Pernille Rudlin, Author at Rudlin Consulting

About Pernille Rudlin

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

She spent nearly a decade at Mitsubishi Corporation (the Fortune 100 $190bn Japanese investment and trading conglomerate) 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

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Here are my most recent posts

Earthquake in Japan – what’s the right thing to do?

I’ve been asked many times the past few days whether to approach and what to say to Japanese colleagues in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake and tsunami.

As with anything so intensely personal, one solution will not fit all and cultural generalizations become even more dangerous, but I am pretty confident of a couple of points. I’m basing it on my own gut instinct, born from having lived in Tokyo during the Kobe earthquake when my team and I had friends and family in the Kansai area – and then this was followed by the Aum terrorist attacks in Tokyo itself. For those of you that are wondering, I do not know anyone directly affected by the Tohoku earthquake, although I did live in Sendai for several years as a child. I do wonder what has happened to all the schoolmates I have lost touch with.

The first thing I would say is do not hesitate to approach your Japanese colleagues, either in person or by email. All you need to say is that you hope their family, friends and colleagues are OK. However you have to bear in mind that all might not be OK, so it is best, if you are approaching them face to face, to ask when there are not so many people around. They may only just have managed to pull themselves together and your question might tip them back over the edge again, causing loss of face.

Do not underestimate how emotional and stressful the situation is even for people who are not directly affected. There have been so many comments in the Western media about how resilient, gaman zuyoi and calm Japanese people are, and it is true overall, but this does not mean there is not a lot of hurt inside, and plenty of emotion being expressed openly as well as through quiet anguish. The TV coverage in Japan is horribly distracting and mesmerising and is now available over the internet too, making work very hard to concentrate on.

Telling your colleagues that you are thinking of them will help though, as not only does it remind Japanese friends that people in the rest of the world do care about Japan, and understand how serious the situation is, but it also gives them a chance to talk with you about how they are feeling. I sense that being “foreign” might even help in this respect, as they can say things they might hesitate to say to a fellow Japanese.

Beware of the Western tendency to want to “do” something and over-communicate however. Listening, and quietly donating money or other practical help are more effective. Otherwise it can look like grandstanding on someone else’s tragedy for self publicity, or to make oneself feel better, more than helping the actual victims.

Right now of course what most people in Japan need is food, fuel and communications, and unfortunately that is very hard to provide long distance.

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Does videoconferencing work?

I’ve recently been involved in a large number of video conference calls and have had to revise my opinion of their effectiveness, in a positive sense, thanks to the technological improvements of recent years. But when it comes to communicating with Japanese counterparts, video conferencing is still no replacement for face-to-face meetings.

The issues involved in remote communication with what are known as “high context” cultures like Japan are well documented. People from such cultures prefer communication that relies on nonverbal cues such as body language, silences and voice tones. People from low context cultures (the US, Germany and Australia, for example) prefer explicit verbal communication.

It would seem, then, that video conferencing is the next best thing to meeting a high-context person face to face, and certainly preferable to e-mail and phone calls. My impression so far is that it can work, but mostly for regular, formal group meetings.

Even then though, there are some problems. Firstly the native English speakers don’t realise that the way they are speaking – conversational, lots of “witty” asides and sentences which tail off – is alienating the group at the other end. All the classic Japanese group meeting behaviours start to emerge – eyes shut, furrowed brows or side conversations to clarify comprehension and intention.

The solution to this is to speak “international” English – clear short sentences, lots of clarifying and comprehension checking statements and questions and use of visible agendas, notes and slideware.

Still, differing expectations about the functions of meetings can affect the outcomes of a video conference. In Japan, decisions are reached outside of formal meetings. A person wanting to make a proposal will talk informally to all possible people affected, and maybe send around a proposal which will be marked as approved by all the different teams concerned. A meeting might then be called, but it will be for rubber stamping purposes, to report back or to draw up action points. In western cultures, however, meetings are seen as the chance to brainstorm or resolve differences.

Finally, there is one vital piece of communication that video conferencing cannot enable – “informal contact.” In Japan much of the negotiating and trust building is done outside formal meetings – in pubs, karaoke bars and restaurants. It’s the infamous honne and tatemae problem – there is the official opinion, which will be expressed in group meetings but to know the real story, you have to be out of the office, talking one to one, or amongst a select few.

Face to face continues to be necessary from time to time, not just in the first phase of virtual team building. I’ve had plenty of beers and trust building with Japanese colleagues over the years, but when speaking one to one on the phone, in Japanese, they sometimes cannot be straight with me. The reason for this is not profound – open plan offices are the norm in Japan, so everyone can hear what you say.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

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The hidden value of meetings

No manager, Japanese or otherwise, has ever said to me that they wish they had more meetings to go to. It may be, though, that Japanese business people are better at finding value in a seemingly pointless meeting than many Western business people. Admittedly, in some cases the value is simply in catching up on lost sleep.

In Japan, meetings are viewed as a necessary part of relationship building, and it’s implicitly accepted that the official reason for a meeting may not be the real objective at all. It does lead to mismatched expectations for international meetings, however.

One common meeting format is the aisatsu- (greetings) or kyaku- (customer) mawari (going around). Senior executives from Japan headquarters will request local operations to fix up meetings with their counterparts at key customer or partner companies. Unfortunately, if expectations are not managed, the Western counterparts end up wondering what on earth the meeting was for.

The Western side might have been anticipating that the Japanese company was on an acquisition hunt, or about to propose some kind of joint venture. But to the Japanese executive, it was simply about relationship building and information exchange, and if some kind of mutually advantageous new business proposition arises from it, in the years to come, so much the better.

Another meeting that is common internationally is the “getting to know you” meeting, where all players in a new project get together in the same room, and introduce themselves to each other, often in a quite personal, informal way.

This happened recently to a group of British engineering contractors – the Japanese lead contractor invited them all to a meeting to kick off the project and of course they all came armed with Gantt charts and schedules only to find themselves talking about which football team they supported. In the Japanese contractors’ mind, this was the moment for everyone to get to know and trust each other.

Japanese business people are quietly proactive in finding added value to meetings that they have been asked to attend. They realise that it is in the interstices that new ideas and deeper relationships form.

I recently arranged a meeting for a virtual team to come together for the first time in the Tokyo headquarters. The headquarters arranged the usual factory tour and visit to the corporate history museum followed by a series of presentations on what each function and region was doing.

The Western participants initially complained to me that they found the sessions dull and patronising, but then started to talk about how valuable it was nonetheless to see their colleagues face to face for the first time, and that quite a lot of planning had taken place on the train journey to the factory, and problems solved over a beer or two in the evening.

“Oh really” I responded, trying not to look like that was precisely the point of my instigating the event in the first place, “it’s good to hear you managed to get something out of it, nonetheless.”

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

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Diverse societies have equally diverse ideas about good service

In the previous articles discussing differing customer service standards in the UK and Japan I concluded that there was one fundamental cultural difference which may make it impossible for the UK to replicate Japanese customer service levels, namely that Japanese people are so acutely sensitive to how they are seen by other people around them.

Why are the Japanese more considerate of other people compared to the British or indeed many other nationalities? Many cultural commentators like to talk about Japan’s history as a cooperative, “mura” based, rice growing nation, contrasting with Western individualistic, opportunistic hunter gatherers. This not only ignores the fact that Europeans also farmed collaboratively to grow crops, but denies any possibility that cultures may change in the face of industrialisation and urbanization.

The more obvious explanation, less to do with ancient national history, is to what extent a community is diverse and fluctuating. Politeness and consideration is distinctly worse in London than in other communities in the UK in which I have lived. 40% of Londoners were not born in the UK, and the population is constantly changing as even the original British come and go, for work, education or family reasons. There is no incentive to be considerate to the people around you, as you will probably never meet them again. Also, with an ethnically diverse population, you will find equally diverse ideas about what constitutes politeness.

Although Japanese people originally had diverse ancestry, this dates back thousands of years ago and since then there has not been much in the way of immigration. There are still distinct regional differences in culture, behaviour and etiquette within Japan of course but across the nation a strong idea prevails, it seems to me, of what standard politeness and decent behaviour should be.

When you have diverse ideas about politeness coexisting, you get culture clashes, and people think the other person is being rude, even when the other person was trying to be polite. For example, in certain African cultures it is disrespectful to look a senior person in the eye when they are talking to you. This leads to British Afro-Caribbean youths getting into trouble with ethnically white British police who demand “look me in the eye when I am talking to you!”

When I was a student I took a summer job in a Kosher Chinese restaurant in London. I was pretty hopeless as a waitress. All the tricky stuff like cutting up and serving Peking Duck was left to the Chinese waitresses, but the Chinese idea of good service is to be efficient and expressionless, with no small talk. The Israeli owner of the restaurant hired me and an Iranian girl to provide the smiles and the chat and serve drinks. Our lack of skill did not matter so much as long as we were charming the customers. It was difficult to charm my way out of the time when I dropped a whole tray of iced Coca Cola in a male customer’s lap, however!

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and in Japanese in the Eikoku News Digest. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

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When dealing with customers, a little omoiyari goes a long way

I explained in a previous article on customer service that British service sector staff are often hostile or resentful in their attitude to customers partly because of a lack of pride in their work and their company. This has arisen from their sense that they are being exploited by their employer, that their company only benefits shareholders, not society, and that “serving” people is somehow demeaning.

This could be counteracted to some extent by making sure employees do feel more positive about their employers, as seen with British companies which do have excellent customer service, such as the retailer John Lewis, whose employees are partners and owners of the company. Introducing Japanese concepts such as “gembashugi” (empowerment for the frontline staff) and “monozukuri” (a pride in craftsmanship, not just in manufacturing, but service skills too) could also help.

But as I was travelling and shopping both in Japan and the UK over the Christmas and New Year, I began to wonder whether British service standards could ever reach Japanese levels, because of a fundamental cultural difference that may just be too hard to reconcile. Japanese society is permeated by a strong concern for how what you say or do affects others, to a far greater extent than in the UK.

I realise that for many Japanese it is almost too much pressure, what one British writer on Japan has called “CCTV eyes”, where you can end up becoming paranoid about how other people might see or think about you. The positive side to it is “omoiyari”, what in English we would call “forethought” or “consideration”. It’s an ability to pre-empt what the other person might need, or how the other person might be feeling, and to do something about it, without being asked.

One British manager told me a funny story after I explained to him about omoiyari. He had been asked to pick up a Japanese colleague from Heathrow airport and take him to one of their company factories. The British manager was very busy, so he tried to drive as quickly as he could to the factory. En route, however, he was bemused by the way his Japanese colleague kept asking him about what his favourite soft drink was, and whether he thought Diet Seven Up was better than Diet Sprite. Only after hearing me describe “omoiyari” did the manager realise that his Japanese colleague was hinting that he was thirsty.

“What should I do next time if I want to show omoiyari?” the manager wondered. “Ask him if he would like to stop off to get some drinks?”

The problem with that, I responded, is that if the Japanese colleague is also practising omoiyari, he may notice that you are busy, and deny that he is thirsty, because he does not want to delay you.

The best thing would be to buy some drinks in advance and offer them to him in the car. This kind of behaviour is the ultimate in customer service.

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Autumn/Winter seminar schedule

We are delighted to announce our schedule of seminars in Europe for Autumn/Winter 2010, as below.

We are offering five “Working Effectively with Japanese Colleagues and Partners” seminars, three in Germany, one in London and one in Paris.

We can of course offer a customised version of any of our seminars (for example with a Dutch, French or German focus), to be held at your own offices, if you prefer. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like further details of this.

Working Effectively with Japanese Colleagues and Partners

Friday 22nd October 2010, Mercure Hotel Frankfurt Messe
Facilitators:Ulrike Froehlich and Claudia Romberg

Tuesday 9th November 2010, Kastens Hotel Luisenhof
Facilitator: Claudia Romberg

Wednesday 10th November 2010, Muenchen Mariott Hotel
Facilitator: Ulrike Froehlich

Wednesday 24th November 2010, Centre d’Affaires Emergence Opéra, 5 rue du Helder 75009 Paris
Facilitator: Cécile Buckenmeyer

Tuesday 16th December 2010, London Chamber of Commerce & Industry, 33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP
Facilitator: Paula Sugawara

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The monozukuri of customer service

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.

This article first appeared in the December 28th 2009 edition of The Nikkei Weekly

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Why some Japanese people prefer British customer service!

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 Eikoku News Digest

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Spring/Summer 2010 seminar schedule

Japan Intercultural Consulting Europe is delighted to announce our schedule of seminars in Europe for the first half of 2010.

Effective Management Communication with British Colleagues
Wednesday 5th May, London Chamber of Commerce, 33 Queen Street, London EC4
Facilitator: Kumiko Ishiyama, HR Consultant

Working Effectively with Japanese Colleagues and Partners
Thursday 27th May, Mercure Tour Eiffel Grenelle, Paris
Facilitator:Cécile Buckenmeyer, Senior Consultant
This seminar will be in English, but with explanations in French as necessary.

Working Effectively with Japanese Colleagues and Partners
Thursday June 3rd, London Chamber of Commerce, 33 Queen Street, London EC4
Facilitator: Cécile Buckenmeyer, Senior Consultant
Please click on the links above for online registration or further details on fees and methods of payment.

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What are companies for?

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 in the Eikoku News Digest

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Archives

About Pernille Rudlin

Earthquake in Japan – what’s the right thing to do?

Does videoconferencing work?

The hidden value of meetings

Diverse societies have equally diverse ideas about good service

When dealing with customers, a little omoiyari goes a long way

Autumn/Winter seminar schedule

The monozukuri of customer service

Why some Japanese people prefer British customer service!

Spring/Summer 2010 seminar schedule

What are companies for?

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