Pernille Rudlin - Rudlin Consulting

About Pernille Rudlin

Pernille Rudlin was brought up partly in Japan and partly in the UK. She is fluent in Japanese, and lived in Japan for 9 years.

She spent nearly a decade at Mitsubishi Corporation working in their London operations and Tokyo headquarters in sales and marketing and corporate planning and also including a stint in their International Human Resource Development Office.

More recently she had a global senior role as Director of External Relations, International Business, at Fujitsu, the leading Japanese information and communication technology company and the biggest Japanese employer in the UK, focusing on ensuring the company’s corporate messages in Japan reach the world outside.

Pernille Rudlin holds a B.A. with honours from Oxford University in Modern History and Economics and an M.B.A. from INSEAD and she is the author of several books and articles on cross cultural communications and business.

Since starting Japan Intercultural Consulting’s operations in Europe in 2004, Pernille has conducted seminars for Japanese and European companies in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA, on Japanese cultural topics, post merger integration and on working with different European cultures.

Pernille is a non-executive director of Japan House London, an Associate of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia and she is also a trustee of the Japan Society of the UK.

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Here are my most recent posts

Exporting Omotenashi

It’s been a very tough few months for high street retail in the UK and elsewhere. Supermarkets, clothing brands and electronics have all had casualties in the UK. As always the disruptive effect of e-commerce is blamed. Rumours are swirling that even the UK upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose has been approached by Amazon as an acquisition prospect.

So maybe this is a good moment for Japanese retail and e-commerce companies to make another attempt to expand overseas, after the relative failure of Rakuten. Clearly Mercari thinks so, having just announced that it will enter the US market.

But rather than go down the disruptive route of simply undercutting prices online, I wonder whether Japanese companies could be more innovative in the service they provide, and find ways to bring the famous Japanese value of omotenashi to the world.

I shopped at the Cos (a Swedish mid market brand from the same company as H&M) flagship store in Regent’s Street in London recently. It was full of Chinese tourists but also local people, trying on piles of clothes. It was not a pleasant experience and most of the clothes had cosmetics stains on them. I wondered why anyone would buy anything and then realised that what the local people were doing was trying, and then buying the clothes online.

This makes it difficult to incentivise the shop assistants to give good service or keep the shop environment pleasant either through commission or through positive feedback, as there is little direct sense of achievement or impact on sales. But of course the physical customer experience has become even more crucial now if retailers with high street presence are to compete with pure online retailers.

This point was reinforced by the speaker at my local business women’s network. She has started an upmarket women’s fashion brand – £500 for vibrantly coloured tailor made dresses in Italian wool. It is a highly personal service and she says that she has also discovered that customers are willing to pay for her simply to spend an hour and a half with her.

We did wonder why she had made the effort to travel 2 hours to talk to us for free, considering we might not be rich enough to afford her dresses. And she was also kind enough to give me some free careers advice afterwards. I suppose it links back to what she said in her speech about one of her core values being to give, without expecting to receive anything back, at least at first. This is the deeper meaning of omotenashi. Not just the usual translation of “hospitality” but a selfless giving, which is why Japanese customer service is world famous.

I know some Japanese clothing companies like Start Today are trying to replicate excellent personalised service online. It would be great if Japanese companies in other sectors could do this physically as well as online outside of Japan. The UK certainly has plenty of empty shops available.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in 2018 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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Just-in-time solution to Brexit for Japanese automotive suppliers

The report on Sky News about the Dutch government advising Dutch companies not to use British made parts in goods for export before Brexit spurred me to do some more analysis into the impact this kind of advice might have on Japanese automotive suppliers based in the UK. In fact I even stayed up until 1am last night doing it – I’m that obsessed.

The results of tweaking my database of Japanese companies in Europe reveal that there are around 40 Japanese automotive suppliers in the UK who have production facilities in the UK. They range from solder suppliers to paint production to car seat manufacturers, from 7 to over 1000 employees, employing around 13,600 in total.

Are 13,600 jobs in UK-based Japanese automotive suppliers at risk?

So should those 13,600 people be worried about their jobs right now? 75% of those Japanese companies have similar production sites elsewhere in the European Union. So supply to EU car plants could easily shift to those sites.

The 40 automotive suppliers with production sites in the UK can of course continue to supply the UK based car manufacturers, if there is enough demand to sustain viable production levels. There is a theory (blog post here) in the Japanese automotive world that viable production levels require a market of 100 million people, which is greater than the UK population. Of course UK based car plants are not just supplying the UK, but the EU and in the case of Honda, their Civic model is also exported to the USA and even to Japan. In fact almost 80% of British car production is exported, the majority of this to the EU.

What were the secret UK government promises to Japanese car manufacturers in the UK?

So the 13,600 jobs are less at risk, if the UK based car manufacturers can sustain their exports to the EU after Brexit. Which is why there is the concern that a lack of a deal with the EU means 10% tariffs on British car exports to the European Union. Presumably the secret promises that the UK government has made to Japanese car manufacturers include some kind of bung to ensure that any cost of the tariffs is compensated for. Whether this is allowed under WTO rules or acceptable to the EU, I leave to the trade wonks. I suspect the answer is no. It also explains why the UK government is so keen on the customs partnership solution and max fac. Presumably they see this as enabling them in real time to have a grip on what is being traded and tariffs imposed, so they can compensate UK car manufacturers accordingly or set up a fast lane for them in processing at the borders.

The quandary facing Japanese automotive suppliers with no UK production base

The UK government presumably also pitched max fac to the car manufacturers as the technical solution to the worries flagged up in the report in the Financial Times yesterday, of delays at the borders disrupting just-in-time supply chains for automotive parts coming in from the EU. This is why Japanese car manufacturers like Nissan have been pressurising automotive suppliers to set up in the UK, preferably in the new industrial park right by Nissan’s factory in Sunderland.

Weeding through my database, I have identified 33 Japanese automotive suppliers with sales arms in the UK but who do not have production in the UK. So should they now consider setting up production bases in the UK? They have to take a view on how likely it is that UK based car production will be maintained after Brexit. How will the Nissan-Renault alliance resolve itself – will Renault become dominant, in which case, expect French production to be prioritised? Nissan also has another EU based plant, in Spain. Honda wants its UK plant to be a global hub, but also has a factory in Turkey (which exports car models such as the CIvic to the EU under the EU-Turkey customs union). Toyota has car plants in France and Russia.

Consolidate supply chain within EU, leave importing to UK to the last possible minute

A further complication is that the import and export of automotive components is not just a one off – the same part may go back and forth several times between multiple factories, having solder/paint/other components added. Concerns about rules of origin and the paperwork involved, and possible delays at the border, along with the car manufacturers themselves essentially saying to suppliers “that’s your problem not ours” might lead a supplier to conclude that the best solution is to consolidate the supply chain within EU borders, until the final moment when the component has to be brought to the car manufacturers’ UK site for assembly. There might be some more warehouses at the Sunderland industrial park, and maybe some finishing/assembly facilities, but a safer, cheaper bet would be to put most production in Eastern European countries such as Slovenia or Slovakia, which does indeed seem to be what has happened over the past year or two.

UK is the only top 10 European economy where the number of Japanese residents has fallen – why?

The UK is the only top 10 European economy where the number of Japanese residents has declined from 2015 to 2016.

The number of Japanese residents in the UK hit an all time high in 2015 of just under 68,000, according to Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This fell by 4.5% in 2016. The last time there was a significant fall in Japanese residents in the UK was 2007-9. Presumably this can be attributed to the Lehman Shock, and numbers have been climbing steadily since 2010. So why has there been another drop? Brexit might be the easy answer, but the referendum vote was in June 2016, so it seems a rather immediate impact.

There are more Japanese in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, both in absolute and relative terms. The second highest population of Japanese in Europe is in Germany (44,027) and the third highest is France (41,641), with other countries having substantially less Japanese presence (4th is Italy, with 13,808).

I was surprised there were that many Japanese people in France as there are fewer large Japanese companies and regional headquarters in France relative to Germany or the UK. Fortunately, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs breaks down the total by whether they are permanent residents or long term residents – broken down by intra company transfers, self-employed and students/academic related. France has a relatively larger proportion of students, self employed and government related people, whereas the UK has relatively more permanent residents and Germany relatively more intra company transferees.

Number of permanent Japanese residents in the UK has risen, but academic, corporate and diplomatic residents have fallen

The number of permanent Japanese residents in the UK has risen by 4.5% to 19,785 (30% of all Japanese in the UK) and the number of long term residents has dropped 7.9% to 45,813.

The UK still has the highest number of intra company transfers in Europe – 17,841 – but this is 4% down on 2015. The bigger falls were in students/academics/researchers – 13.8% (from 19,100 to 16,461) and government related – a 25.7% decrease from 934 people to 743. So is this due to young Japanese becoming more reluctant to study overseas? Is the UK losing its centrality as a diplomatic posting?

Comparing the UK to trends in Germany and France shows that Japanese are still studying in Europe, just increasingly more in Germany or France (also large Japanese student populations in Italy, Spain and Switzerland and significant increases in the Netherlands and Ireland). Diplomats and other government officials are also gravitating more towards Germany and France (there are also a large number of Japanese government people in Switzerland).

Germany hosts almost double the number of Japanese companies than the UK does (1811 compared to 998) so the other key difference between Germany and the UK is the density of Japanese people on intra company transfers per Japanese company. The UK has by far the highest density – of around 18 Japanese residents per company, then Belgium with 12, then France with 11, Germany, Netherlands and UAE with 9. This is due to the large number of regional headquartered financial services and trading companies in London.

So what has changed since 2015 that has not impacted the other European countries so much, apart from Brexit? I conclude it must be the increasing difficulty of obtaining Tier 2 intra company transfer visas (as I mentioned in my comments to the Financial Times recently) and also student visas (as explained in this 2016 report). Government agency/diplomatic visas are dealt with separately I assume – maybe this is an element which can be explained by the UK’s declining international influence and more a question of reduced demand rather than reduced supply? Either way, Brexit and visa restrictions will be a combination precipitating further rebalancing away from the UK and to the continent, I predict.

What is a Japanese company?

I had anticipated the “do you have any questions for us?” at a recent final interview for a non-executive directorship for an investment trust focused on Japan. I was advised by another experienced non-executive director to think of a thought provoking question, to show the board I was capable of bringing a different perspective, something they had not thought of before.

On reflection, I probably erred too far on the “thought provoking”. It was a genuine question, however, and I was genuinely interested in their answer. As the fund’s strategy was to invest only in Japanese companies, how do you define a Japanese company?

Listed in Japan or majority of business in Japan?

The fund defined it as being listed on a Japanese stock exchange. This may seem a clear enough definition, but does this mean Sharp, now owned by a Taiwanese company, Hon Hai, is a still a Japanese company? How about Hitachi Power Tools and Calsonic Kansei, now both owned by American buyout firm KKR?

Other Japan focused funds also invest in companies that are listed outside Japan, so long as a significant majority of their business is in Japan. But if percentage of sales in Japan is the criterion, then there are plenty of Japanese companies who are listed in Japan, for whom a majority of their business is outside Japan – Takeuchi for example exports 95% of its diggers to overseas markets and 68% of Sony’s business is outside Japan.

Avoiding ‘country risk’

Why does it matter? It matters to the boards of such funds, because if they define “Japanese” as Japan listed or majority of business in Japan, then clearly they need to consider the “country risk” of Japan and ensure the strategy is adjusted, or mitigation is put in place accordingly.

They need an expert in Japanese economics or politics to read the entrails on whether Prime Minister Abe will be re-elected as leader of the LDP in September, and if so whether he will be in a strong enough position to carry on with his “Three Arrows” of reform. They need to be able to judge whether the recent dip in Japan’s GDP growth is temporary, or likely to be revised upwards in June, as often happens. They might need some inside track on trade friction around the world and how this might affect the Yen.

But if the strategy is to invest in specific Japanese companies with long term growth potential, then this is not the same as investing in the Japanese economy or a Japanese index tracker. The aim should be to look for companies that will succeed no matter what happens to the Yen or Abe.

Managed by Japanese executives?

Specifying that those companies should be Japanese indicates to me that there is thought to be something unique to Japanese companies that makes them worthy of special attention. So should it be that the management of the company is Japanese? In which case, how should Takeda be classified – likely to become even more dominated by non-Japanese executives after the acquisition of Shire?

What about other companies who, like Takeda, have substantial overseas business acquired through acquisition, but manage it mostly through an international HQ based outside Japan, such as Japan Tobacco (Swiss HQ) or Dentsu (Dentsu Aegis Network in the UK)?

Or how about SoftBank, founded and run by Masayoshi Son, ethnically Korean and educated in the USA? The original telecoms business is clearly Japanese, but what about ARM in the UK and Sprint in the US – not to mention Softbank’s massive Vision Fund which notably is not investing much into Japanese companies at all?

Where Japanese companies have the edge…

I propose some further, admittedly fuzzier definitions of “Japanese”. Firstly, the business should reflect an aspect where Japan has an “edge” – a comparative advantage. For example, any business that is focused on the elderly, as Japan has the most rapidly ageing population in the world, with over 25% over the age of 65. Or a business which has evolved from Japan’s traditional manufacturing and craftsmanship strengths, what is known as monozukuri in Japanese – highly sophisticated machine tools, robotics and components.

But I think there is something more than that to being “Japanese”. It’s about the corporate culture and governance – a different model to the Anglo-Saxon shareholder value maximization model. Investing in a Japanese company should be for long term capital growth rather than a quick dividend, as well as some satisfaction that the investment is going into a company which does not engage in creative destruction type capitalism.

…is also where the risks lie

And this is where the risks also lie. Japan’s stakeholder capitalist model means job security, but also hidden underemployment and low productivity. Jealous guarding of corporate reputation can mean cover ups when something goes wrong. Strong loyalty to other members of the corporate family can mean deference to seniors without questioning or challenging orders given. Extreme risk aversion can mean opportunities missed.

Understanding and mitigating these risks is not something that can be resolved by an informal chat with a contact in a ministry, nor by looking at exchange rate forecasts and putting some hedges in place.

This was the conversation I wanted to have, and where I thought I could add value, but that’s the trouble with the “any questions for us” coming at the end of the interview. As the board chair said – fascinating question, but you’d need a whole afternoon or a seminar to thrash it out. And no, I did not get the job.

Data visualisation depersonalizes discussions, but you still need the people to make a judgement

I often advise Europeans who are trying to communicate a proposal, or want to have a discussion with Japanese counterparts to try to put their idea into a visual format. This has several benefits. One is that it should reduce the amount of English text that the Japanese person has to plough through to understand what is being proposed. A second reason is that it depersonalizes the discussion if there is a graphical representation – a “thing” that can be pointed at and disagreed with during the argument, rather than having to argue with someone’s abstract idea.

Thirdly, Japanese written language – kanji – is highly graphical as a communication method, so Japanese people are more receptive to complex concepts being communicated in a graphical and holistic way rather than the textual, linear form common in the West.

So I was quite surprised to hear a young Japanese expatriate woman tell me that her colleagues in the UK based market research agency she works for are much more accustomed to representing their findings in a graphical way than she was used to in Japan. Specifically, she said that they use infographics and sometimes even send the report to clients as a video, using the infographics and clips of customers being interviewed.

With the advent of “Big Data”, data visualization is a growing industry. So should Japanese companies be acquiring companies or hiring people who have those skills, or is this another area which will simply be automated, and all that is needed is to buy in or develop some software?

Automation tools already exist for data visualization, but the key is to think about why you want to put the data into a visual format in the first place. It is usually to give insights which will then provoke a discussion. An infographic does not of itself provide the solution. Discussions require human beings to provide their different interpretations of the infographics and ideas about how to act on them. The infographic provides the “thing” that can be pointed at and disagreed with, but also allows people of diverse backgrounds and native languages to have a more equal chance of contributing to the debate, because there is less of a language or technical barrier.

The market research agency at which the Japanese woman worked was founded in the UK and acquired by a Japanese company in 2014. But it also has offices across Asia, multinational staff who travel across Europe and a call centre based in the UK covering over 30 languages.

The UK is the obvious location for global marketing services, not just because it is the home of English language communication, but because of its multinational workforce, who can ensure the data is interpreted appropriately for different cultures. This is why Japanese marketing and advertising agencies have been acquiring many British companies recently. I just hope Brexit does not damage this advantage by putting up too many barriers to immigration and free movement across Europe.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Gender pay gap in UK’s largest Japanese employers is lower than average

Any company in the UK that employs over 250 people is supposed to have submitted their gender pay gap estimates by 4th April 2018. We ran our Top 30 Japanese companies through the Companies’ House database and found that all have submitted data for those subsidiaries which qualify.

The average pay gap of their 50 subsidiaries is around 15%, slightly lower than the national average of 18.4%. There are some interesting patterns in that there is a gender pay gap in women’s favour in the automotive and tyre businesses – Kwik-Fit and Stapletons (both owned by Itochu) and Micheldever (acquired by Sumitomo Rubber in 2017) and also Toyota Motor Manufacturing and NSG Pilkington Automotive. Looking at the detail, it seems this is to do with there being a lot of men in the lower paid jobs (presumably tyre fitting, shopfloor, delivery) and some well paid women in the higher paid, presumably managerial/executive jobs.

The gender pay gap is particularly bad in finance, although no worse for Japanese banks than for other UK based investment and retail banks.

The wooden spoon goes to Hitachi subsidiary Horizon Nuclear Power with a 41.9% pay gap, closely followed by Fujifilm, with a 41% pay gap.

Top 30 Japanese employers in the UK (April 2018) & gender pay gap
Rank	Company	UK employees 2016-7*	Gender gap
1	Fujitsu Services	9,326	17.9%
2	Nissan	7,755	-11.3%
3	Honda Motor Europe (sales)	6,539	27.1%
	Honda of the UK Manufacturing		4.5%
4	Itochu	6,515
	Kwik-Fit		-15.2%
	Stapleton’s (Tyre Services)		-24.9%
5	Hitachi Hitachi Consulting	3,998	30.3%
	Horizon Nuclear		41.9%
	Hitachi Capital		33.5%
	Hitachi Vantara		27.0%
	Hitachi Rail		-0.9%
6	Mitsubishi Corp Princes Foods	3,532	8.7%
7	Ricoh UK	3,484	17.4%
	Ricoh UK Products		10.4%
	Ricoh Europe		32.2%
8	Sony Europe	3,143	27.2%
	Sony Music		22.7%
	Sony DADC		8.7%
	Sony Interactive		12.8%
9	Toyota Motor Manufacturing	3,098	-6.4%
	Toyota (GB) (sales)		29.7%
9	Marubeni (Agrovista)	2,294	36%
10	Dentsu Aegis London	2,757	14.5%
	Dentsu Aegis Manchester		1.8%
11	Canon	2,693	15.8%
12	SoftBank (ARM)	2,173	15.5%
13	Nomura	2,166	36.9%
14	NSG Pilkington Automotive	2,128	-12.1%
	Pilkington Technology Management		31.7%
	Pilkington UK		8.3%
15	Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Goup	1,987	35.6%
16	Denso Manufacturing	1,897	24.2%
	Denso Marston		6.6%
17	NYK Group (Yusen Logistics)	1,855	4.0%
18	Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa (Insure The Box)	1,809	19.0%
19	Calsonic Kansei UK	1,778	3.6%
	Calsonic Kansei Sunderland		3.6%
20	Konica Minolta	1,572	18.2%
21	Sumitomo Rubber (Micheldever Tyre Services)	1,543	-19.9%
22	Brother Industries (Domino UK)	1,384	15.1%
23	Olympus Keymed	1,348	27.7%
24	Fujifilm UK	1,257	41.0%
	Fujifilm Speciality Ink Systems		8.7%
	Fujifilm Diosynth		16.0%
25	Sumitomo Corporation (Howco Group)	1,249	17.5%
26	Unipres	1,237	3.1%
27	JT Group (Gallaher)	1,086	14.0%
28	Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation	1019	34.9%
29	Toyoda Gosei	1,192	0.9%
30	Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Primetals)	1,152	38.1%
TOTAL		84,966	15.1%

Mitsubishi Corp alumnus toasts the Suntory spirit

When I left Mitsubishi Corporation after 9 years, I felt guilty that I had not found a way to repay (in business development rather than money) the MBA they sponsored me through and worried that the wonderful sempai (mentors) who had supported my career would now be angry with me. I was delighted and relieved therefore, when one of the sempai, very senior in the company, invited me for a drink when I was in Japan on a business trip, and explained to me and the other team members at the table that Mitsubishi Corporation should regard people who leave as alumni, just as McKinsey do. “We may end up doing business together one day,” he predicted.

Indeed Mitsubishi Corporation is now a valued customer of mine, and I have seen many other MC alumni rise to some of the top positions in the Japanese business world. Probably the most well known one is Takeshi Niinami. A graduate of Keio University, as so many MC people are, he was sponsored by MC through a Harvard MBA. He eventually became President of Lawson, the convenience store chain that MC had invested in, leading its turn around.

He is now the President of Suntory Holdings and was interviewed in Nikkei Business magazine about recent developments there, including the acquisition of Beam Inc (but not its acquisitions in Europe of Lucozade, Ribena and Orangina) and the “Suntory Way”.

What Beam got from Suntory

“The Suntory Way means that we develop products that our competitors do not have”, says Niinami. “When I explained this to the Jim Beam factory in Kentucky they were very supportive. Beam Inc headquarters people all had MBAs. American marketers get a sense of consumer trends from consultant’s reports and decided their strategy based on that, they never went to the gemba (shopfloor) the way we do in Japan. They just told the Kentucky factory what to do, top down, from afar. If you told them to go to the gemba they’d probably quit. There wasn’t one single person in the executive team who came from manufacturing and they weren’t investing in the factory. But the Kentucky people loved making things. So when we told them we saw manufacturing as the most important thing and appointed someone from manufacturing to the board, their motivation shot up.”

“When they came to see our factories in Japan, they became aware of the need to improve their Kentucky factory. Beam is even older than Suntory – more than 200 years of history. We were able to revive their DNA.”

What Suntory learnt from Beam

“Beam are really good at managing profitability. Suntory got heavily into debt to buy Beam and we are all focused on reducing this debt. Suntory was not as good at managing cash flow as Beam but we have learnt.”

What’s next for Suntory and Niinami

Niinami was brought in by the previous President and now CEO and Chairman, Nobutada Saji (also from the founding family) in 2014. Niinami thinks his successor is likely to be another member of the founding family – current COO NobuhiroTorii – and seems in favour of this, as a way of maintaining Suntory’s spirit. He also expects Suntory to remain a privately held company, despite discussions to the contrary when he first became President. The advantage, he says, is that Suntory is able to contribute to society, through the Suntory Hall (a famous concert venue in Tokyo) and also a water sustainability initiative, without having to justify this to shareholders.

As an outsider, Niinami feels he was able to see objectively how good the Suntory spirit was, and how to roll it out globally. He has set up a Suntory University to help with this. Although Niinami is only 59, he says he is willing to finish his career at Suntory. “I am already “of age” and I don’t think anyone will be asking this “odd fish” to join them.”

GDPR

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25^th 2018, after which date, organizations which hold personal data on EU citizens which are not compliant with the GDPR may face heavy fines.

Many small companies like mine are struggling to comply. The regulation is clearly aimed at the larger business-to-consumer companies who hold a lot of very personal data about their customers, such as their age, sexuality, political affiliations and so on, and could use this to target them in a way that could be seen as intrusive or offensive.

I have decided, however, to make sure the personal data we hold is compliant, partly because I want my customers to feel confident that their suppliers are trustworthy, but also because I see this as a chance to improve the service we provide and slim down our customer database and mailing lists.

Japanese companies in Europe are undoubtedly feeling particularly nervous about the GDPR, as Honda Motor Europe was already fined by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office in 2017 for violating a UK regulation which has very similar requirements to the GDPR regarding consent.

Consent is the key issue with GDPR. There needs to be informed, positive consent by the customer for their data to be processed. The nature of the data (what kind of personal details) which the company will hold, and what it will be used for (emails, newsletters, postal mailing etc) have to be clearly explained. A double opt in is recommended – whereby people fill in the form, and then receive an email asking them to confirm that they do want to share their data. A clear process for them to ask to be deleted from a database also needs to be in place.

It is not possible to “grandfather” (allow old conditions to continue even if they are against the new rules) previously held personal data, so it might be safest to reconfirm with people on your database that they still consent to you processing their data. Of course, the risk with this is that many people will not consent and your mailing list will shrink.

But this brings me on to my second reason for deciding to comply as thoroughly as possible with the GDPR. I want to make sure that my newsletters are really valued by my customers. Our newsletters are not marketing our training so much as part of the after-service we provide. They help our customers refresh and add to what they learnt in the classroom.

Manufacturers are also moving away from just selling a product, to selling a solution – hardware plus surrounding services such as maintenance and support, using the Internet of Things and Big Data to provide a more customised product.

Which is of course why the GDPR has become necessary. Personal data can be used in a good way, to meet customer needs more completely, but, as we know in Europe, particularly in former dictatorships and communist regimes, personal data can be abused.

This article appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Hybrid food cultures and the EU Japan Economic Partnership Agreement

The EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) has been characterised in Europe as “cars for cheese”. As a cheese loving North European, I did indeed miss being able to buy reasonably priced good quality cheese when I was living in Japan. It was a kind of comfort food for me – either hunks of cheese on bread, or sometimes I would have what I called my “spaghetti Bolognese” moment, where I would crave the umami of a tomato and beef sauce smothered with parmesan cheese.

But because I also lived in Japan as a child, traditional Japanese foods are comfort food for me too. Now I am living in the UK – I sometimes make miso soup (particularly the red miso I remember from when I was a child in Sendai), or okonomiyaki, or curry rice or tonkatsu to cheer myself up.

The EPA now has to be approved by various local European parliaments, and one of the ways of persuading them to accept the agreement is to point out that it will ensure the geographical designation of over 200 European food and drink products are protected in the Japanese market, such as Polish vodka or Parma ham.

If this argument is sufficiently persuasive to local parliaments, the agreement is expected to be ratified in 2018 and implemented in 2019.

Europeans get very passionate about the authenticity of local food – particularly the Italians. There is even a Twitter account called “Italians mad at food” (@Italiancomments) which retweets comments from Italians outraged – mostly at Americans – for putting mushrooms or garlic in carbonara sauce or pineapple on pizza.

Italians would not be impressed with my spaghetti Bolognese either – there is no such dish as spaghetti Bolognese in Italy. There is ragu alla Bolognese, which means simply a meat sauce – and is meant to be eaten with tagliatelle, not spaghetti.

The British have a long history of adopting foods from other cultures – our favourite national dish is Chicken Tikka Masala – which is a curry which does not exist in India – and the second or third generation British Chinese who run our takeaway food shops have become resigned to putting sweet and sour sauce on fries.

The British have become far more sophisticated about foreign food these days. Multicultural street food has become fashionable across Europe – most major cities have markets full of “yatai” – one in my town has a Chilean stall and a falafel (Middle Eastern food) stall which is actually run by a couple of Koreans.

Japanese people are somewhat dismayed to see fast food chains selling “sushi” in the UK which have little resemblance to the authentic Japanese version but of course curry rice, tempura and tonkatsu are actually hybrid Japanese/European/Indian foods themselves.

So the EPA seems likely to herald another chapter of hybridization. Japan and Europe will trade in each other’s authentic, local foods, and create new hybrids that will be the comfort foods for the next generation. It’s a business opportunity both for traditional farmers and adventurous cooks.

Situational leadership for Japanese managers in Europe

One of the issues that Japanese people who come to work in Europe find most challenging is the multiple nationalities of people they have to work with. Whether you are based in London, Duesseldorf or Amsterdam, it is highly likely that your colleagues will be a mixture of not just British, German or Dutch but also Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish or indeed Indian or Chinese.

Much of the global leadership or management training that is offered in Japan is based on American models. Europeans are used to American management styles so they will tolerate them – at least superficially. However, many of these “one size fits all” models are not ultimately effective in getting Europeans to go beyond superficial compliance. In fact, they can have quite a demotivating effect, particularly if they are too rigidly focused on quantitative targets and objectives.

European managers themselves find that the American model which works the best is known as “situational leadership”. This is not a new theory – it was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the Americans Dr Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard. It suits the European context because the key idea is that there is no one best style of leadership, and situational leaders are those who are able to diagnose the situation, adjust their leadership style and communicate accordingly. They also need to be able to take account of the “performance readiness” – in other words the ability and willingness – of the various members of the team.

National cultural differences are not specifically mentioned in the model, but in my training I always relate situational leadership to what is known about the preferences in each European country for top down or consensus oriented decision making styles, as well as direct or indirect and formal or informal communication in the ways of giving feedback or direction.

Of course, this can be somewhat overwhelming for someone who is new to the European workplace. It is particularly tough for Japanese people who have worked in the more traditional Japanese companies, where people just do as best they can whatever their bosses tell them, whether they are willing or able or not.

But I think Japanese managers have two big advantages. Although this is a generalization and may not apply to all Japanese managers, in my twenty-five years’ experience of working with or in Japanese companies, most of the Japanese people I have met have been humble about their own abilities and also curious about other cultures. This means they are willing to learn and to accept that their usual way of working may have to be adjusted.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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