Category: Corporate culture

“If we carry on like this, Japan will perish” – Uniqlo’s founder Tadashi Yanai

Tadashi Yanai, founder and president of Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) has some hard hitting words for the Nikkei Business magazine series “Wake Up Japan”:

“Japan is the only country which relies mainly on one big intake of domestic graduate hires for its recruitment. But you have to recruit globally. There is competition around the world to hire people, and Japan is falling behind.  Only hiring Japanese people is pointless.

At the moment Japan just seems to be hiring raw manpower, but we need to hire people with advanced skills, knowledge workers. Yet we are still just hiring Japanese people for this too.

Japan’s executives need to globalize too

Japan is two steps behind in terms of skills, yet we think we are ahead of the game. We don’t know the reality of the wider world outside. This is because executives are not learning and not going outside of Japan.  Executives think they are globalising their companies, but they just send out business unit heads, without actually changing at the executive level. If executives aren’t taking risks, with their own money, it won’t go well.

If you want to hire top non-Japanese, you have to radically change Japan’s HR and reward systems. If you look at compensation, levels in China and Europe are around 2-3 times higher, and around 10 times higher in the USA.

Only non-Japanese who love Japanese culture can put up with Japan’s current HR system

Japanese companies set pay just by looking at other companies in their sector, in Japan. So there is pressure for everyone to toe the line. So if you want good non-Japanese people to join you, you will only attract the ones who love Japanese culture.

The lifetime employment and seniority based promotion systems have become calcified. I think they are good systems, but only if the company is growing. It’s OK if the outcome is lifetime employment and seniority based promotion, but this has become very superficial. If you bring in people from outside Japan, seniority based promotion and lifetime employment will collapse.

For example, if you want to build up strength in robotics and AI, you have to hire top people from Silicon Valley, or India or China and work with them. Seniority based promotion is irrelevant then. If you want to work together, it has to be based on a transparent, fair system.

The need for strong, good values to attract good people

If you want to work with people from all round the world, you have to have strong good values yourself.  This attracts good people. Good companies attract good people.

Japan still behaves like a closed country even though it thinks it isn’t any more, just because more and more tourists are coming here. Real globalization means working alongside non-Japanese people. So you have to build a system that enables this.

So I don’t think of career development as being in 10 year increments, rather as 3 year units.  Talented people can become directors within three years, even if they are graduate recruits.  If you don’t have that kind of system, they will quit.”

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Fundamentally rethinking Japan’s lifetime employment system

Toyota’s President Aikio Toyoda made the headlines in May 2019 by saying that if there are not more incentives to continue employing people, lifetime employment can no longer be maintained.  Toyota has still been sticking to the seniority based system common to many Japanese companies where the promotion path is to become kacho (team leader) by 40, then bucho (general manager) in the second half of your 40s.  If you drop off this path, there is no return to it.  “Which means that if you are in your 50s, with no people reporting to you and no major work to do, it is hard to be motivated, and yet because your salary is Y12m a year (around $110,000), nobody quits” says an employee in his 40s, in a Nikkei Business magazine special feature.

Hidden unemployment

Up until recently, those in their 50s who were in the production side would be taken away from the production line but now, because of a labour shortage, they need to be kept on the production line.  So from 2012, Toyota introduced new appraisal systems and health policies, so that those in the 50s can also be productive. The lifetime employment problem is more acute with those in office functions. A Toyota source says “up until the Lehman Shock, they could hide somewhere even if they did not have much work to do, but now the “unemployed layer” is becoming more apparent.”

Toyota has already shrunk its board directors down from 55 to 23 and merged several executive level layers into one. It has been in a series of negotiations with the company union on revising the appraisal system and increasing mid-career hires.  Toyota group companies such as Denso, J-TEKT and Aisin are following suit.

“Men in their 50s are inflexible. They are a drag on reform”

Outside Toyota, Hiroaki Nakanishi, now chair of Japanese business federation Keidanren, formerly President of Hitachi has also said that “we have reached a limit to how far a company can run its business on the precondition of lifetime employment”.  Electronics companies who developed staff in the 1980s for their semi conductor business are now finding it hard to switch over to AI and other skillsets. “Men in their 50s are inflexible. They are a drag on reform” says the head of a Japanese manufacturer.

Japanese telecoms company KDDI conducted an internal survey to try to revitalise the rapidly growing “over 50s” segment of its workforce, only to find that most of those in their 50s were happy with staying as they were, and had no interest in becoming more energetic in their work.  It has not been so much of an issue for Japan’s banks, as there was a tradition of employees in their 50s being transferred to clients.  But some clients are beginning to refuse secondees from banks, if they are not adding value.

Fourth time round – a fundamental change is needed

According to Rikkyo University assistant professor Satoshi Tanaka, this is the fourth time round that the middle-senior age group has been a labour issue. The first time was directly after the oil shock in the mid 1970s, the second time was in the mid 1990s, the third was after the Lehman schock. The countermeasure after the oil shock was to second people to sister companies and subsidiaries, the countermeasure in the 1990s was to introduce more performance based HR systems. The Lehman shock aftermath saw more “early retirement” systems (although I saw this being introduced in the 1990s when I was in Japan too) and now the 4th time round, the focus is on how to “revitalise” those in the mid-senior age groups rather than get rid of them, due to Japan’s labour shortage.

Nikkei Business contrasts Japan’s “membership system” with the “job system” of the West. Japan has the three treasures of a company union, seniority based promotion and lifetime employment in contrast to the harsher world of the West, where there are job descriptions, it is easier to fire people and unions are by sector. The consensus fourth time round seems to be that a fundamental rethink of Japan’s HR system is needed.

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The cause of Japan’s low productivity: 5 generalists doing one specialist’s job

In the Nikkei Business series on how to “wake up Japan”, Senior Chairman and former CEO of Japanese leasing and financial services company Orix Yoshihiko Miyauchi sees three mistakes that have led to  Japan’s “lost three decades”

  • Allowing an asset bubble to develop in Japan the first place
  • Not stabilising the economy after the asset price crash.
  • Not restructuring the Japanese banking system quicker – real restructuring did not happen until the 2000s, 10 years after the crash.

As a result, Japanese companies were “like tiny boats on a big ocean, using all their energy to avoid large waves. Rather than innovate or grow, they focused on cost cutting”, says Miyauchi.

Miyauchi rates Japanese employees very highly – “they have a strong sense of responsibility, and do all they can to fulfil their obligations. But there is a lack of creative thinkers.  There is a problem in the way we develop people – Japanese companies are always developing generalists, when in the future we need to focus intensively on supporting the development of specialists. If you don’t have specialists who are the complete experts, then you cannot achieve high performance. Japanese companies end up having 5 ‘semi professionals’ doing one specialist’s job. ”

“It would be a big shock to change this immediately, so probably Japanese companies will need a hybrid development system with a specialist track and a generalist track.”  I agree, but I have seen that in the past when this is done in Japanese companies, the specialist track is seen as a demotion away from line management.  Japan may need to introduce specialist, professional organisations such as the various chartered institutes we have in the UK, which certify qualifications  and support continuing professional development, to ensure that specialists are less reliant on the prejudices of their company’s HR system for their careers.

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TDK President Ishiguro – quietly magnetic

TDK is in our top 30 largest Japanese companies in Europe, with over 7,000 employees – mainly working their factories in the Czech Republic and Hungary. But we’ve never blogged about them before as their senior executives tend to stay rather quiet.  In fact I wonder if that many Europeans are even aware of them as a company, or that they are Japanese.

People of my age will remember TDK cassette tapes.  The company’s origins date back to 1935, when TDK was founded as Tokyo Denki Kagaku Kogyo (Tokyo Electrical Chemical Industries) and they began manufacturing magnetic tapes in the 1950s. TDK has pretty much phased out its magnetic tapes now and instead is focused on sensors, actuators and power electronic components.  It has acquired various companies in these sectors, including EPCOS in Germany, the Lambda Power Division of Invensys in the UK, and Micronas in Switzerland. As a result, more than 90% of its sales and its employees are outside Japan.

Global governance means empowering

The Nikkei recently interviewed TDK’s President since 2016 – Nasunari Ishiguro. Ishiguro is confident that TDK’s approach to global management by having a structure that encourages self-directed action is working well.  “We had to think about how to have effective global governance.  How to be disciplined as a group  but at the same time not impact society in a negative way.”

“It’s not something that a president can do on their own. We have a phrase “functional equality” at TDK, meaning every department should be functionally equivalent.  We thought the word “governance” didn’t really suit our culture.  It’s not about delegating authority – so we use the word “empower” instead.”

“Instead of just providing money, people and technology to group companies and leaving it up to them to get on with it, we encourage stakeholders to become more transparent with each other, in a spirit of give and take, so it is not a centralized organization, but autonomously distributed”

“For example, a subsidiary in China that makes batteries, then makes use of the structure to propose other things that they want to do, rather than being commanded to do things by the President.”

“So we have regional headquarters in China, the USA, Europe and Asia so that group companies can cooperate with each other. So for example, if a lawyer is needed, they can be sent from a regional headquarters, or they can share a finance function.”

TDK garitto philosophy

“We are currently developing a “Day 1″ book that summarizes our philosophy and the values to be shared, such as contribute to society/the industry, ensure trust, keep quality standards etc.  It should be no more than 3-5cm thick. Each group company can freely exercise their discretion in how they adhere to it.”

“All management meetings are in English, and because of “functional equality” each person is equal in the debate. So meetings can take more than 2 hours.  Overseas group officers are to point out problems without hesitation and feel free to give their opinions and voice doubts”

Ishiguro is worried that manufacturing has moved outside of Japan and wants to ensure that TDK’s monozukuri (craftsmanship) is systematized. He has started a “Garitto monozukuri” initiative with the aim of systematizing and conveying manufacturing know-how to future generations.  “Garitto” is Akita dialect (one of TDK’s original factories was in Akita) meaning “with all your might” and “sturdily.”

Equal global people

“We need to have global employee mobility too. The head of global HR is the Germany HR Director. We have established a cross border HR team as an organization that is not bounded by location.  For example the leader of one project is Chinese, and there are Japanese and German people in the team.”

As for a successor, Ishiguro says he doesn’t care what background or nationality someone has, it just needs to be “someone with a spirit of adventure, and a light in their eyes, who is not afraid of change.  We have to change in order to be of use to society.  They need to put out their antenna, even when the way forward is not clear.”

Although Ishiguro has been at TDK all his career, he actually dropped out of university and also spent some time working in Luxembourg, setting up a magnetic tape factory.  Perhaps this is where he got his un-Japanese tolerance of being equals in argument and thrashing out problems. “I’m not a flashy person” he says, “I believe I was asked to be president because I will consolidate our foundations. I think I have revived the company through open debate and steady reforms.”

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No Matsushita in Panasonic

Panasonic is now in the 8th year of Kazuhiro Tsuga’s Presidency but none of the seeds he has sown seem to have blossomed.  The most recent quarterly results, unveiled on July 31st 2019 showed that despite Tsuga’s focus on profit over turnover, operating profit fell by 44% on the previous year, with tunover down 6%.

Of the 5 internal companies, only the Life Solutions business showed a profit. The slowing down of the Chinese economy had an impact but profitability in China was worse than forecast even taking that into account.  It had been designated a growth area and a special company set up to focus on it. The US China trade conflict and decrease in infrastructure investment seem to be at the root of the problem.

The automotive business is also challenging. The joint venture with Tesla for battery supply is still loss making. Another joint venture with Toyota has been set up, but this might be outside the consolidated Panasonic earnings.

A third area of concern is the home appliance business. Although airconditioning and washing machines are selling well in Japan, profits were thin overseas. Panasonic executive Hirokazu Umeda says the price of EL panels fell far more sharply than expected in Europe and Panasonic could not compete on pricing even in Asia. Panasonic is going to shut its TV factory in Mexico and look at OEM and ODM (original display manufacturing) options and withdrawing from the USA and China markets.

As of June 2019, there is no representative of Panasonic’s original founding family on the board, with the retirement of Matsuyuki Matsushita, a grandson of the founder Konosuke Matsushita. Matsuyuki Matsushita’s eldest son is still working at Panasonic however. As to whether he wants him to become a board director “that is up to his effort and ability” says Matsuyuki Matsushita. “Sometimes founding families are involved in management, sometimes they are not involved at all. Which is better is up to the management academics to debate.”

Matsuyuki Matsushita says his father set up to the internal company system so that each division could focus and compete with specialist manufacturers. “The current problems are probably showing the limits of monozukuri (manufacturing or craftsmanship) and the shift from analogue to digital, to services. Panasonic has not shown the answer to this yet.”

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No sacred cows for NEC’s President Niino

I was reminiscing a couple of days’ ago with a Japanese business person about how in the 1990s there was a Silicon Glen in Scotland hosting many Japanese electronics and semiconductor factories, including NEC’s semiconductor plant in Livingston. After the IT bubble burst in 2000, most of these plants disappeared, including NEC’s. Silicon Glen has remade itself, focusing more on software and semiconductor design and development.  NEC has also reinvigorated its presence in the UK with the acquisition of Northgate Public Services in 2018.

NEC is not out of the woods yet, however. In a tough interview in the Nikkei Business, President Niino seems willing to slaughter several sacred cows and even commits to taking responsibility (presumably by resigning) if his revival plan to FY 2020 does not succeed.

He said he was open to merging with rival Fujitsu, even if it meant the NEC name disappeared. I certainly recognised from his descriptions some similar characteristics in the way they operate.

NEC, like Fujitsu, was part of the so-called Den Den Family, where stable, dependable business came from government contracts from what is now NTT. “Customers would make very stringent requests of us and we would always try to respond with the best possible technical solutions, and deliver 100%. This is an important quality, but you cannot survive globally just on this”.

Niino thinks there were many reasons for the halving of NEC’s turnover since 2000.  They had relied on introducing new technology in areas such as semiconductors, PCs and mobile phones, but once these became volume businesses with many newcomers, spending far more on R&D, NEC was no longer able to compete.

Niino is focusing on profit targets rather than turnover and sees NEC’s future strength as being in “safer cities” – using AI and software development rather than hardware. Clearly China will be a major competitor in this, but I guess NEC and other Japanese suppliers will be preferred by many who might view China as a threat.

Niino has brought in an HR director from Microsoft Japan to shake up the HR system.  He has appointed 31 “change agents” and made evaluations more visible, and the distinction between specialists and managers more clear.  Corporate officers on the board have all been asked to step down temporarily and then are being rehired on 1 year contracts. “I won’t be firing them if they don’t meet targets within one year, but if they miss two years’ running, it might be that they are better off working outside NEC”.  As Niino is himself a Corporate Officer, no wonder he has to commit to taking personal responsibility for any failure too.

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Mitsui tells employees – come and go as you please

I remember when I left Mitsubishi Corporation 2o (!) years’ ago, I was surprised how friendly some of my most senior Japanese sponsors continued to be towards me.  One of them explained to me that he thought Mitsubishi Corporation should think like McKinsey and view employees who leave as “alumni” who might one day come back and work there again, or end up as business partners or customers.

It was very far sighted, and I often joke that he was right in that Mitsubishi Corporation does seem to have become a McKinsey with a venture capital/investment arm attached. Mitsubishi’s arch rival Mitsui Bussan also seems to have gone down this path, according to an article in the Nikkei Business magazine recently.

They have set up a separate office called Moon Creative Lab in Tokyo and Palo Alto to look for new business opportunities in the IoT and AI sectors, inviting ideas from their 44,000 employees around the world. Mitsui also hosts networking events, inviting alumni who head up start ups in Japan such as atama plus, Shippio, Nature, Sansan and B Platz.

Mitsui continues to be popular with top Japanese graduates but they only hire around 130 a year, compared to over 200 at the end of the Bubble Era. They have also found that their retention rate has worsened in recent years.  Luring alumni back in to create businesses that are not in its traditional sectors is seen as one way to move away from its dependency on resource and commodities businesses. For example, Yusuke Tamura, who was a graduate hire in the metals division in 2004 but left in 2014.  He  started up a fashion brand as CEO but parted ways with the founding partner.  He returned to Mitsui in 2016 and is now working on the restructuring of Mitsui’s catering business.

Mitsui was always characterised as being more about “people” than Mitsubishi, who was more about “organisation”. The idea was that to get things done at Mitsui, it was about who you knew, whereas Mitsubishi worked in a more organisation driven way.  So Mitsui is making use of who they know outside the company as much as inside – and maybe even outside Japan?

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The enduring Japanese family firm

I attended a Japan Society talk last month on shinise  (Japanese family firms) – given by academics Innan Sasaki and Davide Ravasi.  Sasaki and Ravasi argued that shinise have survived over 100 years, by keeping small and focused on traditional crafts like sweet making, sake brewing, and textiles.  They are very much embedded in the society and community in which they operate – the highest concentration is in Japan’s old capital, Kyoto.  In return for their commitment to the local community, they gain a social status and support from the community.  They are meant to have a higher moral purpose than pure profit and therefore do not seek to take risks and grow much beyond their current geography and sector – which means they are more resilient to external economic shocks.  When downturns happen locally, they survive through the strength of local support. This contrasts with what Sasaki and Ravasi call “instrumental” firms, who exist for a purely economic purpose.

Even large Japanese multinationals behave like Kyoto shinise

Listening to their descriptions of shinise‘s motivations and behaviours, I realised they were very similar to the way I describe bigger, multinational Japanese firms in my seminars.   Even though Japanese multinationals have taken the risk to expand overseas, and are often no longer owned by the founding family, the ethos of having a higher moral purpose than shareholder value, of corporate contribution to society and strong risk aversion to ensure longevity still endures.

And like the shinise, the darker side is the sacrifices needed to be regarded as a proper member of the family firm and the difficulty of becoming a senior manager if you were not born into it – or at least recruited straight from university like Japanese headquarter permanent staff.

Nikkei Business magazine had a feature last month on family firms in Japan showcasing research that family owned firms in Japan perform better than non-family owned firms in terms of Return on Assets. “They don’t hold on to unnecessary assets” says Professor Yasuhiro Ochiai of Shizuoka University.

Japanese family owned multinationals that have performed well

DMG Mori is still owned by the Mori family and has been particularly active recently in M&A overseas since the current Mori took over as President in 1999, most notably in their merger with German machine tool manufacturer DMG.  Apparently quite a few of DMG Mori’s employees come from the wider “family” of customers and suppliers.

Of course the most famous Japanese company still managed by a founding family member is Toyota.  However the current President Akio Toyoda is adamant that the company name is Toyota, the family name is Toyoda, and Toyota is not a Toyoda family company, “it’s everyone’s company.”

Those that are listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and also active in Europe were:

  • Suntory (Torii family – founded by Shinjiro Torii in 1899) – chairman is from the founding family.
  • Aisin (automotive parts maker in the Toyota group founded in 1949 – chairman is part of the Toyoda founding family)
  • Shimano (Founded 1921, president is a Shimano)
  • DIC (Dainippon Ink) founded in 1908 by Kijiro Kawamura, a Kawamura is on the board of directors

And how to avoid toxic family rows

It’s not all joy in a family of course. Nikkei Business also looks at the family rows that have affected the performance of companies like Idemitsu (petroleum company) founding family shareholders fighting a merger with Showa Shell and the rebellion against founding family member Yoichiro Ushioda and chairman by executives of LIXIL (owners of German bathroom fittings company Grohe).

Nikkei Business’s prescription for avoiding trouble is:

  1. Frequent communication between family members
  2. Treat family members who are employees the same way as other employees in terms of company regulations
  3. Don’t withhold information for family only, be transparent in management
  4. Don’t appoint a successor from the family if there is noone suitable
  5. Keep family assets and company assets separate
  6. When there is a generation changeover, keep criticisms to yourself
  7. Avoid too many family members as employees
  8. Ensure a structure is in place to stop family members going rogue

For more on what being a “family” means for Japanese firms and the non-Japanese employees that work for them, this was one of my most popular articles in recent years.

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4 cultures of controlling overseas subsidiaries

During a recent trip to Japan I visited Amazon’s offices to have lunch with an acquaintance who has been working there for 1 year and 3 months.  He told me that Amazon has expanded so rapidly this past year that he is now in the upper half of a chart which shows all employees ranked by their length of time working for the company.

He also told me that almost all the non-Japanese people working there were, like him, locally hired and that there were hardly any expatriate staff from the US headquarters. I therefore wondered how Amazon HQ could control a subsidiary which is growing so rapidly without any expatriate managers to keep monitor it.

Amazon also tries to minimize the number of processes and procedures it has, in order to maintain the speedy, fast to market, start up mentality it had when it first began over twenty years’ ago.

The 3 usual ways to control overseas operations

In the various multinationals and their subsidiaries I have worked in or with, you can usually find three types of headquarter control.  American, sales focused companies tend to control their subsidiaries by setting numerical targets. If the subsidiary employees and managers hit the targets, they get bonuses, if they miss them, they get fired.  Many multinationals who are not American in origin use these systems because numbers are easy for everyone to understand, regardless of language.

Another way of managing subsidiaries which both European and American multinationals also use is to ensure compliance through having strong regulations, processes and systems, and clear hierarchical chains of command, so everyone knows who has responsibility and authority for each part of the business.

A third way, which is more common among Japanese companies and also companies such as the German Mittelstand, family owned companies, is “control by the family” – in other words members of the headquarters family are sent out to subsidiaries to monitor what is going on and promote the corporate culture.

Amazon’s way

My Amazon contact explained that Amazon ensures its employees behave in compliance with Amazon’s core values by having a very rigorous hiring process.  Candidates are interviewed several times by multiple employees and asked questions about past experiences, to reveal what kind of mindset they have.

I can imagine, however, that it is difficult for Japanese companies to use this method if their overseas subsidiaries were the result of an acquisition, or if the company has already been operating overseas for several decades.  There will already be a substantial legacy of staff who may have rather different values and behaviours to those of the Japanese headquarters.

It would also be a mistake, and damaging to the benefits of having diverse, localised operations that are close to their customers, to impose too rigid a set of behaviours and values on all overseas employees.

Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that Japanese companies who are about to acquire or set up operations overseas ensure they have a clear, globally understandable company mission and values (rinen) and hire or promote their overseas employees accordingly.

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.

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The good and bad of no longer being “Japan owned”

I’ve been wondering for a while whether Japanese employees of companies such as Sharp or Takata have been feeling any change in corporate culture since being acquired by Taiwanese or Chinese companies and whether those companies could still be considered to be “Japanese”.

Nikkei Business has inteviewed employees from Sharp, Toshiba memory division and also from the laptop division of NEC (now owned by Lenovo) and come up with  13 aspects that have caused difficulties for Japanese employees who have been “bought” (as the Nikkei puts it) and 7 positive effects.

Difficulties:

1. Having to work much harder than before – due to increasing focus on short term profitability – even longer hours than is the norm in Japan.

2. Loss of right to evaluate staff – a sense that Taiwan HQ is now in charge of career development

3. Increase in employees who have a “Taiwan First” mindset

“If you don’t like doing things the Hon Hai way, then start your own business, or go and work for Nidec or Panasonic. If you can’t do that, then suck it up, seems to be their attitude” says one employee.

4. Rigid management by numbers

5. English skills are now compulsory

6. Nemawashi (stakeholder management/consensus) no longer works

7. Large cuts in salary

8. Reduction in autonomy

9. Sudden changes in supplier relationships

10. Reduction in  management positions

11. Being posted to unwelcome locations

12. Collapse of succession planning

13. Low capability managers being seconded to your company

Some of the above could happen to any acquired company in any country, but I guess 1, 4, 5, and 6 are particularly acutely felt for Japanese companies acquired by foreign companies.

Some employees saw an upside however:

1. Structural problems are removed

2. Disappearance of bullying bosses

3. Job becomes more fulfilling

4. “Rags to riches” when previously your career history or educational record counted against you

5. Increased salary

6. Improved credit rating

7. More opportunities for promotion

Again many of these are the result of issues arising from having worked for a failing company, and now being owned by a more successful one – but I can see that for many Japanese who were stuck – with their careers blocked by bullying bosses, or considered lower status because of not being a lifetime employee since graduation or not coming from a top university –  it is refreshing to be evaluated and promoted purely on ability.

 

 

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