Globalization

Third Culture Kid

I don’t think my parents quite realised what an impact their decision to move to Japan when I was six years old would have on my life, even into adulthood. Now that I consult on cross cultural matters as a profession, I increasingly appreciate how influential such childhood experiences are. There is of course some disagreement amongst experts, but many psychologists and anthropologists would agree that the formative years are from around five or six years old through to eleven or twelve years old, when the personality and cultural values of the future adult are shaped.

It was precisely during those years that we lived first in Sendai (a city in the north of Japan) and then Kobe (a port in the south of Japan). The Sendai experience was particularly intense. There weren’t many foreigners in Sendai in the 1970s – just some missionaries and a few academic families like mine. As there was no international school, I ended up being the first foreign pupil at the local girls’ Catholic school – blonde haired, blue eyed but wearing the same traditional sailor top, skirt and hat as all the other Japanese schoolgirls.

For the first few weeks I was in tears most days, and pupils from throughout the school would come to stare at me in the break times, touch my hair and stare into my blue eyes. When my father or mother came to pick me up from school a riot would almost break out. But children at that age are amazingly adaptable and sponge like, and also bore easily. Within six months I was speaking reasonably fluent Japanese and had made friends who accepted me as basically the same as them, just a bit odd looking. I even got the top mark in Japanese composition once. I thought that was nothing special, and couldn’t understand why my parents made such a fuss about it.

Kobe was a lot easier – a cosmopolitan port city with several international schools. At the school I went to, there were many children like me, mongrels of various nationalities and cultures. I later realised that they, like me, are what are known as TCKs – Third Culture Kids. Third Culture Kids were brought up in a country different to their country of nationality and consequently do not feel totally at home either in their country of birth or their adopted country. They instead create a “third culture” where they attempt to mix the best of both countries, and hang out with other TCKs who understand their hybrid identity. They also tend to have “itchy feet” and want to move somewhere else every few years. When they do settle, it is usually in communities where there are many other TCKs, such as London, or Brussels or Switzerland.

Perhaps many of you reading this article are TCKs yourself. If you are the parent of a TCK you might worry from time to time that your life choices have had such an indelible impact on your children. But on balance I would like my son to be a TCK too. So far though, he’s very English.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in Japanese in the August 6th 2009 edition of Eikoku News Digest.

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The freedom of a foreign life

In my previous article I described how I am, thanks to my upbringing in Japan, a Third Culture Kid – a child who was brought up in a different country to that of their birth. There are more and more of us in this increasingly globalising world, and I wonder if other TCKs, like me, find it hard to answer any questions about whether we love or hate the two countries we semi-belong to. For me, Japan and the UK are just a part of my life, like brushing my teeth. I tried to escape the influence of Japan on my career once or twice, but it didn’t work, both because it is the subject that I am most passionate about, and also because, frankly, it is this expertise that people are most willing to pay me for.

A more interesting question is what leads people who are not TCKs to choose to settle in another country. My parents and I stayed in Japan for five years initially. Then, when I was eighteen, they decided to move back to Japan again, to Hiroshima and then Tokyo, staying for a total of twenty years. If you were to ask my mother what caused them to leave the UK again, she would probably half jokingly say “British Rail”. At that time the trains were even more unreliable than they are now and my mother was commuting every day to London to quite a high powered job, chairing various meetings, so if she was late, the meetings did not happen. She became ill, and the stress of the daily commute was making it worse.

Japan is, of course, a country where things work – trains run on time and people are punctual, reliable and polite. This is a big attraction for many of the foreigners who choose to live there permanently and they get a terrible shock when they return to their home country where things don’t work, people are rude and the streets are littered. After a long time away you feel like a foreigner in your home country. My parents actually look like foreigners in the UK now – they are too well dressed!

I know Japanese people who have lived abroad for a long time no longer feel like they belong in Japan. But I do find it puzzling that they chose to live in the UK, with its terrible customer service, bad weather and unreliable transport system. Some Japanese acquaintances have said that they like the freedom and tolerance they find in the UK. I would argue that this is not unique to the UK – anyone living in a foreign country can feel liberated by being out of the reach of the expectations and judgements of their society of birth. Believe it or not, foreigners living in Japan feel that way too.

Sumo or Judo: how Japanese firms embrace or exclude diverse staff

I miss not being able to see the hatsu basho (January sumo tournament) that is now under way in Tokyo, as they don’t show sumo on the television here in the U.K. anymore. It would be great if Harumafuji, the new Mongolian second ranked ozeki, does well*, but it seems this year will be another challenging one for sumo’s credibility, particularly in the way it deals with the foreign rikishi wrestler.

When I was still working at my Japanese company in Japan, trying to develop and implement policies to improve the career opportunities for our “foreign rikishi,” in other words our non-Japanese employees, we had many discussions about what we nicknamed “sumo vs. judo” problem.

The sumo vs judo problem

In a “sumo” company such as ours, the traditional view was that in order to become a senior manager, you needed to join the company (the “sumo stable” or beya) at an early age and spend several years doing menial jobs, pouring the beer for everyone and living in a company dorm.

The sumo equivalent would be cleaning out the sumo beya stable, making chanko nabe stew and undergoing grueling training. So if any foreigner wanted to become a manager, that was fine, but they had to have undergone the same process as other Japanese employees.

Learning the “kata” – knowing the form

As for training, this was mostly on the job, learning from your seniors, as indeed in sumo, where the kata, or form of sumo, is learned by observing others rather than through any formal guidance or manuals. In fact, there weren’t many manuals or formal appraisal processes at all in our company. People just “knew” how to behave and what was expected of them.

For many Japanese companies, this changed in the 1990s. This was partly due to the restructuring needed to deal with the slowing down of Japanese economic growth, but also a recognition that the Japanese company had to become more diverse, not only in terms of nationalities, but in the gender and career background of its staff. It was not only the foreigners that objected to being treated like sumo, but other Japanese people, particularly in the younger generations. Also, the vagueness and lack of transparency often led to cover-ups, verging on what could be deemed corrupt practices.

No point in forcing conformity to the Japanese way on diversity

If you force diverse groups of people to conform to one mysterious way that can only be learned through many years’ apprenticeship, a way most easily learned by a group who share one particular cultural background, then those who deviate from this norm will find that, despite their best efforts, they are only a pale imitation of the mainstream group.

In other words, if you want all employees to behave like traditional Japanese salarymen, then hiring people from nontraditional groups is pointless, because they end up being unhappy, fake Japanese salarymen, or, more likely, quit.

My colleagues and I contrasted sumo with judo, which is also a Japanese origin sport, and has much of the same Japanese ethos regarding the importance of kata and diligence through practice, but is much more transparent in its rules and its teaching methods, a prerequisite, I assume, for it becoming an official Olympic sport for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. I have to say though: I find sumo more charming and fascinating than judo.

* Unfortunately he didn’t. He made a majority of wins 8 to7, and did better in the March tournament that has just ended – 10 wins to 5 losses.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.

Subtle factors that motivate workers differ in Japan and the West

Every time a Japanese company acquires a Western company, there is a concern about how the Japanese organization will deal with the “high risk, high reward” culture that is prevalent not only in the financial industry but across many Western business sectors.

Actually, Japanese multinationals have been dealing with this issue for some years, and the solution has usually been to pay the local market rate. It does, of course, result in some anomalies. Presidents of Japanese blue-chip companies are paid only around 10-20 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, whereas at Fortune 500 CEO can earn anywhere from 300-500 times a junior employee’s salary.

So it may turn out that the Japanese president is earning significantly less than the foreign directors reporting to him from the acquired company. Lower down the ranks, more junior Japanese find that when they are posted overseas, they are having to manage locally hired hotshots who are earning salaries and bonuses that add up to the equivalent of an extra zero on the end of a normal Japanese expat salary.

Many Japanese working for foreign banks and consultancies in Japan have also been making 10 times the average salary in Japan. Of course, Japanese on traditional salary packages can comfort themselves with the thought that they have more secure jobs, especially given what has been happening recently. But I think there is a danger in oversimplifying this risk/reward trade-off.

Knowing that you won’t be laid off when times get tough, or conversely that you are being paid handsomely, is not sufficient for most people, Japanese or Western, to feel completely fulfilled and motivated in their work. These factors may ensure people stay in their jobs but not that they perform those jobs to the best of their abilities.

High salaries and bonuses are in some ways proxies for the things that really motivate people to work. Being paid well should indicate that an employee is doing something that has had a major impact on the company. It should also reflect the employee’s authority and responsibility to make an impact. Getting quick raises should show that one’s career is advancing and that one’s skills and capabilities are developing.

These are all drivers of engagement – pride and motivation in work – for people working in Western companies. Surveys show that the drivers of engagement for Japanese people working in Japanese companies are subtly different. Career advancement opportunities and ability to make an impact are important, but so are other factors – immediate personal relationships, having input to department decisions, and having a manager who understands what motivates each employee and who has good relationships with them.

All people, regardless of nationality, want to feel recognized for making a positive difference in the world through their work. For many Japanese, the traditional way to do this has been through becoming a longtime respected member of a major company. For many Westerners, this route does not exist, so impact on society has to be more visibly rewarded through pay or status.

Japanese and Western companies need to avoid two extremes when trying to combine corporate cultures. Paying people well but not giving them the authority to make an impact and advance their careers will eventually lead Westerners to leave a company. Offering lifetime employment but without good, enduring personal relationships and mutual respect may mean that although Japanese employees stay, their morale is low.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.

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.

Processes and rules – the emphasis on ‘kata’

Japan is usually presented as a highly process-oriented society. One example of this is the emphasis given to kata, form or way of doing something in Japanese martial arts, over the actual result. Martial arts training consists of repeating the same action over and over again until a desired body position and movement is achieved and has become second nature to the practitioner.

I have bitter memories of the weekly kanji tests I used to fail when I went to Japanese elementary school. I thought the characters I wrote looked the way they were supposed to, but the teacher would mark them as incorrect; somehow she knew I had drawn the strokes in the wrong order. There is one, and only one, right way of doing things in many areas of Japanese society.

Maybe this is why a Japanese acquaintance said that when he alights at Heathrow Airport, he breathes a sigh of relief that he is now in a country where he can relax. He was replying to a comment I had made that when I reach Narita International Airport, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I am now in a country where everything works.

Many British working for Japanese companies, while recognizing the attention to detail and highly disciplined work ethic of their Japanese colleagues, also complain that Japanese are often less respecting of British rules and processes. When I ask for more details of the situations in which British rules or processes are bypassed, it usually turns out that a customer or someone else inside the company has asked for an exception to be made. Deadlines that were supposedly set in stone suddenly become flexible.

As the customer is not just king in Japan but “god,” it is easy to understand why rules are easily broken for customers, but the exceptions made for colleagues are less excusable in the eyes of many British people. The British sense of fairness kicks in, and any attempt to ignore rules governing the treatment of people is seen as unfair or evidence of favoritism.

British people regularly flaunt work-related rules or crash processes, however – whether it be in customer service or on the factory floor – if they think the result is the same, or, less admirably, if it makes life easier and they can get away with it. They do not unquestioningly obey rules and processes the way Japanese workers are taught to.

One British manager with Japanese subordinates told me how delighted he was with his Japanese team. “You tell them, just once, about a process that needs to be done each day and they will do it, exactly how you told them, without fail,” he said. “There’s no need to check up on them all the time. In fact, I even forgot to tell them not to do it any more when it was no longer necessary and, of course, discovered they were still doing it months later.”

With his British team members, he not only has to regularly check that processes are being implemented but must ensure that the way he checks, and any ensuing discipline or reward dished out, is seen as transparent and fair.

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

The importance of establishing a hybrid culture in cross border M&A

This article, written by Rochelle Kopp, founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting and Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting appeared in the December 2006 edition of Success Stories Japan

The non-integration strategy

The overseas M&A spree by Japanese companies in the late 80s was legendary for its excess and for its failure. Just as many Japanese firms lost billions on high profile foreign real estate investments during the bubble period, many others were similarly burned on the overseas companies they acquired. Often there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the acquired company, but it quickly ran aground when the new Japanese parent sent large numbers of expatriates to manage it, alienating the existing staff and causing them to leave, thus destroying the original corporate culture. At the other extreme, the acquired foreign firm was never integrated into the company as a whole, and left to operate on its own.

This latter approach has various tempting aspects to it. One obvious one is the cost saving in using fewer Japanese expatriates. The Japanese headquarters company can also justify it to themselves philosophically by saying that they are respecting the local culture by not imposing the Japanese company culture on the new subsidiary. The new subsidiary is likely to react positively too, feeling relief that they are not going to lose the autonomy that they had before and that they will not have to deal with the inevitable tensions caused by having to integrate staff from the parent company. If the newly acquired company is already performing well, then this approach seems to offer continuity and can be justified by an ‘if it ain’t broke…’ philosophy. If the newly acquired company then starts to have problems, the headquarter staff can point the finger of blame at the legacy management.

It is precisely when the new subsidiary starts to have problems, or indeed when there are positive developments, such as new plant investment, that the sustainability of the ‘leave them alone’ approach becomes doubtful. Superficially, allowing the new subsidiary autonomy shows that the subsidiary management is trusted by the headquarters, but this trust is quickly revealed as having been surface only, when large numbers of expatriate Japanese are flown out to trouble-shoot, or to set up the new plant. Real trust has not been built up through in-depth, side by side collaboration by key personnel from both companies. Without this real trust, Japanese headquarters will be reluctant to delegate. Well written, positive sounding monthly management reports from subsidiaries and the occasional board meeting are not enough to persuade most Japanese managers that when it comes to the crunch, the local managers can sort out problems or set up new projects in the correct corporate ‘way’. They also worry, probably rightly, that the systems and processes that they can rely on in Japan are not well embedded in the overseas subsidiary. Underpinning both the lack of trust in people and in the processes is a lack of trust that would have come from explicitly shared values and an understanding of how those values are manifested in the workplace.

An example of this that we have come across recently was when a joint venture between a large Japanese chemicals company and a large European chemicals company became a fully owned subsidiary of the Japanese company. Initially, the Japanese company let the newly acquired company carry on as before, with a European Chief Executive Officer and a wholly European team of managers, all originally from the European chemicals company. Then the CEO left and was replaced by another European, and the Japanese company sent over one expatriate – a sign that they were beginning to get nervous after the departure of the known and trusted CEO. Then when the second CEO left, he was replaced by a Japanese expatriate. Then, when plans for a new factory in Europe were approved, more and more Japanese expatriates began to appear, to the point where the senior management team is now half European and half Japanese.

This has led to complaints from the Europeans about the perceived behaviour of the Japanese expatriate managers – the long and non-transparent Japanese decision making processes seem to exclude the Europeans. National cliques are forming, and suspicion and paranoia are rife. The long hours worked by the Japanese managers worry the Europeans, who wonder if they too are expected to work until late at night every night, and on weekends.

This worry is justified, because for many Japanese companies, a willingness to work late is seen as an indication of loyalty to the company and ability to put the group wellbeing before individual needs. If employees do not work late, they are less trusted.

Does this mean that European employees of Japanese companies should work late if they wish to be trusted? It would certainly help, but we believe this is a very dangerous expectation to impose on locally hired staff. Quite apart from the damage that excessive overtime work is causing to Japanese society itself, Europeans are very keen to preserve their work/life balance, and many will simply refuse to work at a company where long hours are the norm. We already know of a British company, recently acquired by a large Japanese healthcare company, who told us they are having problems hiring a Chief Financial Officer, because good candidates are saying that they are deterred by the notoriety of Japanese working hours.

Behaviours, values, and culture

Behaviours such as a willingness to work long hours are proxies that companies use to measure how far corporate values are being upheld by employees. Different cultures may have disagreements about the desirability of some of these behaviours but there is usually plenty of common ground regarding the values themselves. For example, few people would question the desirability of ‘loyalty’. It is how these are thought to be manifested that is the sticking point.

This is where the creation of a hybrid culture comes in, but it is not enough to have a lovingly crafted, mutually-agreed list of values or mission statement. There has to be agreement on how these values will be demonstrated and how the mission statement will be implemented.

The framework of a hybrid culture is a set of communication norms that are designed by the multicultural work team, blending the best practices of each culture. A norm is a behaviour (way of doing things, or custom) that the group practices on an ongoing basis. A norm serves as a ‘ground rule’ for the group’s behaviour. Through a process of consciously creating norms for the group, positive norms can be selected. If norms are not created consciously, there is the danger that negative and counter-productive norms will develop.

In the team building sessions we have conducted, we first of all ask for behaviours that each national group has noticed in the other group, which they find positive, and behaviours that they find puzzling or troubling. Then we analyze the behaviours to uncover the values underlining them. Some of the values can be acceptable to all, and some may not be as high priority for some national or corporate cultures as for others. For example group orientation is more important to Japanese than it is to Americans or Europeans, and role clarity is less important to Japanese.

We focus first of all on the common positive behaviours. These are the starting point for the group norms. For example, a common one that Japanese mention with regard to the British and the British mention with regard to the Japanese is “helpfulness”. Then we look at the behaviours which the team has found puzzling or troubling; lengthy decision-making for example. The long time that Japanese spend on decision-making can be traced back to Japanese values of consensus decision making, relationship orientation and group orientation. Consensus decision-making is not a value that is totally alien to other cultures. Within Europe, for example, the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians and Germans all have forms of consensus decision making. However many Europeans also value swift actions and are more task-oriented than relationship-oriented. The group can then come to an agreement that decisions should be made through consensus, but a time limit or a limit on the number of people that have to be consulted, or a limit on the number of pre-meetings can also be set.

Foreign acquisitions in Japan

The same process can be used for acquisitions of Japanese companies operating in Japan by foreign companies. Indeed, if values are not compared and mutually comfortable norms and structures created, it can jeopardize the entire deal. In one case we are aware of, a potential acquisition of a Japanese components manufacturer by an American company was scuttled because the American side was insistent on the particular role that sales engineers should play in the organization. This view was based on a particular set of values and assumptions concerning how to work with customers. The American firm viewed their way of using sales engineers as a key aspect of their competitive advantage, that they felt very emotionally attached to. The Japanese organization had a strikingly different approach, and was reluctant to suddenly change a way of doing things that had worked in the past and was comfortable for their Japanese customers. Faced with this clash of approaches, the American organization became nervous, and discussions ground to a halt. If the two sides had taken the opportunity to dig beneath the formal structure of the engineer role in each of their organizations, and discuss their values relating to customer service, they might have discovered more similarities than differences, and been able to find a common ground to move forward.

In acquisitions of Japanese companies operating in Japan by foreign firms, these issues of culture often become key sticking blocks. This is in part due to the fears that many Japanese have about having their taken over by foreign owners, since this is something that is still rather rare and dramatic in Japan. Indeed, acquisitions of any type are less familiar to most Japanese than to people in the west, and having the acquirer be a foreign firm is a wild card that leads to more concern. Also, since most Japanese have spent their entire working lives at one firm, they tend to be particularly attached to their company’s existing ways of doing things, and less comfortable trying other approaches. Thus, foreign firms making acquisitions in Japan need to take particular care to not impose their culture willy-nilly on the acquired firm, and instead working together to develop a hybrid that leverages the best of both the acquirer’s and acquiree’s values and business practices.

Culture as a “powerful seed”

Carlos Ghosn, President and CEO of both Nissan and Renault, has said that “cultural differences can be viewed as either a handicap or a powerful seed for something new.” The process of creating a hybrid culture, and explicitly stating the behaviours or competencies that are expected by employees in order to demonstrate the values of that hybrid culture, can lead to an enhanced competitive advantage for the new company. Greater trust between employees will allow access to capabilities and knowledge which might otherwise remain hidden inside each culture. The new culture and its associated behaviours can help the company overcome rigidities from its past. Also, by discussing the issue of culture head-on, the company can avoid having it become the catch-all for every friction or discomfort that comes up during the acquisition process. If cultural issues have been examined and addressed, it’s difficult to start blaming everything on “those Japanese” or “the Americans.” Furthermore, we have found that the cultural discussions held in the process of designing the hybrid culture and its norms lead to a greater mutual understanding and feeling of closeness between the acquirer and acquiree personnel, that becomes a key basis for ongoing cooperation and synergy.

U.S.-based Rochelle Kopp and U.K.-based Pernille Rudlin have assisted several major Japanese firms with post-merger integration. For further information on their work please visit www.japanintercultural.com.

Category: Globalization