members, he not only has to regularly check that processes are being implemented but must ensure that the way he checks, and any ensuing discipline or reward dished out, is seen as transparent and fair.
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Giving a presentation in Japan? Think about sending it in advance
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Tuesday 30 September @ 14:00:54
This is the fifteenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the June 16th 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
In previous articles in this series I have given a couple of tips regarding making presentations and proposals to Japanese customers or colleagues. One was on the usefulness of “visualisation” – trying to capture what you are saying in graphics. The other point I made was that presenting or pitching proposals in a Japanese context is like a maths exam – you have to show your working out, not just the conclusion, to get full marks.
The third piece of advice I have about presentations and pitches, especially if you are going to do them in English, is to send the documents in advance. You may think this detracts from the appeal of a presentation, but if your audience includes people who are not comfortable with English, prefer group based decision making and don’t like taking risks, then you are likely to be greeted by deafening silence when you ask for their go-ahead or if there are any questions. I’m not saying all Japanese corporate people fit this description but I have heard enough stories to suggest that it is worth making the effort to send your presentation ahead, if you can.
It may also be a good idea to send more than the slides. One group of British research scientists told me how when they first had a joint meeting with their Japanese counterparts, they presented their results using all the slideware tricks to make it as stimulating as possible. But when they asked for questions, their Japanese colleagues simply sat there - nodding, but silent.
The next time they met, the British scientists sent their Japanese colleagues not just the slides but also all the data, two weeks in advance. This time, when they asked for questions, everybody’s hand shot up. The Japanese scientists had not only been able to translate any of the English they did not understand, but probably also crunched the data themselves and, I suspect, had a discussion, maybe even allocating questions to each other.
I told this story to a rueful European marketing director of a Japanese electronics company the other day. He had told me that on his appointment, he was invited to Japan to meet with the President of the company. Being a marketing director he of course put together a slide presentation on his strategy for Europe. When he arrived at the Tokyo headquarters for his meeting, he was asked to wait, as the President was with a customer. Finally, 45 minutes late, he went in to see the President. The President apologized profusely for keeping him waiting and then said unfortunately another customer was coming in 15 minutes. “We ended up drinking tea and talking about the weather and I never showed my presentation” the marketing director told me. If he had sent the presentation in advance, it probably would have been picked up by the President’s executive assistant, who would have translated it, summarised it and even suggested questions for the President to ask. At least then they could have talked about more than the weather.
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Business presentations
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 09 July @ 13:25:32
This is the fourteenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the May 12th 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
Westerners who have sat through a presentation by a Japanese businessperson usually complain afterwards that it lacked punch and a logical progression, and seem to have had too many slides, crammed full of data and graphics, with a jumble of font sizes, typefaces and colours. More often than not, due to a discomfort with public speaking, especially in English, the Japanese presenter has had his head stuck in the script the whole way through or read out the bullet points on the slides, word for word.
This public speaking style is partly explained by the difference in Japanese and Western education. Whereas Western schools give plenty of opportunities for practising public speaking - drama classes, school plays, public speaking competitions and class debates - most Japanese schools are still focused on the teacher disseminating information, rather than classroom discussions. And, of course, English teaching in Japanese schools is still far more centred on written rather than spoken English.
Slideware took a long time to take off in Japanese corporations, but if you look at the shelves of business books in Japanese bookstores now, you can see that self help books on mastering slide presentations have become increasingly popular.
While I see more and more Japanese who know how to present in a way that appeals to Westerners, I sense that there is still a fundamental difference between Japan and Europe or North America in what a presentation is supposed to be about.
Last year, I was involved in helping German and Japanese senior managers make pitches to their board directors. The German managers were happy with our standard Western approach. We cut out some of the slide content, tried to get a clear line of logic and then rehearsed the presentation until it was slick and within the time limit. The Japanese managers looked increasingly unhappy, however. I thought it was just because of the stress of having to learn their lines in English, but they said they felt there was a fundamental cultural difference. “Our German team mates seem to believe presentations are all about style”, they said, “whereas for us, it is about showing our effort (doryoku). We need to explain the process of our thinking”.
This could be a difference in what constitutes “logic”. In the West we are told that when making a presentation or writing an essay you should “say what you are going to say, say it, then tell them what you just said”.
The Japanese philosophical model, ki-sho-ten-ketsu (introduction, follow-up,turn/change conclusion), may look similar, but the emphasis is on giving the context and often leaving the audience to figure out the conclusion. So, when presenting to Japanese customers, although I am not saying you should bore them into submission, you may need to give more details on the context and history, before reaching your conclusion. Rather like a maths exam, you have to show the working out, not just the answer, to get full points.
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New book from Pernille Rudlin and Rochelle Kopp
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 27 June @ 10:35:03
We are delighted to announce that Business Communication, written by Pernille Rudlin and Rochelle Kopp, was published in Japan by Lightworks and First Press on 21st June 2008.
ビジネス・コミュニケーション
ライトワークスビジネスベーシックシリーズ
ロッシェル・カップ 著 パニラ・ラドリン 著 ファーストプレス 版
2008年06月 発行 ページ 107P サイズ Ａ５ソフトカバー 1,260円（1,200円＋税）
ISBN 978-4-904336-01-4 (4-904336-01-1)
ビジネス・コミュニケーションとはコミュニケーションの基本は、「自分の意見を他人に伝えること」と「他人が言おうとしていることを理解すること」に尽きる。ビジネス・コミュニケーション能力を身につけることは、ビジネスパーソンが成果を上げるための最も確かな方法の一つである。世界標準をマスターする!日経新聞、日経WOMANで活躍中の著者が 日系企業へのコンサル経験を基に執筆 日本人が陥りがちな弱点の克服法を米英スペシャリストがわかりやすく解説。
Written with young Japanese managers in mind, the book contains short case studies, graphical illustrations and descriptions of various key topics in business communication such as giving feedback, making presentations and brainstorming.
第１章 効果的なコミュニケーションの要素
１ 明快さ
２ 一貫性
３ 前後関係
４ 礼儀
５ 確認
６ 簡潔性
７ 論理的な構成
８ 衝突の回避
第２章 一般的なコミュニケーションのタイプ
１ 効果的な質問
２ 説得力のある主張
３ 要求／指示をする
４ 情報の伝達
５ ポジティブ・フィードバック
６ ネガティブ・フィードバック
７ 問題解決
８ 非言語コミュニケーション
第３章 特殊な状況下でのコミュニケーション
１ ビジネスメール
２ ミーティング
３ ブレーンストーミング
４ インタビューを受ける
５ インタビューをする
６ 交渉
７ プレゼンテーション
８ 危機管理
It's available on Amazon.co.jp and Rakuten
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Establishing credentials with Japanese business people
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 16 May @ 12:19:22
This is the thirteenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the April 7th 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
My company recently applied to join another of the Japanese Chambers of Commerce in Europe. As we are not a Japan-owned company, this is still quite an unusual thing to do.
Sure enough, a few days after submitting the application, I received a phone call from the head of the chamber, with lots of questions (in Japanese) about why we wanted to join, what our company did, were we OK with everything being done in Japanese, and so on.
All these questions were fair enough, but I knew what he was really trying to do -establish whether or not we were “appropriate” as members. Could we be trusted to behave according to the norms of the organisation? So, as soon as I could, I mentioned that we were already members of several other Japanese chambers of commerce in Europe. “Ah,” he said, audibly brightening, “do you know Mr Tanaka [head of one of the other chambers] then?” “Oh yes,” I said “and actually I also worked for nine years at the same Japanese company that he used to work for”.
Again, the relief was palpable. Not only could he now ring Mr Tanaka to check us out, but he was reassured that I had worked at a blue-chip Japanese company, so would almost certainly be well aware of how to behave in a Japanese corporate context.
It reminded me of the time when I first moved to Tokyo, and had to furnish my apartment. I went to a major furniture store, famous for its generous store card. As I approached the store card application desk with the list of items I needed, I could see a nervous look and beads of sweat appearing on the assistant’s face, as he realised he would have to deal with a foreigner.
He calmed down slightly when he realised I could at least speak Japanese. But then looked worried as he produced the application form – would I be able to read and write Japanese too? I assured him I would do my best. I then took out my business card, so I could copy the work address onto the form. The assistant suddenly leant forward as he caught sight of the well known corporate logo on my card.
“Can I call your team leader at the company, to confirm your salary details?” he asked. He scuttled off into a back office, and returned a few minutes later, beaming. “You can have a better fridge than that! And why not have two televisions?” He couldn’t have been more helpful.
So, whenever you sense a doubt or worry in a Japanese business person you are meeting for the first time, do not hesitate to introduce your credentials. This could be something to do with your company (well known name, long history, past clients) or you (education, Japan experience, past employers) or a mutual acquaintance – anything that establishes you as a trustworthy potential member of the “in-group”.
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Visualisation - I see what you mean
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 25 April @ 11:35:51
This is the twelfth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the March 3rd 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
We’re just starting the process of selling our home and looking for a new house here in the UK, and I have been struck by how showing layouts of a house and listing its total floor space is still a relatively new trend in Britain. In Japan it would be unthinkable to give particulars of a house or flat without also providing a floor plan and an estimate of how many square meters or jo, number of tatami mats, the floor space is.
I don’t think this is just because land space is so precious in Japan. I think it is related to a general Japanese preference for visualisation over text. It’s well known that Toyota Motor Corp., for example, promotes problem visualisation in its factories. In other words, don’t just have an alarm that sounds or a printout that indicates a problem; make sure there is some visual control or graphic display of the problem.
Toyota also has a policy of using A3-size paper for its reports on problem solving or proposals, which have a visual storyline of interlinked boxes, that relieve people from having to read densely typed 20-page memos.
Visualisaton isn’t about oversimplifying problems; it is about condensing a problem and often conveying quite a lot of information or logic without spelling it all out in words. I think the ability to convey rich detail in a graphic form originates from the use of kanji, the Chinese ideograms that are sometimes obviously derived from the thing they are meant to represent - trees, mountains, rivers - or can be broken down into components which represent concepts from which a meaning can be deduced. For example “speech” plus “true” = “evidence”.
The preference for visualisation can lead to cross-cultural communication snafus. Japanese PowerPoint presentations have a tendency to be so densely packed with graphics full of tiny text that squinting Westerners start to yearn for white spaces and a maximum of five bullet points per slide. If you add an allergy to long paragraphs of English to a preference for visuals, it’s no wonder many lengthy English reports and emails are left unread by Japanese recipients.
It’s not just written communication where problems occur. Whilst Americans and the British may be happy to yak away in a teleconference, the chances are that Japanese person lost the thread way back, and is wondering what the canteen lunch special is.
So what to do? Obviously, when presenting an idea or showing a problem to Japanese people, try to use visuals – bar charts, pie charts and so on. Even trying to sketch your idea on a piece of paper or a whiteboard as you talk can be of help. I have heard that teleconferences that have a web based visual component – slides or a spreadsheet that can be pointed at - work much better when there are Japanese participants than pure voice or visuals of ‘talking heads’.
So, the next time you need to make a proposal to a Japanese person, see if you can draw it first.
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Bowing and shaking hands
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Monday 14 April @ 17:23:29
This is the eleventh article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the January 28th 2008 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
When this month’s shinnenkai (New Year's parties) started, I found I had to snap back into remembering to bow properly, whilst negotiating my wine and canapés, as I exchanged akemashite omedetou with Japanese business acquaintances. It felt awkward at first but thanks to my time in a Japanese school, where we bowed every morning to the teacher, and had twice weekly outdoor assemblies where we rehearsed standing at ease, then standing to attention, then bowing - the proper way to bow is somewhat instinctive for me.
For most non-Japanese people, bowing correctly is a challenge, and in my opinion, we worry too much about it. Most Japanese people, when meeting with a foreign person, will expect to shake hands. I usually advise that a slight nod of the head or bend at the waist is a good cultural compromise when shaking hands with a Japanese person. If you have not been brought up to bow, and also had it drilled into you again at an induction course in a Japanese company, when you do try to do a full bow, you will almost certainly get it wrong. Bowing too deeply or for too long a time will result in your Japanese counterpart feeling obliged to dip down again for a further round of needless bowing.
You often see this happening in public in Japan, where neither party wants to stop bowing first, in order to show respect. In the mid-1990s, an English-language magazine targeting Tokyo's expat community extrapolated on this phenomenon by publishing an April Fool’s article saying authorities were going to set up “no bowing” zones, near revolving doors and on station platforms as excessive bowing was causing a safety hazard. Plenty of people believed the article.
I do know of one case where bowing actually did lead to physical injury. A British employee of a Japanese company in Europe related the story to me: “Our new Japanese Managing Director for Europe was going round all the departments to introduce himself and as he turned to me I put out my hand to shake hands. He, however, had started to bow down low, and I caught him right in the eye. Fortunately it turned out he has a good sense of humour, and whenever I see him in the corridor now, he covers his eye with his hand!”
Bowing is deeply engrained in the Japanese psyche, it would seem. One Japanese friend of mine, who has been living in the UK for 30 years, still bows whenever he meets a Japanese person, even in the streets of London. I asked another Japanese friend of mine, who has also been living for many years in London, if she would ever consider hugging her mother when she came to meet her at Narita airport each time she returns to Japan. “Ewww no!” she said, and then laughed, realising how years of kissing, hugging and shaking hands in the UK had made no impact on her instincts at all.
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Attitudes to time
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Tuesday 25 March @ 09:38:57
This is the tenth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the December 17th 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
Whenever I run training sessions for mixed groups of Japanese and European managers, it is always fun to observe the nationalities of the participants who arrive first and of the people who arrive last. In a seminar last week, the Norwegian participant was precisely five minutes early. The last to arrive (more than an hour late) was a Frenchman, originally from the south of France. In Europe, it is reliably the case that the further south you travel, the more people have a ‘flexible’ view of time.
When I later picked up on this with the Norwegian participant, he looked worried for an instant and said “I was only five minutes early”. This attitude strikes me as very similar to the Japanese approach, which is to be early for appointments, but only by five minutes. Any earlier than that would inconvenience the other person. I have been in coffee shops in Japan, near clients’ offices, and realised that other salespeople, like me, who had arrived too early, were killing time with a quick cup of coffee. I realised this because at about ten minutes to the hour, we would all rush to the till to pay and go.
This behaviour seems to be in direct contradiction to Japanese schedule-keeping patterns when it comes to internal meetings, however. Unless there is a senior executive at one of these meetings, Japanese employees are frequently late. This also holds true, regrettably for me, for training sessions. If there is a senior person is coming, the five minute rule applies. I have even seen junior employees peer through the window, see that a senior person has already arrived, and run away rather than be late.
It would seem that when the meeting is of peers and is ‘in-group’, Japanese people revert to a more relaxed view of time. Not only are they frequently late, but they will answer e-mails via their laptops in the meeting, keep their mobile phones switched on to take calls and be hauled out of the meeting to talk to someone else, sometimes not returning for half an hour or more.
My explanation of this is that when it is an internal meeting, a Japanese worker does not feel the meeting excludes or has priority over all the other relationships that he or she is having to attend to at the time.
While this kind of behaviour drives North Europeans crazy, I also had a Japanese expatriate manager complain to me about the behaviour of a German purchasing manager he went to visit. Apparently the German left his mobile phone on, without even muting the ringtone, all the way through the meeting. Every time the phone rang, the German purchasing manager would look at who was calling, then put the phone back down and let it ring until it switched to voice mail.
I have talked to various Europeans, including Germans, about this, and have come to the conclusion that, for once, there is no national cultural tendency behind this behaviour, it is merely a customer playing status and power games with a supplier!
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Japanese decision making
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 14 March @ 20:59:15
This is the ninth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the November 12th 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
One of the most practised concepts in Japanese business is nemawashi, often described as “Japanese style consensus building”. Sometimes explanations go further, getting into the word’s literal meaning- to dig around the roots of a tree in preparation for transplantation. When I talk about nemawashi in my training sessions, I try to create a more vivid image by pointing out that if you want to transplant a mature tree, just yanking the tree out of the ground by the trunk will kill it. The metaphor holds if the goal is to transplant a new idea in a Japanese company. If you were approach whoever you think has the decision making authority (‘the trunk’) and obtain only their approval, it is likely the decision would die in implementation, because you did not get the understanding or agreement of all the other people likely to be affected or interested (the roots).
Europeans from consensus oriented national cultures like those of the Netherlands and Sweden, respond to this lesson by saying “well of course, we would always do this kind of consensus building anyway, it’s common sense.” In the Netherlands, consensus-based decision making is known as the polder model. Polders are low lying tracts of reclaimed land protected from the sea by dykes. In the past, all Dutch, regardless of whether they were peasants or noblemen, whether they lived on or near the polders, had to reach a consensus on how to protect them, and everyone had to be involved in carrying out the plan, otherwise all would suffer. Nowadays the word describes the kind of political consensus reached between government, the unions and business to adjust wages or social benefits or environmental protection.
Both Dutch and Japanese would therefore say they have a long history of consensus based decision making, but a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Management Studies* concludes that “the concept of consensus is interpreted quite differently by Japanese and Dutch managers.” In Japanese companies, nemawashi is carried out through a series of informal, often one-on-one discussions, so that there is already a consensus when the meeting to discuss the “transplantation” is held. The meeting, then, is more about formally recognising the decision. In Dutch companies, the consensus is reached during a meeting, often through quite heated debate. Also, the Japanese managers demand a more complete consensus, whereby all agree, including other departments, whereas Dutch “appreciate the process of trying to reach consensus, but when a difference of opinion persists, the decision is taken by someone”.
This someone would therefore be expected to take responsibility for the decision, if things were to go wrong. In Japan, the view is that a comprehensive consensus is necessary to avoid putting the decision maker and the company at risk, and to preserve harmony and the employee loyalty. Given the time and care taken to get such a comprehensive consensus in Japan, once a decision is made, there is no turning back. To the Dutch, this is symptomatic of Japanese companies, where “everyone has responsibility, but nobody can take responsibility”.
*Comprehensiveness versus Pragmatism: Consensus at the Japanese-Dutch Interface, Niels G. Noorderhaven, Jos Benders and Arjan B. Keizer, Journal of Management Studies, 2007
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Negotiating business deals in Japan requires a bit of finesse
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Monday 03 March @ 16:08:47
This is the eighth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the October 22nd 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
A friend from business school days phoned me last week to ask for my advice on negotiating with Japanese business people. He was about to fly out to Japan to meet a potential joint venture partner. “I suspect my usual negotiating style might cause offence”, he said. “And apparently I may already have committed a faux pas, because when we met with them in the UK, I tossed my business cards around the table”.
After explaining how to exchange business cards with slightly more finesse, I asked him for full details of the company and people he was going to meet. One lesson we learned during our negotiation course at business school, which is applicable whatever the culture you are dealing with, was “prepare, prepare, prepare”. This means not only knowing as much as you can about the people and company you are meeting, but also being an expert in every single detail of your company and its products or services.
I warned him that other approaches we learnt at business school may not work so well if his counterparts are traditional Japanese business people rather than MBA wielding ‘young guns’. Traditional Japanese business people want to be reassured that you are someone they can trust in the long term. If they spot that you are using tricks and tactics in your negotiation, they may worry that you are insincere and that in the future, if something goes wrong in the deal, you will be adversarial rather than cooperative. For example, it is better to open with a reasonable offer price, rather than a deliberately outrageous position from which you expect to be beaten down by half.
Other negotiating tactics, such as having a BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) may be useful, and indeed you may be asked who else you are talking with or supplying to. Too much focus on a written negotiated agreement may be a mistake however, as it will not be the endpoint with a Japanese partner, rather the start of a relationship, subject to change and unofficial amendments in the future. Also, your Japanese counterparts may need to have further internal discussions, so do not expect to come out of a meeting with the final deal.
Indeed much of the concrete detail may be settled outside the negotiating room. When I was working in building material sales in Japan, our Zimbabwean suppliers used to visit once a year to negotiate prices and shipping schedules. The first time I participated in the negotiation meeting I was surprised to find that we spent the first day exchanging data and views on industry trends. During a coffee break I asked one of the Zimbabweans when we would get down to the ‘real’ negotiation and talk about prices.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “tonight your boss and my boss will go out for a Korean barbecue and some beers, and they’ll settle the prices then. It happens every year.” Sure enough, the next day, as if by magic, a piece of paper with agreed prices appeared.
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Women in Japanese Business
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Monday 25 February @ 09:19:15
This is the seventh article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the October 1st 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
Many of my clients who have Japanese customers have been asking me recently whether there will be a problem if they put a woman in charge of a Japanese client account. Being female myself, I instinctively want to support other women in business and declare that there should not be a problem.
I never felt discriminated against or even any resistance from clients in the nine years I worked in a Japanese company, selling to Japanese customers for many of those years. No doubt it helped that I clearly had the endorsement of my blue chip Japanese company, and that I spoke fluent Japanese. Also, as I described in my previous article, the “person in charge” role I had, known as madoguchi or tantosha, is understood to have a team behind it, including a team leader and general manager, so if there was some need to have a senior, male person involved, this could easily be arranged.
I also thought there were some positive advantages to being female. I sensed the clients enjoyed the novelty of having a young, foreign female to deal with and that they also felt more relaxed and were more open with me than they might have been with a male salesperson. Showing that you are intelligent and competent is of course key, as well as making the most of the perception that (rightly or wrongly), women are more detail oriented and accurate.
It is harder for Japanese women than foreign women to gain management roles, as there is a widespread assumption that that any Japanese woman must be in an administrative role. This is based in harsh reality - Japan has the lowest percentage of companies with a woman in senior positions, according to a worldwide survey published by Grant Thornton this year. Nonetheless, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and PwC all have or have had Japanese women as partners or in senior positions in their Japan offices and Accenture Japan makes a special point of welcoming women graduates in its recruitment.
Even Japan-headquartered companies are having to change the way they treat women employees. “Tayousei” (diversity) has become a buzzword, and is taken to mean giving equal career opportunities to women. Most major companies stopped graduate recruitment of so-called ‘Office Ladies’ in the 1990s and now outsource most of their administrative staffing needs to temp agencies. Although the number of women in the management track at major companies has not increased dramatically, with an ageing population and a dearth of middle management due to hiring freezes in the 1990s, making the best use of half the population has become a necessity rather than window dressing.
I have heard Japanese men say that the reason they don’t put women in client facing positions is that women “don’t drink”, which is a euphemism, I suppose, for the client entertainment, in hostess bars and so on, which are deemed by some in Japan to be necessary for good business relationships. This may be so, but frankly, if the main reason your customer chooses you as a supplier is because of your in-depth knowledge of girlie bars, you have a problem!
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There is no excuse for not having an umbrella in Japan
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Thursday 27 September @ 17:55:06
This is the fifth article in a series by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appearing in the August 20th 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
Japanese people who have recently arrived in the UK often wonder why British people do not use their umbrellas when it rains. I think this is partly to do with the different type of rain we have in the UK. Our weather forecasts are usually for “light showers” or “sunny intervals” or “occasional rain”. We do not have the “40% probability of rain” forecasts that you get in Japan. When it rains, it is usually not very heavy or very prolonged, unlike Japan in the rainy season. So British people can’t be bothered to carry or put up their umbrellas. The chances are it won’t rain at precisely the moment we are outside, and even if it does, it won’t be very heavy, so we will soon dry off, whereas in Japan, if it is summer, it is so humid, you can end up being damp all day if you get wet just once.
This British “can’t be bothered”, phlegmatic mentality does not work so well in Japan. There is no excuse other than that you are stupid or disorganised if you do not have an umbrella when the weather forecast says there is an 80% chance of rain.
Similarly, there is no excuse other than lack of self discipline if you are late for work or a meeting with a customer. Trains in Japan run on time. In the UK, our train systems are unreliable, and traffic congestion is a perennial problem, thanks to road works which take place during the day rather than at night as in Tokyo.
The further south you go in Europe, the less worried people are about punctuality and deadlines; what is known in Spain as the “mañana” (tomorrow, later, in the future) attitude. British people, who are of course northern European, want to be punctual but rarely are. We have almost given up trying because inevitably something will prevent us from being on time. We feel upset by being late, so we end up explaining in some detail what went wrong, to which the correct response, in the British mind, is sympathy. However, as I explained in a previous article in this series, such explanations can sound like iiwake (pointless excuses) in Japan.
A clinical trials manager at a Japanese pharmaceuticals company in the UK told me how a drugs trial she was conducting ended up being invalid, because a large number of the participants failed to complete all the tests. They simply did not turn up, because their car had broken down, they were hung-over, the trains weren’t running and so on. Her Japanese colleagues were not sympathetic. In Japan, participants would turn up. They felt she must have managed the trial badly, and indeed, I think she should have signed up even more participants than she did, as it could have been anticipated that a large percentage would drop out. It is best to be over-cautious, not optimistic, in setting deadlines when working with Japanese people, especially if part of your supply chain is in Europe.
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For everything in Japan there is a season, even neckties
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 05 September @ 17:52:08
This article by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan
Intercultural Consulting, appeared in the July 30th 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.
A former colleague of mine, a Japanese man who has been living in London for the past seven years, told me what he most misses about Japan is the distinctive seasons. Of course the UK also has four seasons, but this summer it has been rainy and cold more than usual and we all fear that it will merge seamlessly into the dark, damp days of autumn and winter.
Japan is well-known for its cherry blossom viewing season and anyone who has lived any length of time in Japan will also realise how obsessed most Japanese are about what food is best eaten at which time of year.
This sense of seasonal “rightness” even extends to clothing. I remember once hearing my home stay family debate whether it was too early in the autumn for the father to wear his maple leaf tie.
All this illustrates how being tuned into the seasons is vital to getting the right look and feel to your advertising campaigns and product packaging but there is also a strong commercial rhythm to the Japanese year which should not be ignored.
If you’re thinking about how to time your marketing campaign, there two bonus seasons each year, in summer and just before the New Year, when you’ll notice that advertising for luxury goods suddenly ramps up.
If you’re looking for the right timing for business proposals, it is also worth remembering that most Japanese companies operate on an April 1st to March 31st financial year. April 1st is when new graduates join companies and major reorganisations, promotions and salary changes are implemented. March is therefore a nervous month in most Japanese companies, and not a good time to propose new ideas. A mini-reorganisation is often carried out at the half year point too, on October 1st.
Japanese employees only take about half the holidays they are entitled to and so do not disappear for two weeks to a month in the summer as Europeans do. Still, business meetings in Japan are usually discouraged in July and August. This is partly because some factories close down around the Bon holiday period in mid-August, when people return to their hometowns to visit family graves, but also because the hot and humid weather saps people’s energy.
In September the business trip season starts, climaxing in the attempt to have all payments settled by the calendar year end, in order to start the new year with a clean slate. Unfortunately for those in Europe and North America who are working with Japanese companies, this final push coincides with the Christmas holidays.
The only time when Japan truly shuts down is in the first week of the year, and then another busy period begins, to the end of the financial year, and the annual ‘yosan’ (budget) panic. Then April is taken up with the after-effects of the reorganisations, after which everyone needs the Golden Week holidays at the end of April, through to early May. And so the cycle starts again.
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Japanese customers like prompt, predictable suppliers
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 18 July @ 23:24:06
This article by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, appeared in the July 9th 2007 edition of the Nikkei Weekly
When I first worked at a Japanese multinational, the main method of international communication was telex. I am not as ancient as this makes me sound – it actually took several years in the 1990s for e-mail to become accepted in preference to telex within the company. E-mail was regarded as much less secure and reliable, whereas it was easy to check that the recipient had received a telex on our dedicated telecommunications network. Just to be extra sure, we were also told that every telex should be responded to within 24 hours, even if it was just with a “YRS NTD TKS” (“Yours noted, thanks”).
Nowadays, of course, e-mail has become much more reliable but nonetheless, there always remains that niggling doubt as to whether an important e-mail has reached and been read by the recipient. I do not advocate requesting a delivery or read receipt, particularly to customers, as this smacks of bullying, or mistrust. There are, however, lessons to be learnt from the telex era, particularly when it comes to working with Japanese colleagues or customers.
I encourage people working in virtual teams to agree a common e-mail response time, say 24 or 36 hours. This is usually greeted by groans from people who have so many incoming e-mails, they worry they will spend the whole day responding to them. The point is that the response does not have to be the full answer to the e-mail, it can just be the e-mail equivalent of a “YRS NTD TKS” – to show you have received it or are working on the response. It may even be a good idea to indicate when you intend to respond fully.
I advocate this prompt response whatever the nationality mix of the people involved, but it is especially important when communicating with Japanese customers or colleagues. Japanese customers are mostly highly risk averse, and looking for reliability and responsiveness in their suppliers. As a foreigner, you represent an unknown, and a risk. A quick reply shows that you are responsive and giving the other person priority. The reply should also be positive, in the first instance. Even if you think the ultimate answer is going to be “no”, it is good to show willing, with a phrase such as “we will investigate this further and revert”.
Being prompt, but also responding in a consistent way, demonstrates a third characteristic that Japanese customers value, which is a predictable process for dealing with their requests.
I conducted a Japanese client satisfaction survey for a firm of British patent attorneys a couple of years’ ago. The results were very clear. Happy customers were those who knew that their patent applications were going to be dealt with in exactly the same way each time by the British attorneys, from the method of response (letter, fax, e-mail etc), through to the wording, the person in charge and the timing.
Being prompt, positive and predictable will go a long way towards reassuring Japanese customers and colleagues that they made the right choice in you.
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Customer visits key to sales success in Japanese markets
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 06 June @ 15:18:13
This article, written by Pernille Rudlin, appeared in the May 28th edition of Nikkei Weekly
I was recently shown around the offices of one of Japan's largest recruitment agencies. There was the bustle and hum you would expect of a successful company in one of the fastest-growing industries in Japan, but the sales department was empty and silent.
The director explained to me that any salesperson found in the office during working hours would be poorly evaluated and their bonus would suffer. It was tough on the sales people, who are often shown the door when they cold-call on clients. But the company strongly believes in genbashugi, literally 'on-the-spot-ism' as part of its sales strategy.
I am not suggesting that everyone selling in the Japanese market should door-step their customers, but before you pick up the phone or send an e-mail to a client, it is definitely worth considering whether you could arrange a face-to-face meeting instead.
I was first introduced to genbashugi in the 1990s when I was working at a major Japanese trading company in Tokyo, selling granite to a Japanese stone wholesaler. Samples would arrive at my office from around the world, but instead of sending them off by courier to the customer, as I might have done in the UK, I called customers and arranged appointments. I did this not only so I could see their reaction with my own eyes, but also because most companies would try to make such a visit worthwhile by spending an hour talking about their business and swapping industry news, which often led to sales leads. One time, after a customer had given his opinion of a sample, he mentioned to me, as we chatted over a cup of green tea, that an architect had visited, looking for blue granite. Of course this was exactly the kind of lead that I was hoping for, so as soon as I got back to my office, on the other side of Tokyo, I sent off a request to all my contacts around the world, asking them if they had any blue granite. It led to several thousand dollars worth of business for us.
Genbashugi is normally used in the context of a manufacturing operation, in the sense of it being important that managers go out on to the shopfloor, to see for themselves, or even ensure that decisions are made at the shopfloor level. But I believe it is the secret of success in Japanese sales and customer service, too.
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The importance of establishing a hybrid culture in cross border M&A
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Friday 20 April @ 13:15:56
This article, written by Rochelle Kopp, founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting and Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting appeared in the December 2006 edition of Success Stories Japan
The non-integration strategy
The overseas M&A spree by Japanese companies in the late 80s was legendary for its excess and for its failure. Just as many Japanese firms lost billions on high profile foreign real estate investments during the bubble period, many others were similarly burned on the overseas companies they acquired. Often there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the acquired company, but it quickly ran aground when the new Japanese parent sent large numbers of expatriates to manage it, alienating the existing staff and causing them to leave, thus destroying the original corporate culture. At the other extreme, the acquired foreign firm was never integrated into the company as a whole, and left to operate on its own.
This latter approach has various tempting aspects to it. One obvious one is the cost saving in using fewer Japanese expatriates. The Japanese headquarters company can also justify it to themselves philosophically by saying that they are respecting the local culture by not imposing the Japanese company culture on the new subsidiary. The new subsidiary is likely to react positively too, feeling relief that they are not going to lose the autonomy that they had before and that they will not have to deal with the inevitable tensions caused by having to integrate staff from the parent company. If the newly acquired company is already performing well, then this approach seems to offer continuity and can be justified by an ‘if it ain’t broke…’ philosophy. If the newly acquired company then starts to have problems, the headquarter staff can point the finger of blame at the legacy management.
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Japanese Acquisitions Overseas - What's Different this Time?
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Sunday 14 January @ 18:38:09
An article on the new wave of Japanese corporate acquisitions overseas, written by Pernille Rudlin and Rochelle Kopp (founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting) has appeared in Daijob HR Club, a site for HR professionals in Japan.
Avoiding the bubble era mistakes
The overseas M&A spree by Japanese companies in the late 80s was legendary for its excess and for its failures. Just as many Japanese firms lost billions on high profile foreign real estate investments during the bubble period, many others were similarly burned on the companies they acquired. With little due diligence, Japanese firms snapped up what appeared to be bargains. They often found that the companies they acquired were not in as good shape as they had assumed, and they were saddled with having to pour in more energy and cash than anticipated to whip them into shape. And in other cases, a healthy acquired firm quickly ran aground when the new Japanese parent sent large numbers of expatriates to manage it, who clashed with the existing staff and were not sufficiently sensitive to the local culture.
Now that a decade and a half has passed, Japanese firms are again embarking on an overseas M&A spree. Last year Japan carried out two trillion yen (£10 billion) of overseas M&A, the highest level since 2000. However, this time it’s different. Rather than spending cash willy-nilly, today’s Japanese acquirers are more strategic in their approach, and are consciously seeking to avoid the mistakes of the past in their approach to international M&A.
In this two-part article, we will look at what’s special about today’s Japanese international acquirers. Then we will examine what causes mergers and acquisitions to fail, and how those failures can be avoided through proper management of the post-merger integration process. We will particularly look at what areas need to be paid attention to when M&A happens cross-border and thus cross-culturally. This is important not only to Japanese firms acquiring foreign companies, but also foreign firms making acquisitions in Japan. Due to rule changes taking effect next year, the latter is expected to increase significantly, leading to a whole new level of cultural challenges.
What went wrong last time
Between 1987 and 1990, Japanese firms spent billions on international acquisitions. The impetus of course was the bubble economy, which gave Japanese firms a bundle of cash that was burning a hole in their pockets. Using that money to buy prestigious foreign assets was tempting, leading to a string of large deals. Sony and Matsushita both bought Hollywood movie studios. The Saison Group purchased the Intercontinental Hotels Group. Renown bought two top British clothing brands, Burberry and Aquascutum. Dai Nippon Ink and Chemicals bought Reichold Chemical, Sun Chemicals, and Polychrome. Bridgestone bought fellow tire maker Firestone. And these are just the more prominent ones – smaller yet significant deals seemed to be happening right and left.
In these deals and others, the Japanese were inexperienced acquirers. Just as with the trophy real estate properties being purchased by Japanese at the time, the prices were often inflated, based on the assumption that the Japanese had a lot of money to spare. In many cases, the strategic rationale behind the merger was fuzzy at best, amounting to little more than “because it’s cool, and because we can.” Often the Japanese companies did not do enough due diligence, leading them to buy a “pig in a poke” – in other words, to discover that the company they had purchased was not as financially sound as they had expected.
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Bowing, handshakes and greetings
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Wednesday 21 December @ 11:44:57
The following dialogue between Tadaharu Iizuka, Managing Director of Centre People, a recruitment consultancy and Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting appeared in Journey (a weekly magazine for the Japanese community in the UK) on 1st September 2005.
Iizuka: A while ago there was a TV commercial for a British bank which I found very amusing. It showed a British businessman and a Japanese businessman meeting for the first time, and both sides were very nervous. The Japanese man extended his right hand to shake hands and at the same time the British man took a very deep bow. Then they reversed and did the opposite and again missed each other. You really felt that East and West will never meet.
Rudlin: Even though that was a TV ad, it is something that you can imagine happening for real. I have a similar story which I will tell in a moment, but it is certainly true that as an intercultural consultant I am almost always asked by people if they should bow when they meet Japanese people for the first time.
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Japanese use of 'telepathy' to communicate
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Saturday 14 May @ 13:50:37
Pernille Rudlin was interviewed by Tadaharu Iizuka, Managing Director of Centre People, regarding the Japanese use of 'ishindenshin' or telepathy in order to communicate. It appeared in the Japanese language weekly Journey magazine, May 5th 2005.
Iizuka: Although Japanese attitudes towards communication and Japanese culture itself are changing, we still have a long history of unconsciously using ‘ishin denshin’ (telepathy or tacit understanding). We think that the other person has already understood what we are trying to say, so we don’t say much, but in the UK if we expect this to work…
Rudlin: …it can lead to misunderstandings or British people saying to themselves “you can never tell what Japanese people are thinking”. Research has shown that the degree of directness of expression varies between cultures. Americans are very forthright, the French quite forthright, the British in the middle somewhere, South East Asians are rather more indirect and the Japanese are very indirect. With Americans, what they say is all that they want to say, nothing more, nothing less. Which is why they find it hard to understand what Japanese people are trying to say.
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Japanese and British use of eye contact
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Monday 11 April @ 14:15:01
Pernille Rudlin was interviewed by Tadaharu Iizuka, Managing Director of Centre People, regarding differences in Japanese and British use of eye contact for the Japanese language weekly Journey magazine, April 7th 2005.
Iizuka: What kind of experiences did you have when you went to junior school in Japan for six years? I hear that at that age one tends to pick things up very quickly, soaking everything up like a sponge?
Rudlin: The first six months were very tough. Of course I couldn’t understand anything and during the break times pupils from the entire school, right up to senior high school, would crowd round to look at my face or touch my hair. But children at that age are very adaptable and after about six months I was able to speak everyday Japanese and the other pupils had become used to me. I was still rather bad at the weekly kanji (pictogram) test but once I even managed to get top marks for a composition. Even now theme tunes from TV programmes, nursery rhymes and songs come back to me from time to time.
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European holiday entitlements and customs
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Tuesday 26 October @ 11:01:40
A second article by Pernille Rudlin has appeared in the Japanese human resources magazine Staff Adviser, concerning the different holiday entitlements and customs in the UK, Germany, Spain and Poland. A pdf version of the article (in Japanese) can be downloaded here.
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Why video conferencing doesn't work across cultures
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Posted by Rudlin Consulting on: Thursday 12 June @ 16:45:35
Video conferencing should be popular. It's cheap because participants do not have to travel long distances to meet each other. It's safe in this post-9/11 world because no air travel to risky countries is involved. But if you talk to anyone in the IT and telecoms industries "off the record", they will tell you videoconferencing has been a hard and unrewarding sell.
This lack of enthusiasm also mystifies many cross cultural communication experts. They often recommend video conferencing as an effective way to build relations with people living in "high context" cultures.
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