Internal communications

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.

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A truly global HQ, where Japan is just one of the regions?

I mentioned in a previous article in this series that Japanese companies such as Fast Retailing and Rakuten are adopting English as their corporate language. In reaction to this, various surveys of Japanese employees’ attitudes to speaking English appeared in the media, including one that showed that 73% of Japanese are reluctant to have English as a corporate language.

Adding to this, another survey just released by the Sanno Institute of Management found that 67% of the businesspeople it questioned did not want to work abroad. The conclusion drawn by many Japanese commentators is that this is all part of Japan’s withdrawal from the globalized world. In particular there is a worry, shared by the Japanese government, that the younger generation have become more inward looking and cautious, and this will have a negative impact on the economy. My personal conclusion is that these reactions show that Japanese people rather enjoy agonising over surveys about themselves, particularly if the results show how different Japan is or are in some way a cause for gloom.

It seems to me any such trends are more related to economic factors than anything peculiar to Japanese society. There is not the urgency to rebuild the Japanese economy through export led growth that there was in the post-war decades. The slow death of lifetime employment means that younger people are less loyal to their companies and therefore less willing to go wherever their employers tell them.

Japanese companies have adapted over the past twenty years to the changing global environment. They expatriate fewer staff to the expensive developed world, relying on local managers instead, and have turned their attention to investment of capital and personnel in emerging markets.

The same trends can be found in the matured economies elsewhere in the world. The US used to have a mobile workforce, who would pack up and move state in search of a job, but apparently this is less true now, despite the persistent unemployment problem there. And although Europeans love pointing out how only 20% of Americans have passports, compared to 70% or so of the British population for example – it is noticeable how most of the migration within Europe is from Eastern Europe, rather than from Western Europe.

Rather than force reluctant Japanese employees to transfer abroad or adopt English as a corporate language, many Japanese companies are trying to globalise by encouraging employees from Asia to transfer to Japan or hiring Asian students who are studying in Japan. I suspect the expectation is that these employees will have to blend in as much as possible, however, so the impact on the Japanese staff in the headquarters will be minimal.

The worry then is that the non-Asian part of the business will become increasingly disconnected from Japan and Asia, with very little exchange of staff between the two regions. A radical solution might be to accept that the majority of Japanese staff prefer to focus on Japanese domestic sales, and split the Japanese domestic side from the global headquarters. This headquarters could be situated anywhere in the world, and yes, the working language will probably be English.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

The Mitsubishi thoroughbred who was called an alien

“When I was called ‘the alien’ I was resigned to it, realising that the people around me didn’t understand what I was trying to do. However, recently it seems as if what I was saying then is gradually becoming understood.” Minoru Makihara, former President of Mitsubishi Corporation, recollects the time when he tried to make English the second corporate language in 1992 and was criticised from within and outside the company [disclosure – I had just been posted to Mitsubishi Corporation Japan HQ at the time, and later worked with Mr Makihara to deal with the fall out from these policies]. “It was partly a misunderstanding – I was saying that ‘Bad English’ should be the corporate language. Because if you do not express yourself, no matter how poor the English, then you cannot have a dialogue.”

“English is the international language of business, not just because it is widespread, but because it is most suited to business. English can be vague when necessary, and precise when needed. Nobody thinks Japanese is suitable for business – it’s far too implicit. However, even though English is a necessity, it is not sufficient for listening globally. You need a sense of your own roots, your own “-ism” to understand someone who speaks a different language to you.”

“I have proposed a third ‘Opening up’ for Japan to the government. Japan is lagging behind in globalization. By ‘Opening up’ I don’t just mean the issue of whether there should be more immigration, but that we Japanese are the problem.”

“Ultimately it comes down to education – a liberal arts type education. To work globally, you need be able to gather data and knowledge for yourself, and make your own independent judgement. So to open up Japan again, you need to start from there. Without this, Japan will be isolated in the world.”

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

The lack of information from Japan – “it’s like gold dust”

After a recent trip to Japan I came back clutching various documents from some contacts I met at one particular Japanese company. I only recently got round to translating them and forwarding them to the appropriate people in the overseas operations of that company. I asked in advance, before spending too much time translating, if the content was already familiar to the people outside Japan. Apparently it was not and the content was described as “gold dust” by one person.

It’s a perennial complaint in the overseas operations of Japanese companies that they don’t get enough information from Japan, to the point where they begin to wonder if things are being deliberately hidden from them.

I wrote in a previous article in this series about the unquenchable thirst for information amongst Japanese employees. In Japan this thirst is partly met through implicit knowledge sharing, by having an open plan office full of people who spend years working together and who all speak Japanese, so do not need to be formal and explicit in the way they communicate. There are more formal communication methods in most departments, such as weekly and monthly reports as well as the infamous A3 sized planning documents and the “ringi” proposals, which are circulated around numerous people.

But the problem is these are all in Japanese, and no one feels like taking on the onerous task of translating them into English. They all mostly have higher priority day jobs to attend to. Outsourcing them to a translation agency is one option, but it often takes an insider to truly distinguish what is important and what is really meant by internal documents.

I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be a conscious process set up for communicating between Japanese operations and the rest of the world, and it needs to be a recognised part of someone’s job. The person selected for this should not be shunted into some “global” group but be part of the actual business department, otherwise they will not understand the context of the information and which bits are most needed by overseas subsidiaries.

The final piece of the process is identifying the organisational units and people that are counterparts to each other, and therefore need to share information. This is more complicated than it might seem, as most large Japanese companies in my experience are organised in quite different ways to Western equivalents. In Japan there are no sales directors in charge of specific regions or customer segments. There are no marketing directors, in fact there is rarely a standalone marketing department. The organisation is highly vertical, so each business group has to be combed for people who have a global remit or functional role that looks relevant.

This is not easy when few people have written job descriptions. But once the right person and team are found, I am sure their thirst for information from outside Japan and satisfaction derived from being useful to global colleagues will mean the process becomes well embedded.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and also appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.

Sometimes, the unquenchable thirst for information is hard to swallow

As a home-stay student with a Japanese family, I became used to being asked by my host mother where I was going every time I left the house. If it had been my own family, I would probably have responded “Out!” before leaving as quickly as I could, slamming the door behind me. I was trying to avoid my parents interfering in my plans but I soon realised my Japanese home stay mother didn’t really have a hidden agenda behind her inquiries – she was simply curious, and wanted to show she cared.

In the Japanese corporate world, there are hidden agendas, but the same thirst for “information for information’s sake”, continues. A constant niggle I hear from people who aren’t Japanese who work in Japanese companies is the sheer quantity of questions, often on seemingly irrelevant details, that they have to deal with from their Japanese colleagues.

These non-Japanese staff worry because they fear that their answers might be seen as commitments and they want to sort out the business case or the strategy before they give the full details of a plan. Or, like my teenage self, they are just concerned that there is some kind of ulterior motive.

I sense that Japanese colleagues are frustrated by this – they want to know the details as soon as possible because they need to feed them back into their network in Japan. If they have “overseas” or “global” in their title then they are supposed to be the instant expert on what overseas operations are doing, regardless of how complex the local cultures and markets are. Their knowledge is currency, or “neta” as it is known in Japanese – the inside scoop on how things really are. Japanese people are so used to the idea that in Japanese society nothing is as it really seems, they assume that those who claim to know the real story are the ones with the power and intelligence.

By contrast, many Westerners are surprisingly incurious about the world beyond their immediate sphere. Multinationals run on US lines tend to function on explicit knowledge – distributed through regular updates amongst a select group of global managers, maybe via a weekly phone conference, where predetermined targets are matched against actual figures, and arguments are had about any shortfalls. As a result, US type multinationals send far less headquarters staff out to work in overseas operations than Japanese multinationals, which feel that they need to have a mole in every operation to keep HQ in the loop.

I have some sympathy with the worries of non-Japanese staff. Information casually shared with Japanese colleagues does have a habit of escalating up the Japanese hierarchy and turning into formalised fact, to be thrown back in the face of the overseas staff when commitments never given are not met. Also, Japanese headquarters staff, who are so used to sharing knowledge in informal ways, fail to share it more explicitly with their overseas colleagues.

Information flows need to be two-way to work. Maybe I should have responded to my home stay mother by asking her what she was doing during the day. She might have been pleased to know I cared.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and also appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.)

Why it matters if Japanese businesspeople are bad at English

The former President of Microsoft Japan, Makoto Naruke, wrote a best seller entitled “90% of Japanese don’t need to speak English” provocatively asserting that learning English was a waste of time and money, no graduate from an international school has succeeded in business, business English conversation is easy and if you’re an idiot, being able to speak English isn’t going to help.

There’s obvious truth in the last point, and Tejun Shin, formerly of Morgan Stanley, now running his own fund and a microfinance not-for-profit Living in Peace doesn’t deny that 90% of Japanese don’t need English in their jobs, but points out in the Nikkei Online(Japanese) that it’s still a big problem that the 10% of Japanese who do need English for their work are pretty awful at English too.

He demolishes various assumptions made that Japanese have nothing to worry about, showing that even amongst 19 Asian countries Japan comes second from bottom after Cambodia on English ability scores and that amongst 15 OECD countries where English is not the native language, Japan is bottom in English ability. Even something that I often assert, that Japanese are better at reading than speaking or writing English, turns out to be wrong.

He gives a couple of excellent reasons that I had not articulated myself for why poor English ability is an issue for Japanese employees.

Firstly, that it will lead to the Galapagosisation of the mind (Galapagos syndrome is often used to describe products which are developed purely for the Japanese market, so like a Galapagos turtle, cannot survive outside that particular environnment). Without input of “world knowledge” – from the internet or TED talks etc – which is inevitably in English, thoughts become entirely inward looking and idea creation incestuous.

Secondly, for leaders in particular, English ability is a must, not only so that they can form alliances with overseas companies to develop business, but also – and this was the real aha moment for me – so that English speaking talent feels comfortable working for them. This is so true – if you are a high flier, you wouldn’t want to work in a company where you have little chance of getting your views heard by the top executives.

The hidden value of meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When telepathy is not enough

It seems that the only opportunity for new business at the moment, for those of us who supply services to Japanese companies, is the continuing wave of Japanese acquisitions. Faced with a saturated, aging market at home and good companies going cheaply overseas, it’s no wonder Japanese companies see acquisitions abroad as a way to revitalize and grow.

Western companies are in the mood to accept new Asian owners, too. Weary of the destruction brought about by Anglo-Saxon capitalism, there is plenty of debate going on in Western business circles as to whether it might not be time for a more long-term, stakeholder-oriented – rather than short-term, shareholder-oriented – way of running companies.

We have been here before with Japan

We have, of course, been here before. Japan’s economic success in the 1980s was attributed to Japanese values – lifetime employment, group orientation, taking the long-term view, striving for growth rather than profit and so on. But then in the 1990s those same values were blamed for Japan’s economic failure. The debate as to whether an alternative to the current form of capitalism is truly needed – and whether Confucian capitalism is the best alternative – will no doubt continue.

While the discussion rumbles on, Japanese companies that have acquired overseas companies face the question of how or how not to adapt their distinctive corporate values and cultures.

The missing vital tool of internal communications

Regardless of what path is chosen, many Japanese companies have failed to use a vital tool – internal communications. Case in point: A participant at a seminar I gave at a British company that had been acquired two months earlier by a Japanese company carne up to me afterwards, on the verge of tears, to say thank you.

Apparently I was the first person to talk to her team since the acquisition who was able to explain at a deeper level what was going on. The team members felt they had been left in the dark.

Another participant at a different company mentioned to me that the local operation had only found out a vital piece of news about their company through a U.K. trade magazine.

I have lost count of the number of times Europeans working for Japanese companies have complained to me about information being withheld. When I ask them if they had asked Japanese colleagues for this information, it often transpires that they had not, that they expected to be told.

Many Japanese companies do not have internal communications departments. One director of corporate affairs told me that he could find no counterpart at the new owner’s Japan headquarters.

Japan’s deliberately vague corporate cultures

There is an assumption that Japanese employees will pick up corporate strategy and culture through time-honored methods such as ishin denshin, or telepathy. While this assumption cannot, of course, be made for employees who do not work in Japan or who do not speak Japanese, there nevertheless seems to be a fear that translating even innocuous internal documents into English will cause vital secrets to be leaked.

Deliberately leaving it up to employees to work out values and strategies for themselves is itself a corporate value. Once I got used to this, I rather liked it, as it means employees are treated as mature adults. Paradoxically, however, if Japanese companies want to preserve this value as they globalize, it has to be explicitly communicated.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Three tips to get Japanese people to read and respond to your emails

A British participant in one of my recent training sessions asked me why her Japanese colleagues so often start their e-mails with “Hoping this finds you well”. She found it quaintly polite. I explained that in the days before e-mail, when business correspondence was more formal, it was standard practice to begin letters in Japanese with comments regarding the seasons, gratitude for the continued custom, and solicitous remarks regarding the recipient’s health and fortune. Perhaps, therefore, her colleagues were trying to carry on that tradition.

A Japanese acquaintance has added a second explanation. I mentioned to him that one of the major frustrations for Europeans working in or with Japanese companies is the lack of response to e-mails sent to Japanese counterparts in the company headquarters. He said that often if the e-mail is very short, with no opening remarks, his colleagues assume it is not an urgent request and just an informal comment. Also, if the e-mail does not have “Dear X-san” at the start, they think they are just being copied on a message, and therefore no reaction is required.

Although I do often recommend a “personal touch” to start an e-mail to Japanese people, it does seem to contradict my other recommendation, which is to keep e-mails as short as possible. I know I have an allergic reaction to long e-mails in Japanese, resisting reading them until I’ve had at least one cup of coffee, and you can be sure that many Japanese have an equally allergic reaction to densely written English.

If the e-mail is too long, particularly with big chunky paragraphs of English, and the action point is buried near the bottom, the recipient may not read it all, and therefore miss what response was required. Chopping long paragraphs up into numbered bullet points is one tactic that many Japanese have told me they appreciate. The action point or conclusion should be brought up to the top of the e-mail, or if the logical flow does not allow for this, highlighting it in bold, and in a different color, will help the English-phobic spot what is required of them.

The third recommendation for getting a quicker response does not have so much to do with the format as with the personal relationship. The plain fact is that e-mails written in English are going to get a lower priority than e-mails written in Japanese because most Japanese companies still prioritize domestic sales and domestic customers over foreign ones. If the e-mail is in English, the chances are it is about a foreign customer. In fact I have found in the past that some Japanese companies’ spam filters throw almost everything in English into the junk-mail folder.

The only way to overcome the mental spam filter is to have met your counterparts and established a good relationship with them. Then, when they see your English e-mail in a sea of other Japanese e-mails, instead of putting it off to another day, they will spot your name and take a quick look to see what you are asking because they feel personally obligated to you. A gentle reminder of the personal relationship in your opening remarks will reinforce this – another explanation as to why Japanese sometimes put “hoping this finds you well” in their e-mails.

This article by Pernille Rudlin, European Representative of Japan Intercultural Consulting, originally appeared in the 23rd February 2009 edition of the Nikkei Weekly

Category: Internal communications