Human resources

The Bubble Gang – what became of my cohort in Japan

In the UK I would be regarded as part of Generation X but in Japan I am in the Bubble Gang, of people aged 45-49 who joined a major Japanese company straight out of university between 1988 and 1992 – at the very end of Japan’s economic “Bubble Era”. I graduated in 1988 but did not join Mitsubishi Corporation until 1990, spending two years at a US PR company first. And actually, because I transferred to Mitsubishi’s Tokyo headquarters in 1992, my company ID number started with 92, and I was therefore regarded as being a member of the 1992 graduate intake, despite my protests.

After a period selling building materials in Japan, I transferred to the HR department, where we tried to set up an international HR system which was intended to make the year of joining less relevant and therefore Japanese traditional seniority based promotion less rigid. This was meant to ensure non-Japanese, mid-career hires had more chance of being promoted appropriately, but twenty years on, elements of the old system still persist in Mitsubishi and elsewhere. I was given the title of manager at the time, but didn’t really manage anything in the Western sense of the word – having no team or budget under my control.

If I had stuck with the company into my late 30s I may well have become a ‘proper’ manager, attaining the kacho (team leader or section chief) grade under the Japanese system, and who knows, ten or so years later maybe even made it to bucho (General Manager – head of a department) as some of my friends from that time have recently done.

Contemplating that future at the age of 33, when so many of my MBA class were already running businesses, put a chill in my soul and I decided to leave Mitsubishi after 9 enjoyable years.

It’s not often you get a chance to see how your career might have panned out if a different choice had been made, but thanks to a special feature in the Nikkei Business magazine on the Bubble Gang, I now have more insight, and it has reassured me that I probably took the right path.

The article sets out the following phases:

Entrance ceremony day 1988-1992

So many new graduates joined – up to a 1000 in some cases – that the company has to hire the Budokan for the entrance ceremony

2-3 years on – Japan’s “Loadsamoney”

A separate envelope full of cash is handed out at bonus time, making a 24 hour working day bearable. Hanakin (Flower Friday – the equivalent of POETS day in the UK) drinking to the small hours, including Y50,000 bottles of champagne and waving Y10,000 notes to flag down taxis

5 years on – the Bubble bursts

It’s a slow burst, from the initial bubble burst in 1990, when asset prices started to plummet, through to 1997, with the Asian financial crisis, and the collapse of Hokkaido Bank, the Long Term Credit Bank of Japan and Yamaichi Securities. Friends start to lose their jobs. The wife wants to go back to her family.

10 years on – no team, but performance based pay introduced

Companies like Fujitsu and Mitsui introduce performance based and potential based pay systems. You start to worry about what level of bonus others in your cohort are getting. Due to a hiring freeze, you don’t have any juniors working for you, so end up having to do admin work yourself.

15 years on – the company recovers, but your pay doesn’t

Thanks to a cheaper yen, exports boom and the company results improve, but your pay level does not. Some of the other high fliers in your cohort make it to kacho, but you don’t. Your daughter, whom you struggled to get into a private high school, seems to have lost her mojo too.

20 years on – the Lehman Shock

Every industry suddenly goes into recession. Elpida Memory enters bankruptcy and Panasonic and Sony are in tatters. You start to envy the old guys with their golden goodbyes and full pensions.

25 years on – what do I do now?

Sharp seems to be on its last legs, Toshiba is hit by an accounting scandal. Is my company OK? Drinking with old friends, there are more grey hairs and wheezing than before. Even your highflier friend has applied for early retirement. Younger colleagues are looking at you, still only a kacho, coldly. Should I stay or start my own business or change companies?

The feature then looks at the fate of one man at Sharp. He is called to a seminar by a department called “People Making”, which appears to him to be a firing squad. They show him a chart of the pay offs available to people of his age under the voluntary retirement scheme. He then has a meeting with his General Manager, who tells him to stay. His colleague of the same age is not so lucky, and is told that as there isn’t a job for him, he should contact the employment agencies who are both under contract to Sharp to assist with re-employment, elsewhere.

It seems to be a repeat of the mid 1990s, when HR departments used similar tactics to get rid of the bulge of post war baby boomers, who joined companies in the late 1970s. Apparently the Bubble Gang are the biggest cohort in most companies, comprising 1/6 of the total employees, but only 1/3 have made it to kacho or bucho level.

In response to this, over 60% of companies surveyed by the Nikkei have reviewed their seniority based pay system or introduced voluntary early retirement schemes. Conversely, 59% of the Bubble Gang, the highest percentage of all the cohorts, feel their company has betrayed them – either because they were not promoted as expected or their pay level is not as they hoped. However the vast majority want to continue working for their company, at least for the time being. No surprise really, because you have to wonder how easy it is going to be for someone who has worked for the same company for 25 years to find a job elsewhere.

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Do companies have a social obligation to train employees?

I was surprised when the Japanese expatriate manager at a Japanese logistics firm told me recently that he thought British logistics was more advanced than logistics in Japan. When I returned to the UK after working in Japan for four years at the end of the 1990s, I remember thinking that there was a real business opportunity for a delivery service in the UK similar to Japan’s takkyubin. This thought came to me as I watched an enormous container lorry reverse very cautiously up the 19^th century narrow alleyway to my London apartment, when all they were delivering was a small armchair. Surely in Japan this would have been delivered in a much smaller van, and within a much shorter time frame, so I would not have had to wait in all day for delivery.

Thanks to the rise of internet shopping (the British are the biggest web shoppers in Europe, apparently) and also the liberalisation of postal services, takkyubin type services like MyHermes have now appeared in the UK. You can book a time slot for next day pick up from your house, online, and the prices are cheaper than taking it to the post office, for heavier items.

I assume that similar services are available from takkyubin companies in Japan, so I suppose what the Japanese logistics manager was referring to was the higher volume end of logistics in the UK – transporting large quantities of car parts across Europe, for example.

Although it is possible to get qualifications and even university degrees in logistics in the UK, all the British employees of the Japanese firm at which the Japanese manager worked were in agreement that expertise in logistics was only really developed through practical experience, over time, rather than learning the latest theories in the classroom. In that sense, they were much more in alignment with Japanese apprenticeship style “on the job” training approaches.

As the Japanese manager himself pointed out, the firm’s employees were very indigenous British. Normally when I do training sessions for Japanese companies in the UK who are in the financial or commercial sectors, more than half the employees are not British.

Maybe for those types of companies, attitude and ability to learn are more important than local market expertise, skills and experience. But for logistics and other traditional, highly skilled industries such as engineering, it is tempting to choose someone who already has the local understanding and the expertise and skills born of experience, rather than train someone up.

Such people are scarce in the UK and the rest of Europe however, and instead we have a stubborn youth unemployment problem, of young people who would rather do physical work, or work outside an office, but have not had the training or experience and cannot find stable jobs.

No wonder then that Hitachi Rail has teamed up with other companies to set up a new University Technical College in the north of England. Apparently they were worried they might have to poach employees from nearby Nissan, otherwise.

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

Japanese companies need to pull up younger burdock roots if they really want to grow globally

Along with “tako tsubo” (octopus pot), another Japanese concept “gobou nuki” (plucking out burdock roots) used in HR has been deemed harmful to corporate Japan’s global prospects.

The term has been used frequently in the Japanese media recently, according to Masahiro Kotosaka, an ex McKinsey consultant now at Ritsumeikan University. In a recent article in Nikkei Business Online he points out that the recent appointments as President of Takuya Hirano at Microsoft Japan, Tatsuo Yasunaga at Mitsui & Co, Koji Arima at Denso, Tatsuya Tanaka at Fujitsu and Takahiro Hachigo at Honda have all been described as plucking burdock roots, as they are in their 40s or 50s, younger than normal for Presidents in corporate Japan. The average age of Japanese Presidents was 62 in 2014 (up from 61 in 2013), around 10 years higher than the global average.

The older age is of course partly explained by the continuation of seniority based pay and promotion in Japan – although Panasonic, Sony and Hitachi have all recently announced they are abolishing or looking to abolish this system.

The average age in Japan for a “kacho” (section head, the first managerial position in Japanese companies) is 38.6 and 44 for a “bucho” (department head, or General Manager) according to Recruitworks. In India, China or Thailand, the average is 9 years lower for kacho and 10 years lower for bucho. Even the US average is 5 years lower for both positions.

Kotosaka asserts that Japanese companies need to start pulling out younger burdock roots, people who might be future executives, and making sure they have early leadership experience. If this does not happen, the younger generations of Japanese will soon feel a big gap with their overseas peers.

Already Kotosaka has heard (as I have) from Japanese companies that they feel the utilisation of non-Japanese or external executives has increased and the presence of Japanese executives has faded.

The most notable example is of course Christophe Weber, President of Takeda Pharma, and his team of 16 executives, of whom 8 are non-Japanese and have come from outside the company and two are non-Japanese who joined through being executives in a Takeda acquisition. Weber had his first leadership experience at the age of 29 when he became a country manager at GSK. Carlos Ghosn of Nissan also became head of a factory at the age of 27.

My former employer Mitsubishi Corporation is mentioned as an honourable exception to the lack of experience given to juniors, along with gaishi (foreign owned) consulting companies and private equity firms. For such companies, people are the main asset, and it’s true I suppose that trading companies such as Mitsubishi that have now moved more towards acquisitions rather than trading, do afford ample opportunity for younger Japanese to take up management positions abroad. In practice though, I have seen many instances where the acquisition is left to manage itself, and the Japanese expat director mostly stays in the regional headquarters, processing paperwork to send back to Japan HQ, rather than hands on managing the business.

Why Japanese companies don’t use LinkedIn (but should)

I read in the Nikkei newspaper recently that Panasonic, Mitsubishi Estate and Rakuten are planning to make use of social networking site LinkedIn for recruitment outside Japan, including Europe. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site, based in California, with more than 270 million users worldwide, so it certainly represents an effective way to identify and attract new recruits.

I have been a member for more than 10 years, not to find a job, but to network with my European contacts in Japanese companies. It has been noticeable, however, that Japanese employees and Japanese companies in general are not very active on LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn launched a Japanese version and set up an office in Tokyo in 2011.

I assume this is primarily because LinkedIn is used for mid-career hiring and job seeking, which is still not a popular activity in Japan. Indeed, many Europeans dislike to display their skills and experience publicly, and signal thereby that they may be “for hire”. Based on my own analysis, the British and Dutch are not so cautious, whereas the privacy conscious (and possibly less comfortable in English) Germans and French hold back.

Many of my German contacts use Xing, a Germany based social networking site instead. However all Europeans (and people in multinationals in emerging markets such as Turkey) are aware of LinkedIn, and will take a look at it when they are considering moving to another company.

In other words, from an employer perspective, LinkedIn is a tool not just for searching for recruits based on skills and experience, but also for the company to present an attractive profile.

I recommend that any Japanese company reviewing their LinkedIn presence first of all ensure that the “official” company LinkedIn page is clearly labelled as official (to distinguish it from an alumnus site page run by an individual), and employees are encouraged to link their personal LinkedIn profiles to this official page.

More often than not, there are several pages already existing for the Japanese company. This needs to be tidied up, so that there is a headquarters page (in English), and any regional company pages are clearly identified as such. It is possible to interlink the regional company pages to the headquarters page, to show they all belong to the same company family.

These official pages need to be managed by someone either in marketing or HR at the headquarters and regional subsidiaries. They need a description of the company, including size, activities and a link to the correct website. The pages also need to be “branded” to look visually appealing and reflect the company image. Use should be made of the facility to add descriptions of products and services and add news about the company.

If this is done correctly, then “followers” of company will swiftly increase, both from potential recruits and also current employees, who will feel much happier now their employer has a clear and attractive LinkedIn presence they can associate themselves with.

(This article was originally written in Japanese for the 9th April 2014 Teikoku Databank News, and appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.)

“Locally hired Japanese don’t last long. After 6 years I felt I was turning into an idiot, so I left”

A new employment category, the ‘limited permanent employee’ has emerged in locations such as Singapore, where there are many locally hired Japanese employees, according to Diamond Online. They feature an interview with an anonymous former ‘limited permanent employee’, Mr A, of a major Japanese securities house’s Singapore subsidiary. According to Mr A, the category was somewhere between a contract worker and a permanent employee, and involved being treated in a way that resulted in him leaving.

Diamond journalist Norifumi Yoshida believes this category looks like to catch on in Japan too, to keep a cap on the ever expanding, insecure and badly paid “contract staff” category, in accordance with the government strategy for revitalising economic growth, while at the same time being easier to lay off than the traditional permanent, lifetime employee.

Mr A had been working for a major Japanese manufacturer, and was posted to their Singapore operation. He left the company while still in Singapore. He tried to start up his own IT company, but that failed. Then he heard that the Japanese securities company was looking for an new IT manager so interviewed for the position and was appointed. He was 35 when he joined the company, on around Y3.5m (US$28K) which was at the higher end for Singapore. However the Japanese expatriate IT manager, also 35, was earning around 3 times this.

There were around 150 expatriates from the Japan headquarters, including around 20 general managers who were in charge of the front and back offices, aged around 35 to late 40s.

These 20 had graduated from Japanese universities and joined the securities house straight after graduation. They had worked in Japan for 10 or more years and spoke good English. They initiated sales of securities or bonds and negotiated with local Singaporeans. They were also in IT or accounting or finance. They were good all round players but not professionals or specialists.

There was a second group of people amongst the 150 or so ‘permanent staff’, the front office people – 40 or so traders. They were ‘Anglo Saxon’, types who had worked for American or British firms previously, usually having been transferred to Singapore with those firms. They frequently changed employers, in some cases up to 10 different employers. There were a few Japanese traders, but most of them were not, and they were mostly rewarded through commissions and were often paid more than the Japanese expatriates – several hundred thousand dollars on average.

Mr A is not against this as such – in fact he points out that without these kinds of salaries, it would not be possible to hire highly skilled people, and if the company tried to stick to old ways of equal pay for all, it would surely collapse. Yoshida wondered whether Japanese companies aren’t using this as an experiment, and soon this system will be imported back into Japan.

Mr A felt the unfairness was more around how the third group of ‘permanent staff’, the ‘limited’ permanent staff, were treated. These people were mostly locally hired Singaporeans, on low level jobs, and accordingly paid low wages, with no prospect of promotion or transfer. At such low wages, it was not possible to hire high quality local staff anyway. The head of the IT department was Singaporean, and of the 12 staff in the department, 2 were Japanese expatriate staff and of the remaining 10, Mr A was the only locally hired Japanese. “Locally hired Japanese don’t last long. After 6 years I felt I was turning into an idiot, so I left”.

Both Mr A and the interviewer agree that treating all limited permanent staff the same way, without opening up any opportunities or pay rises to the more high potential or high performing staff will result in more dissatisfied and overworked locally hired specialists, who will keep quitting their Japanese companies. Mr A clearly feels very bitterly about generalist lifetime employees, who have no specialist knowledge of IT, being paid three times as much as him, plus expatriate allowances. “Globalization means the company has to become more focused on competency.”

Personally, I’m not so sure this is a new thing for Japanese companies in the global financial services sector. I remember a friend of mine from university being warned after he joined a Japanese securities house in London in the late 1980s, that locally hired staff were either “whores” or “coolies”. And locally hired staff in Japanese companies in quite a few sectors will ruefully recognise the “no prospect of promotion or transfer” limited permanent staff category.

Power harassment in foreign owned companies in Japan – “irresponsible egotism”?

‘Power harassment’ is a term that has been coined in Japan, in English (as ‘pawahara’ for short), to describe the kind of psychological bullying that may happen to junior staff in Japanese companies, primarily because they do not have the protection of a clear job description that outlines their duties and working hours.

Consequently, you would not expect to find it in Western owned companies (known in Japan as gaishi) where there is supposed to be a clearer set of expectations, job descriptions and performance based evaluations.

According to Diamond Online, however, there are cases of power harassment in foreign owned companies in Japan. Diamond journalist Norifumi Yoshida interviews a 50 year old IT manager, Mr A, who left his foreign owned finance company through power harassment arising from being caught in a battle between a Japanese and an American executive officer (director).

Mr A joined the finance company at the age of 45, having worked for four other foreign owned companies in the past. The first few years went by without incident, but then he found himself the target of attack by the Japanese director. Apparently this director had failed in his original intention to become an actor and was bullied by the troupe he had entered. Then thanks to his politician father’s connections he was able to join a financial services company, but was teased there too for having reached middle age without any competencies and left that too. Again through his father’s connections he found a post in the foreign owned company. Through assiduous sycophancy he managed to jump from team leader to director without going through the usual route of General Manager (GM).

Mr A was GM of the IT department and reported into an American director so should not have had to cross paths with the failed actor, who was responsible for 15 staff in PR, HR and General Affairs. However there were overlaps between the departments, so whenever Mr A’s work affected the payroll or accounting systems, the failed actor would complain in front of everyone that he had not been informed and Mr A was ‘out of order’. In fact Mr A was just doing what he was told by his American boss, but clearly the American boss had not gained consensus from the failed actor.

The American boss was more concerned with doing what he had been asked to do by the President of the company. When Mr A was scolded, 10 or more times a week, for 20 minutes at a time in front of 30 or so employees, and made to apologise, for petty things he had no recollection of doing such as not greeting the director properly, he did not intervene.

The American director probably wanted a quiet life says Mr A, and not to fight with the ‘pawahara machine’ as the Japanese director was known. The Japanese director was on good terms with the President, and was widely thought to be in line for promotion to managing director/board director in a few years, says Mr A.

The President was a Chinese American, who had been brought in by a foreign venture capital company to restructure the company. Mr A says he did not intervene because he preferred to back the winning horse when there was trouble and Mr A’s boss was somewhat of a yes man to him, and probably hoped to get on the board himself.

Yoshida comments that most Japanese would think Americans are open minded, frank and fair, but in his experience “Americans who come to work in Japan can often be rather cold and dry – egoists, to put the worst slant on it – in some ways almost scarily so”. Mr A says he has experienced plenty of upstanding American bosses in his career, but there is definitely a tendency towards egoism and a lack of compassion. “Many of my Japanese friends tell me Europeans are better. I think Japan was a bit brainwashed about America these past 60-70 years but now we have suddenly woken up.”

“Just being able to speak English is not going to be enough for Japanese people to succeed in a globalizing world” says Yoshida. “There are more wily foxes amongst Americans than amongst Japanese. Japanese are too trusting of people and do not know to be suspicious.”

Mr A points the finger at the executives of the company having no understanding of how to look after or create a structure that looks after mid career hires. “They have no sense of responsibility to the people below them, and just insult those employees who leave by saying that they ‘weren’t collaborative’ or ‘she was more suited to housework’ That way they can justify their own management style, if they say it was the fault of the people who leave. Performance based systems (seikashugi) are just a tatemae (a front) for an irresponsible egotism.”

Clearly Mr A is still very traumatised by his experience – still refusing to go anywhere near his old employer. To me, it seems less about whether the company is foreign owned or some difference in character between Americans or Japanese. I certainly recognise those kinds of selfish management behaviours, but usually they are kept in control by HR systems which result in negative consequences for those bosses who do not make efforts to develop a supportive environment for their employees. Western bosses often have employee engagement, retention and training and development targets as part of their annual evaluations. Also HR departments usually conduct exit interviews with staff who resign, to make sure there is not a major problem that had not been aired before. I suspect the foreign financial services company was actually too old-fashioned Japanese, not too American, in not having those mechanisms in place for its own management team. But as it was the ‘pawahara machine’ that was heading up HR, maybe that’s not surprising.

April 1 brings new beginnings, but beware of the undertow

The biggest date on the Japanese corporate calendar is about to hit us. Naturally, it is April 1. Not only it is the start of the new financial year for almost every Japanese company, but it is also when all the major announcements of promotions and restructurings happen, as well as the first day of “proper” work as a bona fide salaryman or salarywoman for thousands of shiny faced graduates.

This means that March is a month of great paranoia, as speculation mounts and information is leaked about who is up and who is down, what will please the new president and which faction is winning which battle.

I try not to be too cynical when Europeans in my training sessions tell me how refreshing it is that Japanese companies seem to have far less politics than European companies. It is of course very easy to be blissfully unaware of the undercurrents ebbing and flowing in March (and indeed other times of the year) but veterans of Japanese companies know well that the undertow may pull you under in April, if you are not paying attention.

I thought I had taken my “Kremlinology” a little too far in the Japanese company I used to work for. I kept a spreadsheet of all the people I had met, what year they entered the company, their current position and grade, and any remarks. I updated carefully every April 1, sending congratulatory emails to those who had done well.

But when I shared this secret with another British veteran of a Japanese firm, he revealed that the spreadsheet of contacts that he had compiled during the 20 years he had worked at his company had become so large, he had pinned it up on his garage wall at home!

When another senior British executive in a Japanese company asked me for my advice on who he should choose as his second-in-command, I’m afraid I went straight into Japanese political mode and immediately asked how old the various candidates were, whether they had been at the company all their career, who were their sponsors and mentors and what business groups they came from originally. He was unable to answer most of these questions, and indeed was not that interested in these aspects. His main criterion was whether they had performed well in the team.

Actually, this is quite refreshing. Too often in Japanese companies, if you come from the wrong department, or ally yourself with the wrong faction, or made a mistake, however well intentioned, you find there is no redemption. At least Western managers, ruthless though they are about firing people who underperform, reward those who do perform, often – but alas not always – regardless of their past career.

When Japanese companies truly globalise, allowing non-Japanese to make personnel decisions, life will become a lot less comfortable for the well connected but underperforming and a new lease of life may energise those who thought their careers were over.

This article originally appeared in The Nikkei Weekly

What I think about Japanese employee engagement – it’s all in the family

Somebody writing a white paper on the reason for low engagement amongst Japanese workers contacted me this week with some questions, which I answered (possibly in more detail than was helpful!) as follows:

As you may have gathered from the articles I have written, I am cautious about applying Western standards, using surveys which are basically translations of (usually American) methodologies and materials, to Japanese companies.

Whenever I find something that is puzzling about Japanese companies – in this case that employees in Japanese companies have consistently lower engagement levels than companies with other countries of origin – then I use the framework developed by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, in Riding the Waves of Culture, which classifies Japanese companies as “Family” type companies, as distinct from Missile type companies or Eiffel Tower type companies or Incubator companies. Please see http://changingminds.org/explanations/culture/trompenaars_four_cultures.htm for a summary.

For Family type companies, the primary motivation is to put food on the table and look after the members of the family, and secondarily the long term survival, and therefore the reputation of the family and its acceptance by the community in which it is based. In Missile type companies motivation is more about success – personal and the company’s and therefore being materially rewarded and recognised for your contribution to that success. Eiffel Tower companies are about believing in and executing the strategy and being rewarded through promotion/status. In an Incubator company, your motivation is self fulfilment – to have a job which makes the most of your skills and interests, and make a difference or do something new.

If you think of Japanese employees as members of a family, and replace “company/employer” with the word “family” then you can quickly see that they will have trouble answering questions in employee engagement surveys which are more suited to Missile, Eiffel Tower or Incubator companies. For example, “would you recommend your family to others/are you proud to tell people you belong to/work for your family” – when it would be seen as boastful to tell others what a great family you have, particularly for modest Japanese people – and traditionally it’s been very difficult for people to join big Japanese family style companies later in their careers, so why would you recommend it to your friends? You wouldn’t say – hey why don’t you leave your family and be adopted by mine?

Families all pull together, nobody expects to be rewarded individually, and if they were this would cause big arguments and accusations of favouritism. So again, there is likely to be a negative to neutral response about being rewarded or recognised or able to make an individual contribution/impact.

Families don’t have strategies, mission and purpose other than, as I said above, long term survival and protection of their reputation. So questions about whether you understand the mission and purpose and strategy will be tough to answer. Japanese employees are used to doing what they are told by mum and dad, and the mission of the family is implicit, not explicitly explained.

So if you asked Japanese employees different questions about their motivation, like “do you feel confident or secure that your company will look after you and your family in the long term” or “do you believe your company acts in the best interests of the community and therefore gives you the opportunity to contribute to the community too” then they might be much more positive.

Even questions about teamwork are tough to answer for Japanese employees – you would expect your family to be supportive and work well together because you know each other so well, so Japanese companies don’t spend much time thinking consciously about teams and individual roles within those teams. They are also, like families, very well aware of each others’ flaws and also the flaws of their seniors – mum and dad – who are the leaders but also just ordinary people who happen to be older – you didn’t choose for them to be your parents.

So Japanese do tend to be highly critical of each other and their companies in general – but just like families, are extremely defensive if someone outside the company/family tries to criticise it.

Overall, I would say, even if you asked more culturally sensitive questions in an employee engagement survey, (by the way, even the word ‘engagement’ has no direct translation into Japanese), you would probably still uncover a motivational problem. Japanese companies have gone through a very tough 20 years. Many of them are still struggling to find their “raison d’etre”, and are having to make unpleasant decisions about axing businesses, which means that their employees do not feel as secure and protected as they used to, nor do they feel that their company is making the contribution to society it used to. Plus the number of “contract” staff has increased to over 30% of the workforce now – these are not members of the family, and have none of the benefits the family members do.

Even the family members are being forced into taking very early retirement (basically redundancy) and the younger family members are wondering whether staying inside the family until retirement is quite as attractive as it used to be – as so many are not getting married or having children, they have less need for a secure and protective employer.

What we did at Fujitsu was to refresh the values and vision, to try to come up with something that made sense inside and outside Japan. We communicated them internally and externally, with a new visual identity and some very emotionally driven advertising about contributing to society through supercomputers etc. Interestingly, the Japan side of Fujitsu were not so keen to have workshops about the values and vision but the one thing they did do was to compile a book of stories of individual employees, – called something like “the power to challenge” in Japanese, translated into “Fortune Favours the Brave – the Fujitsu Way”. So it was celebrating individuals, but again in a very family type way, which is to create some new inspiring family myths/stories.

I think this is what Japanese companies have to do – they usually have some great stories about what the founding fathers did – they need to revisit these, but also develop some new stories about the younger generations. That should help employees feel more motivated – about their ability to contribute individually but also that the company/family can do great things as a whole – in the future, not just the past.

Families like to tell good stories!

If you want a different perspective on this, you may want to speak to my US colleague, Rochelle Kopp, the founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting – she has just published a book in Japanese on why Japanese employee motivation is so low, and I think an English version is due soon. She takes a more HR systems approach – her basic point is that “jinji idou” – the rotating staff system whereby employees have no say in where they are posted – is a key demotivator.

“Without competition, people will not develop”

Japanese construction materials and sanitary fittings manufacturer LIXIL is an example of a Japanese company that has deliberately tried to introduce a spirit of competitiveness into the company, following its acquisition of American Standard and Grohe. A German now runs a division, and many Japanese now have foreign bosses. LIXIL’s CEO Yoshiaki Fujimori says in a recent Nikkei Business article “There is no real competition inside Japanese companies. The benchmarks for evaluating employees are vague, and people are assessed on whether they are good relationship builders or come from the same background. At the very least, with a foreigner as a leader, baseless evaluation criteria will no longer be accepted.”

Fujimori is himself unusual in that he started out at Nissho Iwai (now Sojitz) and then became the first Japanese to be an EVP at General Electric, before joining LIXIL in 2011. He underwent a typical egalitarian Japanese education, graduating from Tokyo University in 1975, but even at Nissho Iwai he thought he could beat most people in terms of performance. However when he studied for an MBA he found out what real competition was like. He found it painful that other students could express their opinions so easily when he could not say anything. So he devised a study routine of making himself review the day in 1 minute every day, and then listen to himself, 30 times a day. It was even worse at GE, he claims, where you always have to win every battle. “If you lose once, you lose your job.” At LIXIL he has tried to quantify job roles in order to set performance evaluation standards and introduced Executive Leadership Training.

Another executive in the same mould as Fujimori is Yoshiaki Itoh. Born in Thailand, and a graduate of Thunderbird Business School, he has worked at Dell, Lenovo, Adidas Japan and Sony Pictures Entertainment, before becoming CEO of Haier Asia. At Haier he was shocked to find that the Sanyo (their white goods business in Asia was acquired by Haier) ‘super egalitarian’ legacy lived on – there were 14 grade levels, and everyone took an exam every two years in order to be promoted. It was not possible to jump a grade, so to get to a management position would take nearly 20 years, no matter how good you were.

Itoh cut the 14 levels to 5 and made it possible to become a team leader without any reference to age. He also went round South East Asia, and sent 20 of the 40 Japanese expatriates back to Japan. He also intends to make the R&D centre stand on its own two feet. “Japanese companies have not grasped the fact that competitiveness is necessary to win on the global stage” Itoh says. He is intending to further clear out remaining notions of “competition avoidance” and “everyone the same”.

Japan would do well to embrace, not shun, its ‘global spanners’

I gave a talk to a group of Japanese MBA students this past week on what it was like to work for a Japanese company outside Japan. I explained about the communication issues, not just the language barrier but how the Japanese style of implicit communication, where so much is left unsaid, did not transmit well overseas. I emphasised how valuable people like Japanese MBAs with overseas experience were as brokers for the different communication styles of the Japan headquarters and overseas operations.

The inevitable discussion then ensued about why young Japanese were not going overseas to study or work. One student commented that despite or maybe because of the fact that she had experience living overseas, and also working in a non-Japanese company, she had found it impossible to get a job in a Japanese company. “They just don’t see how the way I am would fit in with them”.

Afterwards, when we all exchanged business cards, the student told me I could find her on Facebook. This jogged my memory of an article I had just read about how a large proportion of Japanese Facebook users have lived outside of Japan. I sense this is not just because they would have been exposed to Facebook in the West as a commonly accepted way of keeping in touch with friends, but also because the kind of people who have lived for prolonged periods outside their home country tend to be natural networkers, and therefore enthusiastic adopters of social media.

When you have lived outside of your home country, it becomes important to you to keep in touch, not only with your home country friends and relatives, but the ones you make in your new country, and then you try to keep in touch with them as you move around further. I also believe that people who have lived abroad for a long time are more comfortable than most with forming what are known in sociology as “weak ties” – connections to people who are not close friends or relatives, but are acquaintances. Gree and Mixi are popular social networks in Japan, but according to a recent survey, Japanese have 29 friends on average on such sites, compared to a 130 average for all Facebook users.

Global spanners with many weak ties can become bridges between the more close knit groups to which they also belong. In other words, in a Japanese company, a global spanner could have strong ties with either their Japan headquarters colleagues or their colleagues in the overseas team where they are working. Their weak ties, preferably to another global spanner, mean that a pipeline of communication between two inward-looking groups is opened up.

But as I mentioned in a previous article in this series, the problem in Japanese companies is that often the global spanner type is seen as an outsider, and is viewed with suspicion and not allowed to connect into any close knit group. It’s not a problem confined to Japan – ask President Obama – but it does seem to be particularly acute in Japan.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

Category: Human resources