Category: Human resources

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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Murata – reinjecting enjoyment into corporate philosophy

Murata is one of Japan’s most quietly successful companies, with a 40% share of global sales of the tiny ceramic capacitors that are essential to the electronics industry.

Tsuneo Murata, 3rd president from the founding family, says in an interview in Nikkei Business that the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2001 was a turning point for the corporate culture. They had become too arrogant during the IT bubble of the 1990s and had stopped listening to customers. They did not recover as quickly in the early 2000s as rivals did. Tsuneo Murata, who was then EVP, asked board members and employees for their views on the company culture and what was preventing recovery. He was told the company had become conservative, cautious, inflexible, bureaucratic and slow.

So he set up an organisational cultural reform committee It was tasked with ensuring that the culture became one which adapted rapidly to a changing environment, where the genba (shopfloor) had autonomy and people could freely discuss, create and challenge.

The need for persistence in cultural reforms

Murata became President in 2007. Even with the Lehman Shock walloping profits shortly after, he insisted on continuing with cultural reforms. He went back to the founding philosophy of Akira Murata, to rediscover the sense of freedom that Murata used to have. Actually the philosophy does not mention freedom. In translation it says pretty much what many Japanese corporate philosophies say – contributing to society through innovative technology, building trust, working in partnership, etc.  The one part that isn’t translated into English is the word “yorokobi“, meaning to enjoy.  To me that’s the most important bit – a lot of Japanese companies have lost their sense of fun since the 2000s.

It sounds like the success of Murata is as much to do with Tsuneo Murata’s personality.  Since becoming President he continues to eat in the same canteen as workers in the headquarters in Kyoto and does not use the executive elevator (unless in an emergency). “I don’t think there’s a single employee that does not like him” says one employee.

He is asked by Nikkei Business how he ensures a common understanding of corporate culture when Murata acquires other companies – for example, IPDiA in France in 2016.  “It takes time, especially when it’s a foreign acquisition, because generally overseas employees are not as loyal to their companies as in Japan anyway. But if we introduce our corporate philosophy to them, they have empathy with it. I think it’s important to communicate it thoroughly.”

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Brexit for Hitachi – like bees on a tearful face

We blogged earlier this year that Alistair Dormer, first foreign EVP of Hitachi and former CEO of Hitachi Rail in the UK might be in line to become the next (and first foreign) president of Hitachi Japan.

It seems – according to Diamond magazine – that the current chairman of Hitachi, Hiroaki Nakanishi, has deliberately set up a competition between Dormer and the other candidate, Koji Kojima.  Dormer is now heading up the global elevator and rail business, where 80% of sales are overseas. Kojima is leading Hitachi’s “internet of things” business, which also means reviving the stagnating home appliance business in Japan.

The Hitachi rail factory in Newton Aycliffe, UK assembles carriages from domestic and imported parts from Japan and elsewhere to sell locally and re-export. It is “plagued by the risk of Brexit”, says Diamond magazine. On top of which losing the London deep tube rail bid to Siemens was like “bees on a tearful face” – a Japanese expression meaning adding to add insult to injury, or to make matters worse.  The Newton Aycliffe plant is currently finishing back orders, and if it does not win any further projects, will have to start reducing employee numbers.

Dormer moved to Tokyo after being made EVP and is, according to a Hitachi official,  “rapidly gaining popularity” with his British sense of humor and gentle handling of employees who are not good at English – which I take to mean he has not, thankfully, imported any British sarcasm, irony or bantz.

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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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How to hire and retain top staff in Japan – send them abroad

The most frequent complaint I hear from British and other multinationals with subsidiaries in Japan is around staffing.  They can’t get the staff they want and they are not sure the employees they have are really the best for the job.  This complaint is particularly focused on sales, as most “gaishi” (foreign multinationals) in Japan are primarily sales focused.

Many suspect that this is a cultural issue and contact me because they want to understand how sales and marketing work in Japan. They are aware that customer relationships are all important, and far more long term and personal rather than transactional.   So expecting an instant result from a sales call to a new prospect is unrealistic. Incentivising aggressive sales behaviour with bonuses does not seem to work either.

I confirm that sales and marketing are different in Japan but I also explain that it is going to be tough for them to hire the “elite” from Japan’s top universities, who might have the necessary status and connections to approach blue chip Japanese prospects.  This elite usually want to join Japanese blue chip companies, and view gaishi as high risk, low status employers.

Good staff can be found amongst those alienated by traditional Japanese companies

Good staff can be found amongst the groups that feel rejected or alienated by the Japanese blue chip companies – the salaryman who has worked in a Japanese company for 25 years and now finds himself being given a madogiwazoku (window gazing) job or young female graduates who understandably feel that a foreign owned company is more likely to reward them and promote them on merit rather than on how much overtime or drinking with the boss and customers they do.

Another promising group are those Japanese who have been educated outside of Japan. A recent survey by DISCO – a Japanese recruitment company –  of most popular choices for Japanese graduate recruits shows the clear contrast in mindset between the top 10 for graduates of Japanese domestic universities and those who graduated from an overseas university.

Japanese graduates of foreign universities prefer to work for foreign companies

The top 7 choices for Japanese graduates of foreign universities are Deloitte Tohmatsu, PwC, Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Mitsubishi Corporation and All Nippon Airlines are the only Japanese companies in the top 10, at number 8 and number 9, with KPMG bringing up the rear at number 10.

Mitsubishi Corporation and All Nippon Airlines are also in the top 10 choices for Japanese graduates of domestic Japanese universities – at number three for Mitsubishi Corp after fellow trading company Itochu at #1 and Toyota at #2 and at #6 for All Nippon Airlines. All the other Top 10 choices are Japanese too – Suntory, MUFG (financial services), Shiseido, JTB (travel), Japan Airines and Tokio Marine and Fire Insurance.

My old employee Mitsubishi Corporation made a conscious effort to target Japanese graduates of foreign universities and schools more than 20 years’ ago. In fact I was asked to help interview such graduates – whether to make them feel more at ease or to show that Mitsubishi Corp really was global in mindset, I’m not sure.

Twenty years’ on, many Japanese companies are scrabbling to recruit “global human resources”, but as the DISCO survey points out, Japanese graduates of foreign universities have very different ideas of what they are looking for in a career, compared to domestic graduates.

Japanese graduates of foreign universities want a job which helps realise their dreams and pays well, over stability and long term employment

When asked whether they felt a job should be a way to realise your dreams or a way to make sure you have a secure lifestyle, 40% of graduates of foreign universities chose the former with a further 25% saying they had some preference for the former, whereas for the domestic graduates, nearly 60% said they preferred the secure lifestyle.

As for wanting high pay versus wanting a secure lifestyle regardless of high pay, nearly 80% of foreign graduates strongly or somewhat preferred high pay, compared to under 60% of domestic graduates.  Only 40% or so of foreign graduates wanted to work for one company for a long time, compared to 70% of graduates of Japanese universities.

Foreign companies in Japan need to offer overseas opportunities to Japanese graduates

And as Japanese companies have long suspected, most Japanese graduates of Japanese universities prefer to work in Japan rather than overseas.  Whereas 70% of the graduates of foreign universities want to work outside Japan.

So for foreign companies in Japan, as well as offering higher pay and work which is more engaging, offering a chance to transfer to an operation outside Japan may also be needed to attract and retain foreign university graduates.  That is the card which Mitsubishi Corporation and other trading companies have been playing for decades now and it has paid off for them.

 

 

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Chipping away at the three treasures of Japanese HR

Several Japanese blue chip companies have announced some quite radical changes to their HR systems, just in time for the new Reiwa era. The so called three treasures of lifetime employment, seniority based pay and a company union have been looking a little tarnished for some years now. They seem a legacy not even of the Heisei era but of the post war Showa era of a booming economy and a need to retain a young workforce.

Hitachi had shown the way four years ago (as described in our blog post at the time), abolishing seniority based pay for its managers and replacing it with pay based on job roles. They have made further waves recently with the announcement of the first ever Hitachi subsidiary President to be in their forties.  The newly formed Hitachi Global Life Solutions will be led by Jun Taniguchi, born in 1972.

Hitachi claim that this new system is needed for the company to be truly global and able to appoint and transfer managers around the world, regardless of where they were recruited. Beer and soft drink manufacturer Asahi Group Holdings has also been shifting to global standards. Around half their employees are non-Japanese, as a result of their acquisitions of European brands such as Peroni, Grolsch and Fullers. They have said their Presidents and CEOs will be evaluated on return on equity from now on, and given the boot if it is not maintained above 13%.

Japanese megabank MUFG says it will reduce new hires in Japan by 45% to 530 next spring, and will cut the 6000 employees in its Tokyo headquarters by half. Not all Japanese HR traditions are being thrown out of the window, however, as the surplus 3000 will not be made redundant, but rather redeployed to sales functions or sent overseas to areas where MUFG is expanding like the USA and Asia (but not it seems, Europe).  MUFG  is automating the functions that these staff performed, as well as cutting many of its retail branches in Japan. It will instead be beefing up its overseas compliance and digital payment systems divisions.

Some Japanese politicians and commentators have said that the “rei” of Reiwa sounds rather cold, as it can sometimes mean “order” or “command”.  It also, when combined with the radical for water, becomes a character meaning chilly or freezing.  It certainly feels like some icy winds will be blasting through Japanese cosy HR traditions in the new era.

 

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Will Hitachi lop off one of its three branches?

I keep blogging about Hitachi, because they are one of the most influential companies in Japanese business circles, along with Toyota and Panasonic. The way they have reinvented themselves since their record breaking loss in 2009 is watched closely by other Japanese blue chips.

According to the Nikkei Business magazine last month, discussions are well advanced to sell off Hitachi Chemical and Hitachi Construction Machinery. Both have appointed financial advisors – a non-Japanese investment bank  in Hitachi Construction Machinery’s case.  Hitachi Chemical is one of Hitachi’s three largest and longest surviving subsidiaries, known as the Three Branches (Hitachi Metals and Hitachi Cable being the other two).

Hitachi has already reduced 900 subsidiaries down to 500 and finalised the sale of car navigation system subsidiary Clarion to the French company Faurecia last month. The company will be delisted, ending 56 years of history as a listed company, leaving Hitachi with only 4 listed subsidiaries.

Clarion used to have a close relationship with Nissan, who in turn held a small share of Clarion,. With Ghosn’s restructuring of supply chains in the 2000s, Clarion began to struggle, and Hitachi stepped in, ending with over 60% share in the company. Faurecia says its interest in Clarion is to strengthen its autonomous driving capabilities. It also aims to improve Faurecia sales to Japanese and American car manufacturers and Clarion sales to European manufacturers. It may even invest in Clarion’s plant in Hungary, which is currently underutilized.

Social Innovation, not commoditization

Hitachi meanwhile is focusing its business on what it calls “Social Innovation” – the Internet of Things and social infrastructure. It is hiving off any businesses which are product focused and in danger of becoming commoditized. This would include Hitachi Chemicals, who have a stable profit margin of 5%, mainly providing chemicals for semiconductors and smartphones.  Hitachi Construction Machinery is trying to move more into the services sector, and its profit margins are not as healthy as competitor Komatsu.

Neither company wants to be sold off, according to an investment banking insider, but are under pressure from Hitachi. So rather then be bought by a new parent company that they did not choose, they are making defensive moves. This won’t be the first time that one of Hitachi’s subsidiaries chose their own buyer. Hitachi Power Tools led the negotations themselves that ended in being sold to KKR, the American private equity fund in 2017.

Conversely, Hitachi is buying up businesses where it feels it needs strengthening, such as its acquisition last year of Swiss company ABB’s power grid business.  Hitachi needs the cash for growth, which is another reason for selling off its listed subsidiaries.

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Why Germans are happier than the Japanese

Japanese people need to take longer holidays, is the answer to why Germans are happier than the Japanese, according to Japanese freelance journalist Toru Kumagai in his new book “Why do Germans feel rich on only Y2.9m (£20,000) a year?”

Japanese people see shopping as a leisure activity that they can do in just a few hours or a day for pleasure or stress release, and are too busy working. Germans can take holidays as they please, and will take 2 or 3 weeks off work at a time.

When Germans go on holiday, they will go to the seaside or countryside, with their family. In a recent insurance company survey, “sunshine and nature” was seen as the most attractive element of a holiday.  Kumagai points out that as a Northern European country, Germany does not get as many hours of sunshine as Portugal or Southern France.  So holidays are an important moment to refresh and recharge.

I’ve often thought that golf continues to be popular in Japan because it provides distant horizons and greenery. Respectable research in the West has shown a link between greenspace and mental health, although the causality is not yet clear. Although there is a lack of greenspace in Japanese cities, Japanese are good at taking mini breaks that let them refresh and recharge in natural surroundings, such as hiking in the mountains and staying in hot spring resorts.

Compared to Germany, there are far more advertisements and TV commercials aimed at selling something new and leading edge – whether it’s smartphones, beer or sweets, Kumagai notes.  Japanese throw away old things even if they are still usable, as their homes are overflowing with new purchases.  Whereas according to Kumagai, Germans will treasure old items and are used to buying second hand items. They are also very environmentally conscious and one of the major recycling nations of the world.

Kumagai also points the finger at the overservicing of customers in Japan, placing burdens on employees. He quickly adds that he doesn’t want German bad customer service to be imported into Japan, but just that Japan has gone too far in trying to please.  For example, when you buy bread rolls in Japan, each one is put in a separate bag, and then all the bags put in another bag.  If this kind of overservicing and customer expectations were reduced, Japanese workers could take longer holidays, Kumagai suggests.

Japanese consumers need to accept that a delivery might take a day longer, so more people can take Sundays off, or that delivery time windows will not be quite so narrow.  Customers in Germany get thrown out of the shop when it’s closing time, but not in Japan.

I watched Spirited Away for the second time recently, which made me more aware of the environmental message in it – such as the river spirit spewing up old bicycles and trash.  I also realised the Shinto element was a strong motif – the idea of spirits in natural things and the need to simplify life by not being unnecessarily greedy and accumulative.  Much has been written, often snide, about the Shinto influence on Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” approach to decluttering, but as Kumagai says, Japan could benefit from a richer spiritual life if it went back to those Shinto ways (and also Buddhist) of not demanding so much and enduring so much in terms of long hours of work.

 

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Mitsubishi Corporation – a microcosm of the challenges facing Japanese business

The death of the Japanese trading company and the “keiretsu” (company grouping) model has been repeatedly announced over the nearly thirty years since I started working for leading trading company Mitsubishi Corporation and researching their history. But when the Nikkei newspaper runs a three part series on whether Mitsubishi Corporation’s business model is bust, (as they do regularly) it’s worth a look, as Mitsubishi Corporation’s doings are closely watched by the rest of Japanese business.

Digital speed

Part one of the Nikkei series deals with the digital revolution and how it might disintermediate middlemen like Mitsubishi Corp. It notes that Mitsubishi Corp is likely to announce a record profit for 2018/9, but calls Mitsubishi Corp’s legacy a “heavy burden” in trying to find a new digital way to do business.

It looks at how young Mitsubishi employees are scouring Shanghai and Guangzhou for new technologies in convenience stores that they can bring back to Japan.  Mitsubishi Corporation turned Lawson, a convenience store chain in Japan, into a fully owned subsidiary in 2017, partly in response to the losses made on its traditional commodities trading business. But convenience stores themselves are now being threatened by Amazon and China’s Alibaba.

In the mid term plan announced last autumn, Mitsubishi Corp set up a special cross-company structure to look at communications and data [pretty sure we had something like that when I worked there 25 years’ ago, but anyway] and appointed an executive from the energy division (one of the traditional powerful factions at Mitsubishi Corp) as Chief Digital Officer.  “Other trading companies are not our competitors any more” says a senior Mitsubishi Corp executive.  Instead they are looking at SoftBank, who have double the profit and double the share price of Mitsubishi Corporation – a reverse of 10 years’ ago.

The concern, as with so many older Japanese companies, is the speed of change. President Kakiuchi syas he wants to decide within 3 years how to participate in the digital economy – but is that fast enough, the Nikkei asks.

The Three Diamond brand

“Mitsubishi Heavy Industries can fix it by themselves” said a senior executive at Mitsubishi Corporation in September 2018. A subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy, Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation was facing delays in developing its Mitsubishi Regional Jet and needed further investment. The main branches of the Mitsubishi Three Diamonds, the core of the Friday Meeting are Mitsubishi Corporation, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and MUFG Bank.  It was usual in the past for Mitsubishi Corporation to come to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ rescue [often grudgingly I would say] but this time they did not step in.

President Kakiuchi says Mitsubishi Corporation’s relations with other Mitsubishi companies are “no different from with normal independent companies” and has been reducing cross shareholdings.

The Mitsubishi Motors factory which started production in Indonesia in February 2019 of the Nissan Livina also illustrates how ties are weakening.  The factory is a joint venture between Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Corporation. Mitsubishi Motors was originally an offshoot of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Mitsubishi Corporation has been a frequent partner either in dealerships or production, but Mitsubishi Motors turned to Nissan for investment when it was hit by a fuel emissions scandal in 2016 and is now in a triple alliance with Nissan and Renault.  Up until then, the Mitsubishi group had always bailed it out, but repeated scandals meant they felt their fingers had been burned too often.  “To be frank, we have no role to play in this” said a Mitsubishi Corporation executive on the arrest of Ghosn, even though Mitsubishi Corporation had increased its investment in Mitsubishi Motors from 10% to 20% in 2018.  Mitsubishi Motors was selling around 1.2m vehicles a year, and the view was it had to enter an alliance, manufacturing 100 million a year to survive.

Chiyoda Corporation, a spin off from Mitsubishi Oil, asked Mitsubishi Corporation for financial support last year on a loss made on a US LNG plant construction joint venture. The President of Chiyoda Corporation, Masaji Santo, is a former Mitsubishi Corporation employee.  Mitsubishi Corporation was not only the lead shareholder in the LNG plant but was going to be a customer of the LNG plant, so insisted on a low construction cost, which was resulting in Chiyoda making a loss.  President Kakiuchi has said “we will do what we can to support” but is still considering the pros and cons.

Retaining young employees

“I didn’t want to feel regret” said a young employee in his twenties, who left Mitsubishi Corporation after a few years, to join an IT company, citing the difference in the speed of decision making between the two companies.  Mitsubishi Corporation has always been one of the favourites for the elite graduates of Japan, but recently it has dropped in the popularity rankings for Tokyo and Kyoto University graduates, losing out to foreign consultancies like McKinsey.

Graduates who want to make a difference quickly are avoiding trading companies, experts say. One reason is the continuing seniority based promotion system. It took around 20 years to become a general manager until recently, but now Mitsubishi Corporation has reformed its personnel system for the first time in 20 years, to allow capable employees to take on responsibility regardless of age.  Performance based systems and evaluations have been introduced at certain management grades, setting compensation on complexity of the job role and results. Young employees are polishing their management skills with overseas postings.

The Nikkei cites the example of a 33 year old employee posted to the Cote D’Ivoire, who started a solar panel energy project. A Tsukumo Fund has also been set up, to invest up to Y500m in any ideas that employees have which pass certain criteria, even if they don’t have their boss’s approval.

This last point is key to me – it was always possible to have a lot of autonomy, become a manager overseas at a young age and start new projects at Mitsubishi Corporation if you were capable enough, but you needed your manager and the rest of the hierachy’s support – and that took a lot of time.

As the Nikkei says, Mitsubishi Corporation is a microcosm of the Japanese business world. The lifetime employment, seniority based promotion system worked well in the post war era, but now with an ageing, shrinking workforce, companies have to become more flexible to attract young people and encourage innovation.

 

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5 types of Japanese colleagues who are “workstyle reform” blockers

I was surprised to see this explanation of  five generations of “workstyle reform” blockers in the Nikkei Business magazine came with a big red caution notice to readers not to take offence. The categories are not to be taken as hurtful stereotypes but based in research, and do not apply to all people of a particular age group, they explain.

So with that in mind, here’s a precis of the 5 types identified. Even though I’m not Japanese, I’m afraid I do recognise aspects of myself in the “middle manager” category, and am trying not to take offence. Although some of the characteristics are obviously derived from each age group’s experiences of the Japanese domestic economy and society, I am also reminded that there is plenty of evidence each generation around the world has complained about the other generation for the past thousand years or more.

1. The Veteran

Born between 1947-1951, so 66-71 years’ old

  • Work comes first
  • Believes in the virtue of hardship
  • Over strong sense of competition
  • Clings to past experiences of success
  • No intention of changing how they work
  • Gets angry if their way of working is rejected
  • Will oppose competitors’ opinions regardless of content
  • Caught up with “how things were” in the past.

2. The Executive

Born between 1952-1960 so 57-66 years’ old

  • Don’t rock the boat – doesn’t want to challenge
  • Laissez-faire
  • Always talks about “ideally”
  • People are people, I am what I am
  • Rather than change workstyle, is interested in what happens after retirement
  • Uninterested in reform, regardless of content
  • Just wants results, doesn’t make concrete proposals
  • Won’t listen, as retiring soon anyway

3. The middle manager

Born between 1961 and 1970, so 47 to 57 years’ old

  • Superficial
  • Thinks too highly of self
  • Extremely hedonistic
  • Sees everything in cost/benefit, mercenary terms
  • Reform should be done cheerfully, enjoyably without trying too hard
  • Won’t do it if not fun
  • Will oppose anything which increases own workload
  • Tells everyone to do their best and doesn’t do anything themselves
  • Will change the content of any reforms on a whim

4. The shop floor leader

Born between 1971 and 1986, so 31-47 years’ old

  • Pessimistic
  • Not good at interacting with other people
  • Prioritize risk avoidance
  • Strong sense of resignation – “they won’t understand”
  • “If this reform fails, there is no future for me”
  • Won’t promote reform if don’t trust the company
  • Too busy watching others’ reactions to say own conclusions

5. The staff member

Born between 1987 and 1994, so 23 to 31 years’ old.

  • Little sense of crisis
  • Not good at making an extra effort
  • Prioritizes personal life
  • Everything in moderation
  • “Is reform really necessary?” Won’t do it unless feels it’s necessary
  • Let other people take up new challenges or jobs requiring some thought
  • No empathy with the reasons behind the reforms
  • Doesn’t take the company so seriously, ignores directions

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