Corporate brands, values and mission

Hitachi – we’re not heavy, dull or ugly outside Japan

Hitachi is seen as inward looking, conservative and lacking in commercial sense by business people in Japan, but outside Japan it is seen as a motivating place to work, exciting and cool by employees of Hitachi’s overseas subsidiaries such as Hitachi Rail Europe and Hitachi Data Systems, according to Nikkei Business magazine.

Could this help change Hitachi domestically? Currently Hitachi has over 1000 employees with PhDs working for them in Japan, generating many patents, but this technical strength does not seem to be translating into sales. The improvement in profits is largely due to withdrawing from unprofitable businesses such as mobile phones and LCD screens and also the contributions from social innovation business overseas. It is not due to any ground breaking innovation in products or services. It is also seen as being self centred, and not often forming alliances with other companies.

In the rail business however, Hitachi has taken the biggest share of rolling stock orders through to 2019 in the UK. Hitachi first opened an office in the UK for its rail business in 1999, with just one expatriate staffing it. It is now seen as the most powerful train supplier in Europe, according to an executive from Virgin Trains. It has had to completely overhaul its designs however, to cope with the UK’s old fragile railway bridges. Procurement specs for everything from engines, radiators and pumps were reviewed and the body used as much aluminium as possible to lighten the weight. “We were able to use all the expertise we had developed in Japan” says Koji Wagatsuma of Hitachi Rail Europe. “Hitachi’s strength is not just IT, but that we know the operational side of various industries really well”, says Shinya Mitsudomi, CSO of Hitachi Rail Europe.

The other secret of Hitachi Rail’s success is “true delegation”, says the Nikkei. Instead of relying on history and performance within the company, Hitachi has given responsibility to those who know the market best. There is a big difference between the UK and Japanese rail markets, in that the risks taken by the supplier in bids are much greater. It is necessary to guarantee how many people would be needed to run the system per year, and what the lifecycle cost will be.

Alistair Dormer, the CEO, has clearly been a driving force in Hitachi Rail’s success. He likes to hold regular town hall meetings, where he consistently promotes the company’s mission and vision. Ted Yamada, head of HR at Hitachi Rail Europe says “to hire the best people, it’s not just about the remuneration, but to make sure they can get a feel of the kind of company they are working for.” Not only the CEO but also the chairman of Hitachi in Japan, Hiroaki Nakanishi, is a good story teller. As I repeatedly point out in my training sessions, because most Japanese companies are the “family” type, storytelling and parent figures are far more important in giving direction than targets or strategies or policies or structures.

A further feature that Nikkei Business picks up on, is that Hitachi is beginning to pull together virtual company structures, most notably for Hitachi Data Systems. We were moving towards that when I was at Fujitsu – I think IT companies are probably best suited to this kind of organisation – where services have to be provided globally so it makes sense to have teams and hierarchies which span several regions. It does mean a lot of travel to work well – one Hitachi Data Systems director says he has 56 Japan entry stamps on his American passport. Conversely, Japanese engineers travel regularly to the UK and the US.

The feature finishes with an interview with Hiroaki Nakanishi, who comes up with a few punchy quotes. Asked about the impact of Hitachi putting non-Japanese at the top of various regions, he says it has an instant effect on the mindset of the Japanese employees, who now realise that they have to persuade a foreigner of their ideas, so all the “Japanese only” methods they have used in the past will not work. Consequently, decision making and execution have speeded up. Everything in the value chain from marketing to sales, development to production and after sales service have to be overseas. So it’s not possible for Japanese to be seconded abroad and manage everything. Most of the executives are local, non-Japanese. “Before now, Japanese companies would build a factory overseas, but just transfer manufacturing knowhow, and then when it was completed, the head of manufacturing in Japan would fly over and play lots of golf. That’s just no longer feasible.” Since Jack Domme took over at HDS, objectives have been set for individual employees and decision making has become more transparent. HDS is now well regarded by others as a company which would be an enjoyable challenge to work for. “Starting small and growing big is just fooling yourself – there are no dreams or hope in that. People with ambitions will not join such a company” says Nakanishi. “We are still a Japanese company, and so there will be some parts which are difficult for non-Japanese to understand, so not being Japanese might be a bit of a handicap” but maybe no more than Siemens is a German company, or GE is American, Nakanishi adds.

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Branding without egotism

Another survey on the top 100 global brands has just come out, and yet again Japanese brands are not punching their weight, considering the size of their revenues and the Japanese economy. How you measure brand value is of course a contentious point. It’s often an attempt to quantify how much it would cost to buy the brand, based on some kind of residual figure from the value of the company – having subtracted all the other assets – as well as qualitative research on customer evaluations.

Some of the Japanese corporate names missing from the list would come nearer the top if only Japanese customers were surveyed. But even then, I’m guessing the monetary value that could be attached to the brand would still not be as high as for some Western companies, due to the fact that Japanese companies don’t focus so much on profitability, or even “branding”.

Discussions about brand with Japanese executives seem to indicate that they see a “brand” as mostly about advertising and visible forms of identity such as logo and image.

To compete on a global basis, Japanese companies need to understand better what Western customers expect from a strong brand. But there is a danger as well in becoming too focused on brand, to the extent that it becomes a form of egotism, and prevents collaboration.

It’s been over 15 years since NTT DoCoMo Inc launched its i-mode service, putting Japan far ahead of any other nation, even the US, in terms of customers using sophisticated mobile phones to purchase applications and content on the internet. The rest of the world wondered ho to replicate Japan’s success, and many speculated this could never be reproduced outside of Japan because of some kind of special cultural characteristics of Japanese consumers and society. Now, looking at the global success of the iPhone and other mobile technologies, there is no doubt that consumers across the world will buy applications and content for their phones, given the opportunity.

My view is that took the rest of the world so long to catch up because non-Japanese network providers and mobile phone handset manufacturers were so busy protecting the profitability of their brands, that they were unable to replicate the mutually beneficial supply chain ecosystem that DoCoMo built up in Japan.

When I went to Japan in 2002, assisting a British mobile phone application developer, DoCoMo refused to take the credit for a particular image recognition application that it was offering, saying they were only a network provider, and we should talk to the application developers. The application developers said they just provided applications for whatever features handset manufacturers were incorporating. The handset manufacturers said they were simply humble suppliers to the network operators.

Now, with the advent of cloud computing, and an increasingly networked society, Japanese companies are wondering how to compete against the likes of U.S. online titans like Amazon and Google. Strengthening their global brands will help, but they should not lose sight of the fact that a key element of many Japanese companies’ brands is their ability to collaborate, without egotism.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

Famous in Japan, utterly unknown in Europe

25 years ago I became one of the first ever graduate trainees at the London office of the US public relations consultancy Burson Marsteller. Burson Marsteller told me they were starting various joint ventures with Dentsu in Europe, so it seemed like a great opportunity to use my interest in Japan and my communication skills to support Japanese companies who had been arriving in Europe in increasing numbers in the past decade.

PR in Europe at the time was mostly staffed by ex journalists, focused on producing press releases, and wining and dining journalist contacts so they would write favourably about clients. Changes were in the air, however, which is why major PR consultancies like Burson Marsteller were starting to hire and train new graduates to be “communications professionals”.

In the late Eighties, the Big Bang revolutionised the City of London’s investment banks and stock market, and nationalised industries were being privatised. I was assigned to a corporate PR team, looking after British Gas (which later became Centrica) and a building society, which was thinking of floating on the stock exchange.

They were both facing the new pressures on companies to communicate to stakeholders. Not just to their new shareholders, but also to the communities in which they operated. They needed to show they could still be trusted, even if they weren’t owned by the state, or by account holders. There was also a need to polish their reputation so they could attract high potential graduates.

Japanese companies in Europe have the same needs – now as they did then – but unfortunately I do not think much progress has been made these past 25 years. There are so many companies which are famous in Japan but are either utterly unknown in Europe, or the name is familiar, but there is no notion of what they do, or whether they are good corporate citizens.

Nothing came of the Dentsu joint venture twenty five years ago, but I see now that Dentsu itself has started acquiring companies in Europe and other Japanese PR and advertising companies are strengthening their presence here.

Not only do Japanese companies have foreign shareholders to keep happy, but if they are to succeed in overseas social infrastructure projects, they must ensure that the communities affected are informed and welcoming, and that the best overseas graduates view them as a prestigious place to work.

This is not just a Japanese problem – I recently participated in a survey which I assume was commissioned by Siemens. The survey asked whether I knew that Siemens had been in the UK since 1843, was one of the largest graduate employers in the UK, with 12 factories, and involved with all kinds of sustainable energy and infrastructure projects. I was ashamed of my own ignorance of this, but amused to see that one of the competitors they were benchmarking themselves against was my old client, Centrica.

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

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.

Japanese corporate vision – pointing at the moon or a finger in air?

We are coming to the end of the final quarter of the financial year for most Japanese companies. There will be a greater sense of urgency than in previous quarters, not only to make the numbers, but also to find tangible proof that the strategies in place are the right ones, or if they are not, to draft some radical proposals for the President to make at the end of April, when the year’s results must be declared.

It’s a predictable part of the annual cycle, but I sense that in recent years, the feeling of crisis is stronger than ever. So many Japanese companies understand that their very existence on the global stage is under question and the cheaper yen will only provide temporary respite from this.

The usual bottom up accumulation of midterm plans, based on projections of the previous years’ sales, a chat with customers and ”putting a finger in the air”, all jammed into several A3 sized sheets of paper, won’t do this time.

Some companies will announce, or already have announced, radical restructuring plans, but behind such plans is still the huge question of why the company exists at all – a question that most Japanese companies take very seriously, as so many believe that contributing to society, not just by keeping people in employment, but by making a positive impact on the future shape of the world, is at the core of their being.

This means they have to venture into the touchy feely territory of vision, values and corporate culture. Something which I believe they are pretty good at communicating to customers and employees in Japanese, but not outside Japan.

Words and numbers are not enough – there need to be stories, heroes and artifacts. Japanese companies have plenty of these, the question is how to communicate them globally.

One example is Alpine Electronics, the Japanese car audio manufacturer. The current chairman, Seizo Ishiguro, talks of how when he headed up the US operation, a cassette deck was returned to the company riddled with bullet holes by an unhappy American customer. The cassette deck is now in Alpine’s museum, as a reminder of how the key to Alpine’s survival in global markets is the highest possible quality and customer satisfaction.

This is a very tangible artifact, and a great story. Somewhat gentler is the brush painting bought by Sazo Idemitsu, the founder of the Idemitsu petroleum company, when he was 19, at an auction, of Hotei (often known as the Laughing Buddha) pointing to the moon. Apparently he often told employees to “look at the moon” (the big picture) not at Hotei’s finger (the details). In other words that Idemitsu was in the petroleum industry not just to make money, but to benefit society.

Intriguingly, in the painting Idemitsu bought, the moon is not depicted at all. It’s as if the artist is telling us to go and look for the moon for ourselves. The challenge Japanese companies face is ensuring that this kind of subtlety does not get lost in translation.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly in January 2013 and also appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.)

“Japanese managers have been brainwashed by the West” and should aim to be ‘virtuous companies’ instead

An interview with George Hara, currently Chairman of Alliance Forum and former board member of various Silicon Valley start ups as a venture capitalist kicks off Nikkei Business’s attempt at finding a new standard for evaluating Japanese companies, beyond the shareholder capitalism model.

Instead of “Good/Best company”or “Great Place to Work” and all the other awards you can get, the Nikkei proposes ‘Yoi‘, which can be translated as ‘good’ but is probably better translated as ‘virtuous’. They even deliberately write the headline ‘Yoi kaisha‘ (‘Virtuous company’) in Japanese brush stroke calligraphy.

Hara doesn’t think the term ‘stakeholder capitalism’ quite covers what he and the Nikkei are getting at, even though he says the company should be measured on the benefit to employees, customers, partners and regional society as well as shareholders. He prefers ‘shachu‘ (which my dictionary translates as clique or troupe) or public benefit capitalism – meaning that all the concerned parties have a common objective.

He particularly criticises the way companies in the US – the home of full blooded shareholder capitalism – such as Hewlett Packard or Dupont find that putting shareholder interests first means firing people even when there are record breaking profits, or not being able to invest in long term projects to develop technologies which will benefit society.

Japanese corporate leaders used to be much more inclined to public benefit capitalism, and the cause is not lost yet, says Hara – citing that when he showed the great and the good of the IMF around Tokyo’s underground system recently they were full of praise for how clean, orderly and busy a city supposedly suffering from a 20 year recession was. Japan should be setting its own standard for the rest of the world, he feels.

Following on from this, Nikkei Business have come up with a Yoi company metric, based on profit, changes in employee numbers, corporate tax contribution and share price over the past 10 quarters for 3841 Tokyo stock exchange listed companies and the top 10 are:

Softbank
Fast Retailing* (Uniqlo) (Yanai, the founder and also board member of Softbank is quick to throw this back in the face of those who have termed Fast Retailing a “black company”)
Keyence
Fanuc (the current target of shareholder activist Daniel Loeb)
Yahoo
Aeon Mall
Rakuten
Mani (medical devices)
Japan Tobacco
Takeda Pharma *
Central Japan Railway
KDDI
ABC-MART
Sumitomo Real Estate
USS　(car auctions)
Astellas Pharma*
Toyota*
SMC (automatic control equipment)
Nakanishi (motor spindles, micro grinders)
Trend Micro (security solutions, founded in the USA, HQ in Japan)
Sysmex (healthcare)
Hisamitsu Pharma
Komatsu*
Terumo
Canon*
Honda*
Makita
Nitori Holdings (furniture)
Shimano
J Trust

Other of our Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe* in the top 100

Bridgestone #41
Denso #46
Sumitomo Electric Group #51

In our Top 30 in Europe but not in the Top 100 Yoi companies:

Fujitsu, Ricoh, Sony, Asahi Glass, NSG, Toshiba, Hitachi, Panasonic, NTT Data, NYK, Fujifilm, Olympus, Mitsubishi Chemical Holding, Nomura, Nidec, Sharp, Daiichi Sankyo, Kao, Seiko Epson

Japanese management by telepathy and Ninja skills does not work for overseas M&A

The precis below is from an article written by Chieko Matsuda (Executive Director of Booz Allen Hamilton in Japan) for Nikkei Business Online’s “Corporate Governance for Everyone” series, in Japanese, but I felt as I translated it, that it was my own words, so completely do I agree with what she is saying:

Japanese companies often have an “overseas business development unit” to carry out their global M&A. However the mission of this organisation should change depending on the stage reached in expanding overseas. Even if it starts as “business development”, it often turns out that it has to manage the subsidiaries as well. So at the same time as stepping on the accelerator to grow the business, it is supposed to press on the brake, as a shareholder and auditor. When it comes up with solutions to this dilemma, nobody will help the unit out, claiming that “overseas business is your specialist area”, and “nobody speaks English in our unit”

The audit function needs to be strengthened – Japanese companies are far too weak when it comes to risk management with regard to their overseas operations. It is necessary, if expanding overseas, to “control through structure” and review rules, processes and formats. Japanese style management through telepathy will not work for overseas M&A.

In order to design the structure in detail, it is necessary to decide on the direction. What the company should not do, and what it should preserve. If this is left vague, then it will lead to a sense that “we have no idea what the parent company is thinking”.

The top priority therefore is to set the corporate mission and values. What are we trying to do, how will we do it, which way are we facing – it is control through corporate culture as well as through structure.

The corporate vision needs to be concrete, and something that can be translated in an understandable way into many languages. It should be a base for making decisions – to go left or right – not just pretty words.

If the corporate vision and culture is not secure, then it is difficult for diversity to take root. WIthout diversity, the company will not be competitive. A homogenous workforce was efficient for labour intensive production, but we are now in an era of competition of ideas and innovation. New ideas and innovation require a diverse workforce, and what will unite a diverse workforce is common corporate culture and vision.

It is of course partly up to the top management to communicate this corporate culture and vision, but middle management must also be able to use it within their teams. It can’t just be about “reading the air” in the traditional Japanese Ninja way. What do you do if there is a claim from a customer? It cannot be resolved through kiai (“fighting spirit”) and konjou (“guts”). Wouldn’t it be convenient if you had a touchstone, for when there was a problem to be solved?

If you are being acquired by a Japanese company, you may be interested in Japan Intercultural Consulting’s (represented by Rudlin Consulting in EMEA) post merger integration services.

Japanese firms might gain from looking to outsiders for insights

At the beginning of our training sessions with Japanese expatriate managers, I describe to them the positives and challenges Europeans say they face when working in Japanese companies. If I have already done similar sessions with Europeans in that company, then I also highlight those aspects which are specific to the company or were give a particular emphasis.

You can probably guess what the common positives and challenges are. The European employees usually say they find their Japanese colleagues are polite/friendly/calm, take a long-term view and have a high degree of commitment to their jobs and the company. The challenges that they find are communication problems centering on indirect/direct communication styles and attitudes to conflict, and also the long-winded, nontransparent decision making processes.

It is often said that Japanese people are more than usually curious about how they are perceived by other cultures. Certainly my list of common positives and negatives arouses great interest among Japanese participants. However, when I try to turn it into a debate about the company’s culture – asking questions like, “Do you think your company is more or less nemawashi (consensus based decision making) oriented than other Japanese companies in your industry?” – there is hesitation, a few tentative comments, and then thoughtful silence. It is almost as if such questions had never been considered before.

As lifetime employment has been so prevalent in these large companies, and still is for the majority of employees, the opportunity to compare the company you chose to join at the age of 22 with another company only arises once – during the graduate recruitment process. Because this a career-long commitment, both the graduates and the companies put a great deal of effort into the process of finding out whether there is a good fit between the candidate and the company culture.

But the actual nuts and bolts of working in a company – how decisions are made, attitudes to process, risk, hierarchy and so on – are not made so explicit, because the candidates have never worked in a company before and have no way of identifying these characteristics. If you are going to stay at the company for the rest of your career, then you just accept that “this is the way things are done around here.”

Now that more Japanese people are changing employers, and mergers between companies are increasing, it is surely time to be more aware of these differences, so that adjustments can be made by employees and companies.

Some insights will of course come from the job hoppers themselves, but it might also be time for Japanese companies to lose their allergy to using outside consultants. As a consultant myself, I would say this, but consultants who have worked with a range of companies probably have the best overall view of how Japanese companies differ from each other.

As the British writer Rudyard Kipling famously put it, regarding English insularity, “And what should they know of England, who only England know?”

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

“Japan is different, but other countries are different, too” – Takeda’s Weber

Japan’s annual shareholders’ meeting season at the end of June went relatively smoothly for most companies, as their results had improved, in part due to the impact of a cheaper yen. Takeda was one of the exceptions, however, with the new President, Christophe Weber, facing protests from a 100 or so shareholders, more than half of whom were ex-Takeda employees.

Their 7 point letter claimed that the acquisition of Nycomed and Millennium Pharmaceuticals were failures, that the way Takeda was globalizing and the low morale of scientists in Japan called into question management effectiveness, that the way Weber was appointed as Hasegawa’s successor was questionable, that the focus on the executive management committee, largely peopled by “foreigners” was causing the board meetings to become a mere formality, that it was not clear why high dividends should be paid out when the financials were worsening, and finally that responsibility was not clear for the fine of $6bn in the US for concealing the risks for Actos, a diabetes drug.

Diamond Online analyses why Takeda is being criticised “from within”. Takeda was at a high point in 2006, but in decline since then, as four of its blockbuster drugs came off patent in the US. The search for new hit drugs led down the path of M&A. Takeda was the dominant Osaka pharmaceutical company, squaring up against Sankyo the Tokyo-based pharmaceutical giant. Behind the scenes, however, there were merger talks between the two. In the end Sankyo chose to team up with Daiichi.

So Takeda embarked on overseas acquisitions – Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and then Millennium in the USA in 2008, and finaly Nycomed in 2011. These acquisitions required substantial post merger restructuring, however there was noone capable of this in Takeda. The management layer below Hasegawa was “thin” ( a problem common to many Japanese companies, who cut back hiring of that cohort during the first oil shock). Hasegawa appeared isolated, and reliant on foreign executives and Japanese executives who had worked in foreign companies (in other words, not including the indigenous Japanese within Takeda)

Weber’s recent interview in the Japan Times, in which he emphasises that Takeda will remain “Japanese” is an attempt to reassure the Takeda founding family and domestic Japanese management, but whether an interview in English in Japan Times (an English language daily) is sufficient is doubtful. A charm offensive on the Nikkei group of publications might be advisable.

Japan’s soft power

In a week’s time, Rudlin Consulting will move to Norwich, UK. One of the reasons behind this choice of location is to be near the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture. I am keen to explore further how corporate cultures can be expressed “non-verbally”, through Japanese arts and culture, and also hope there is scope to collaborate with the Institute.

So of course I went to the lecture that Mami Mizutori, formerly of the Japanese Embassy in the UK, and now director of the Institute, gave to the Jiji Top Seminar (a monthly lunch for Japanese business people in the UK) last week. The title was “Do you invest in the power of culture?” She focused on the importance of soft power to Japan. Whether or not you believed that only Japanese can really speak Japanese and therefore only Japanese can really understand Japanese culture, (and I am guessing she does not subscribe to this point of view) she pointed out how a non-Japanese perspective on Japanese culture can help Japanese themselves to appreciate Japan’s culture.

Would an exhibition of Shunga (erotic art) ever have been put on in Japan, she wondered, the way the British Museum did last year? Probably the Japanese establishment would have deemed it to be pornography, not art, and therefore too controversial to touch. She also told the story of Joe Price, who started collecting Ito Jakuchu, a late Edo period (18thc) artist who had been neglected, but then became popular, culminating in a blockbuster exhibition in 2006 in Tokyo, the backbone of which was Price’s collection.

As this article described, Price was then able to use his collection to help cultural institutions in the 2011 earthquake region.

Mami also lamented that there is (no longer) a tradition of individuals sponsoring the arts the way there is in the US, and to a certain extent, the UK.

She wondered whether this was because post war Japan is a much more egalitarian place, and sponsoring the arts would be seen as flashy.

Pre-war many wealthy individuals did build up art collections (the Mitsubishi founding family Iwasaki’s Seikado collection or Idemitsu for example) and post war there is some sponsorship, such as Suntory’s famous concert hall. So the question I did not ask, was whether she was hoping that Japanese companies could fill the gap more than they do now.

As was pointed out by Akiya Takahashi, the director of Mitsubishi’s Ichigokan Museum in a recent interview (in Japanese) in the Nikkei Online, many major exhibitions in Japan are sponsored by newspapers and often take place in department stores. The staff therefore tend to be newspaper marketing employees, and there is a consequent lack of professional museum and gallery people, who can network with their peers in other countries. Also, what museum and gallery staff there are tend to return to universities to become academics. He is trying to change this by developing professionals at Ichigokan, encouraging them to travel abroad.

Furthermore, the newspaper sponsorship/temporary exhibition culture means that Japanese museums often do not have a permanent collection of any great strength. Again, Takahashi has been encouraging Mitsubishi to buy up some private collections for its museum. So my old employer Mitsubishi Corp is certainly doing its bit to help Japan’s soft power (and in the UK too – sponsoring the Japan room at the British Museum). I am very much hoping to see other Japanese companies “putting their money where their mouth is” as they say, and I suspect that was the subtle message of Mami’s talk too.

Category: Corporate brands, values and mission