Non-Japanese people who work in Japanese companies are often shocked at how antiquated the IT is in Japanese companies, considering how much Japanese people love new technologies.
Why is this, and will COVID-19 force change?
The next in our series “Japanese Business Mysteries Explained in 5 Minutes”
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
I’ve often felt that what I do as a trainer was similar to a stand-up comedy routine. Not so much that I try to make people laugh (although I do) but that I use the same tricks of the trade as a stand-up comedian – a core idea running through, the seemingly irrelevant anecdote that ends up making a key point, the call back at the end that reassures me and the audience they’ve been paying attention. I know I’ve had a good session if I’ve hit my marks – not in the literal meaning of standing in the right spot, but getting the rhythm and timings right, covering all the material, sensing the key messages have chimed with participants.
Watching some of my favourite entertainers cope with social distancing has been illuminating. It has shed light on the dirty secrets of how far entertaining or teaching at a distance can replace getting together in germ filled rooms.
I knew, but had not articulated, these dirty secrets to myself. I have struggled for around 20 years to make online learning and knowledge sharing work, believing it to be the future, but at the same time I kept having misgivings.
One of my favourite stand-up comedians, Stewart Lee, toured a show a couple of years ago called Content Provider – the brutal digital term for entertainers and teachers. As Lee pointed out in that show, the main way entertainers make money these days is by going on tour delivering the content in person, not from digital or hard copy sales. TV can be a steady earner of course, but Lee was never mainstream enough to attract consistently big bucks. He even supplements the revenue from tickets by buying up second-hand copies of his CDs and DVDs from charity shops and eBay and selling them in person at a profit in the auditorium after the show.
But, as he acknowledged in his most recent show, touring is exhausting, particularly as you get older. My fellow trainer in Germany in a recent Zoom call said she felt more relaxed than she had in some time, despite the lockdown, because she no longer had to travel so much for work. It’s not just the physical but also the mental exhaustion – you wonder if the same old shtick is going to cut it anymore.
So our training team is now discussing what the best way is to deliver our content, without so much travel, resilient to any social distancing, but still make money and stay fresh. Which is why we need to confront the dirty secrets head on.
My recent career has been in providing training to adult learners, but I come from a globally extensive, long line of teachers of all age groups. From talking with them about their experiences, I’m pretty sure that most of these dirty secrets apply to children’s education too.
The good news is that there are plenty of technologies when teaching or entertaining online that we are being forced to adopt which are worth continuing with even after we can all be in the same room again. The future is going to be a blend of online and offline presence.
The biggest dirty secret is that it actually costs quite a lot in terms of effort, time and therefore money to create good learning and entertainment that works at a distance. And yet the expectation is that it should be cheaper.
Why distance costs so much is due to the other dirty secrets:
This is why teachers are struggling to respond to the current crisis. They know that just slapping up slides online with your notes, or teaching a normal lesson via a webcam and providing a recording of it will not create effective learning experiences. But they don’t have the time to do much else.
The issue is not just participant engagement, but that bouncing off an audience is where teachers and entertainers get their energy from. You can spot when an audience is not engaged when you are in a room with them, and adjust accordingly.
When TV entertainers like John Oliver or Stephen Colbert initially tried to do their shows without live audiences, the result was very flat. You could see the desperation in their eyes. It was easier for team chat shows that transmitted live like Channel 4’s The Last Leg. They had already made use of Twitter in real time pre-COVID-19 to get audience suggestions and jokes from beyond the studio, so they made even more use of this to spark off their own interactions in the studio.
Even non-live shows are finding ways to use online tools to engage with their audiences – Graham Norton’s Red Chair stories are now delivered by audience members from their own homes, via their webcams. Many comedy chat shows have found that doing short interviews via webconferencing with celebrities, in their pyjamas, with pets, kids and other props, showing human frailties, can recreate at least some of the warmth and humour they crave.
For teachers and trainers the most obvious online tool to create engagement is polling. Polls can make sure people are paying attention, but also create a connection between participants and give the host a flavour of the needs and views of the audience. Webcams, Q&A and chat functions all help put the life back in to webinars – and yes, why not bring in props and pets too.
If you are creating learning that people consume in their own time, it still needs to be interactive – I’ve incorporated polls, quizzes and self-assessments into our online learning modules.
If you haven’t got a live audience you can interact with, you need to keep it short, and break it up. Graham Norton’s TV chat show used to be 45 minutes long pre-Covid, but is now a tightly edited 30 minutes of a monologue, a brief interview, some music, funny clips and the Red Chair.
I view the online equivalent of our 3-hour classroom-based training course as being a 1.5 hour webinar – and I put a break in half way just as I would for a classroom based session. Similarly, our 6 hour, one day course can be delivered as two 1.5 hour webinars on separate occasions. The online modules can be taken in the meantime, allowing the second webinar to be more of a review and discussion.
It’s generally considered that 45 minutes is the maximum you can expect an adult to pay attention. I’d assume it’s even less for children and for those of us who are used to consuming social media in short videos and 280 character chunks.
But schools do seem very wedded to the idea that a lesson should take 35 to 45 minutes and that it’s an important life skill that children stay still and quiet for this time. I really resented being called into school to be told off for the fact that my son refused to sit nicely on the story mat for half an hour aged 5 or that he’d yell out the answer to a question without waiting until the teacher called on him. My suggestions that it was unreasonable to expect children of that age to stay still without some kind of interactivity, and that they would be better off asking open ended rather than factual questions did not go down well. But then I regularly got thrown out of my Japanese school aged 7 for talking in class. Japanese schools are even more one-way information teaching machines than British schools. Ironically, my son’s school reports now complain that he’s too quiet.
So 10-20 minutes for an online “class” is surely more realistic than expecting children to sit through a teacher talking on a webcam on Microsoft Teams for 40 minutes. This seems to be what my husband and his fellow teachers are now doing – everyone logs in, the teacher asks how they are and has a chat, explains the assignment and then lets everyone log out again and do the assignment in their own time. Getting them to hand the assignment in seems to be a whole other problem, however.
Realising that my audience is not that into me either, I recently re-edited all our online e-learning content so no video/screencast that I have narrated is more than 10 minutes where possible. The most popular YouTube video I have narrated is “Japanese Business Mysteries explained in 5 minutes”, so I will be doing more of those in the future.
But that brings me to the third dirty secret. Not only are they not that into you, they’re not that into your content either. They’re either learning because it’s compulsory or to impress their employers. If they’re school children or students, the main motivator is passing the exam.
This is where the analogy with entertainment ends, I suppose – we consume entertainment for insights, emotions and to know we are not alone. There is no certificate for this but therefore there is a limit to how much a person will pay to be entertained, and they are always looking for ways to get their kicks for free. Which is why I sympathised when Stewart Lee confiscated a mobile phone from an audience member trying to film his routine at the last gig of his I went to.
Teachers at my son’s school have been dutifully setting further reading, challenging maths problems and suggesting resources to prepare for university for the year group affected by the cancellation of the UK national A level exams. Only work before March 18th will count towards the final grade, to ensure that children who are not able to access online learning are not penalised.
Despite the teachers’ efforts, I believe most engagement from that year group is through an app that one of them developed which automates logging in to Microsoft Teams – and occasionally they edit the message so it looks personal.
The only pure online training courses that sell are the ones that relate to compliance and are compulsory, or certify that you have acquired IT skills. This is the kind of knowledge acquisition that can be proved through online multiple-choice tests or online exercises. These courses generate a certificate for the learner and lots of lovely data on the company’s Learning Management System, to show what percentage of staff have taken the courses, passed the tests or said their work efficiency has improved, and then they can generate some kind of Return on Investment on training budgets to keep the CFO happy.
Individual learners are willing to pay for a certificate they can add to their CVs but otherwise expect content to be free. Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have a very high dropout rate. Coursera, an online learning platform mainly for university courses, has a business model based on exactly this understanding of the learner mentality. The University of Tokyo course on Japanese art and literature I took was free but they send you guilt provoking emails if you don’t complete each module within a certain time. If you want a certificate of passing and completion which you can load onto your LinkedIn profile, you have to pay. And so, although I took the course for the love of acquiring knowledge – reader, I paid.
Coursera have done a great job of making the user interface as easy as possible. This is where some of the benefits of being online come in. So long as firewalls and bandwidth do not intervene, it should mean greater accessibility to knowledge for people all around the world. Coursera videos are no more than 10 minutes long, each with a short quiz at the end to make sure you were paying attention. As well as the slides and a video of the professor giving the lecture, there is a transcript with a cursor indicating where the professor has got to in the lecture underneath the video. So if you haven’t quite understood, or your attention wandered, you can check back, rewind and pass the test.
Non-native speakers of English have been far more enthusiastic about e-learning and webinars than native speakers, in my experience. They like the multiple ways to absorb the information – slides, transcripts, aurally and offline. Native English speakers can help during live webinars by summarising key points in the chat function. The host also has far more control over shutting up domineering fluent speakers and making sure the shyer people are brought into the conversation – including through private chat if they’d rather not speak out publicly.
But – not everyone has the technology, bandwidth or budget to participate equally. Teachers at my husband’s well-funded private school have apparently broken down in tears from spending hours marking work online, only to see it disappear into the ether.
Maybe it’s their fault for not backing up, maybe the school has terrible connectivity, who knows. But it brings it home that things must be a hundred times worse for schools and homes where good technology and connectivity is just not affordable or people don’t have the technological knowhow to find solutions.
I realise this article may attract a lot of snark from specialists who have been studying interactive learning design for years, and know way more than I do about how to design learning paths and interfaces. In my defence, I did actually manage a team of people with that knowledge and AI programming skills, way back in the day. Our aim was to get away from directed learning and move towards self-directed learning. That is still my goal.
I attended various learning technology conferences too – where all too often a seminar entitled “making xml work in a corporate learning environment” or some such would end in a spectacular technology fail and blue screens all round. So yes, properly designed learning experiences are available online, but we are still a long way from the user or the technology being smart enough.
This is the deepest darkest dirty secret. We worry that if we do too good a job with online content and the technology does improve enough, we will no longer be needed. Teachers and entertainers want to be needed, even loved – and this is what we get paid for. This is known in business as self-cannibalization – making a cheaper version of your product or service, which then kills your lifeline.
But we should not despair, there are reasons why eating yourself doesn’t work.
If audiences can get the same experience from a CD, DVD or book, why do they continue to go to gigs, concerts, shows? Partly it’s the social experience – the thrill of being in a crowd of people who are going through the same emotions. The closest I have seen during lockdown to recreating the social experience of a concert is TimsTwitterListeningParty – where Tim Burgess of the 1990s group The Charlatans sets an album for everyone to listen to and tweet about in real time – but the real joy is that the original artist also tweets about the making of the record or photos of the band, in synchronicity to each track being listened to.
It’s also for the social experience that people still want to attend classes, despite moaning about being away from their real work. Even if children say they hate school, they want to be with their friends – and it’s usually because of a bad experience of being with others, such as bullying, that makes them hate school the most, rather than the teaching. And of course the teacher can do a lot to set the tone and clamp down on bullying.
Preferring to be in a room with others in order to learn is also an acknowledgement that if you’re not trapped in a class, you are very likely going to get distracted.
Also, in the corporate world, I have found that even when I was on the receiving end of poor-quality training, just being away from the desk and having time to reflect had a value in its own right.
The best concerts, exhibitions or plays are where you feel fully immersed – “lost in another world.” It’s not so easy to do that at home where daily chores and worries intrude.
A close second to being bullied as a reason for hating school is that it’s “boring and pointless”. In other words, children cannot see how what they are learning applies to their own life.
Many of the TV shows that have done well in the UK during lockdown are ones which allow us to live vicariously (and maybe thereby learn about) cultural experiences – Race around the World, The Repair Shop, or Grayson Perry’s Art Club
But not all teachers or subjects translate well to video, and learners still need to be able to interact with the teacher so that they can understand how to apply the knowledge to their individual situation. You can give individual attention and co-create online, but again numbers need to be limited to about the same as a classroom size, to allow proper 1:1 interaction.
The audience or learner wants authenticity – they can spot a mile off when a teacher or entertainer is phoning it in. This is why a lot of e-learning is so dry – actors voicing narratives about how to be a leader just do not resonate. The most popular YouTube videos are where the person is narrating in real time as they play a game. The first video that came up when I was searching for help on how to cut my son’s hair was a hairdresser in a barber shop cutting hair while explaining his technique.
We insist at Japan Intercultural Consulting that all our facilitators have authentic experience of working in Japanese organisations and also have lived in the counterpart culture. We also encourage our facilitators to tell stories from their own experiences during the training. Our participants need to feel that we have “been in your shoes”. But the only way we can be sure this happens is to interact with participants, to understand their experiences.
Parents are struggling trying to do home schooling and work at the same time. Schools were invented partly so people could go to work. Before universal education, only rich people could afford home tutoring, which then perpetuated the professional elite path of going to university to become a lawyer or clergyman.
The only way to work from home and teach your children at the same time if you are not rich enough to afford a home tutor is to teach them through the work you are doing. This was how craftsmen in the past educated their children – they were apprenticed to their parent or to another “master”. The modern-day equivalent would be getting your children to alphabetize your files, or helping you design a spreadsheet for your sales data – or in my case, getting them to edit and add subtitles to my videos.
Japanese companies are still resistant to classroom-based learning and even more so to working remotely, particularly for soft skills. The reason for this is that most Japanese companies are family style in mentality – learning is done through apprenticeship and on the job learning.
I admit I already loved Tidying up with Marie Kondo on Netflix, but it wasn’t just because it added to my Japanese cultural expertise – my obsession with TV decluttering shows stretches back to House Doctor in the 1990s and lockdown has impelled me to binge watch Call the Cleaners. There is something very cathartic and inspiring about watching other people confront their fears and phobias, purge and then move on with their lives, and this is what I needed to do with online learning.
Although we may have a sick feeling in our stomachs about the threat of technology, teachers and trainers will never have to eat themselves. So long as we are authentic and know what we are talking about, then we can help the learner apply the knowledge for themselves, and recreate experiences. We can set scientific experiments, maths problems and history essays to be done away from the classroom, in the knowledge that they need a teacher to guide them and check the result.
If, like now, we can only teach online, then rather than trying to dump a mass of information online or learn how to build an interactive module, we should focus on creating good offline assignments that guide the learner as they explore, apply their new knowledge and recreate experiences for themselves. But learner numbers will be limited if this is to be supervised and checked properly. Ultimately, the cost per learner in terms of time and salaries is not going to be much cheaper than a classroom-based experience if the assignment is well framed and resources are properly curated.
A teacher or entertainer in a germ-infested room full of people is still the most cost effective and emotionally impactful way of transmitting knowledge, insight and experience. Our enforced isolation as teachers and entertainers should be a time to declutter, focus on what sparks joy and maybe add one or two new gadgets into the freed-up space.
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
Alistair Dormer – credit Paul Bigland
Hitachi’s rail business is only 5% of the whole group’s turnover, but is growing rapidly and moving from being “double domestic” to a truly global business. Overseas sales are now 83% of turnover, having been 28% of the business in 2012.
Nikkei Business interviewed Alistair Dormer (subscription only, in Japanese), the CEO of Hitachi Rail who is also a Senior Vice President and Executive Officer of the Hitachi Group about his four years as CEO – at a time when the railway business is undergoing major change, with Siemens and Alstom joining forces in Europe for their rail business.
Dormer talks about the importance of being able to scale multilaterally through M&A, with the acquisition of Ansaldo Breda and other companies, which resulted in acquiring customers across 27 countries – 26% of business is now in the UK, 17% in Japan, 10% in Asia Pacific. Hitachi Rail is also moving, like every technology business, into “solutions” adding a services side, including communication technology, software development, signalling systems and operations.
Dormer says the most important thing for Hitachi Rail as a Japanese company was to speed up every aspect. “It is a strength of Hitachi as with other Japanese companies that business advances on a consensus basis, carefully harmonizing in-house planning and business negotiations with partners. This leads to stable quality standards and organizational cohesion, but it is also a weakness in that it takes too much time when you face global competition. The leader needs to be able to make quick decisions and communicate rapidly.”
Of course this is even more difficult when communication and decisions have to be made across long distances such as between the UK and Japan. So Dormer decided the best way was to move people around, to raise the frequency and density of communication. So there has been substantial exchange of people between the factory in Japan and manufacturing bases in UK and Italy.
If there is a substantial geographical and time distance, then people prefer not to have meetings about trivial things, but these details can later become obstacles. So having more regular interaction is necessary. Hitachi Rail hterefore also has regular video confererence and Dormer himself visits sites, holding meeitngs with 50-80 people to exchange opinions.
With English as the common language, Dormer (as a native Brit) instituted a rule that only simple English should be used. “When native English speakers are talking, they speed up. It should be easy to say, “I don’t understand, I can’t follow what you’re saying”, but it’s difficult to do this in a teleconference or an important meeting. So then the meeting ends inconclusively and you find out later that people did not understand. So not only should you use simple English, but also I put in a process to confirm understanding after the meeting. The productivity of our meetings has greatly improved as a result”
Hitachi Rail has also introduced common standards across all countries for HR reviews, cost, engineering performance etc. “Each country, the UK and Italy and Japan, have different cultures and ways of doing things, so we did not force conformity, but respected each others’ cultures while working to Hitachi’s values as the common standard.”
With regard to Brexit, Dormer says he is repeatedly asked about it, but at the moment there has been no change. “Hitachi has good relations with the UK government. All we can do is continue to ask that companies like us who have their regional base in the UK can continue to access the EU market as seamlessly as possible. There is no choice but to believe this. A transition period is being discussed, so it’s possible the environment will not change for the foreseeable future. However it is still a shock to me on a personal level that the UK made such a decision – even when we knew there was nothing to gain from leaving the EU. There are many people in our offices who were born in the European Union outside the UK, and they are worried. My priority is to reassure them, but the only thing I can say is that nobody knows what the future will hold.”
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
Many creative ideas were proposed in Japan to deal with the power shortages this summer, such as making Friday a holiday and working on Saturday instead. The more articles I read describing these ideas, the more I hoped that flexible working will finally take off in Japan.
It’s been long overdue and much discussed as one way of encouraging women to rejoin the workforce. But I have always thought that unless a critical mass of Japanese companies decide to adopt it – in the face of some overriding social need – rather than a token gesture towards diversity in the workplace aimed at women only – it will never happen in a widespread way.
Being able to work from home has an obvious advantage in a power crisis – it creates less of a burden on the energy hungry national transport system. It also enables more resilience should, heaven forbid, another earthquake strike Japan, as workers will be more dispersed rather than concentrated in one vulnerable office building.
The long term benefits to society, other than the obvious one of allowing more women to return to work, would be that presenteeism – staying long hours in the office to prove loyalty to the team and the company – might finally stop being the norm. It’s hard for Japanese companies to accept that presenteeism has come to a natural end, because one of the fundamental attitudes behind overtime is group orientation. You have never finished your work for the day, because you could always be helping someone else in your team.
One of the major changes in the British workplace over the past decade or so has been the increase in what I call “grey zone” working – thanks to smartphones, we can check our work e-mails during the morning and evening commute.
Lightweight laptops and the ability to log on remotely to corporate servers mean we can easily take our work home with us. This worries Japanese companies, who see all the security risks that entails. But now they also realise that there are security risks in having data concentrated in hardware in one location.
One of the other reasons the UK has taken to flexible working is the fact that we are in an ideal location in terms of time zones. We can pick up from Asia in the morning, and “baton touch” as the Japanese say, to our colleagues in North America in the afternoon. Early morning and late evening phone calls are much more bearable if we can do them from home.
Of course we also realise we have to keep a balance in terms of social interaction and knowledge sharing with our colleagues. A whole week at home would not help us do our jobs properly either. I hope Japan can bridge the gap at the other end of the world’s day, from North America on to Europe via Asia, but it will take flexible working hours to make that a reality.
This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
I’ve recently been involved in a large number of video conference calls and have had to revise my opinion of their effectiveness, in a positive sense, thanks to the technological improvements of recent years. But when it comes to communicating with Japanese counterparts, video conferencing is still no replacement for face-to-face meetings.
The issues involved in remote communication with what are known as “high context” cultures like Japan are well documented. People from such cultures prefer communication that relies on nonverbal cues such as body language, silences and voice tones. People from low context cultures (the US, Germany and Australia, for example) prefer explicit verbal communication.
It would seem, then, that video conferencing is the next best thing to meeting a high-context person face to face, and certainly preferable to e-mail and phone calls. My impression so far is that it can work, but mostly for regular, formal group meetings.
Even then though, there are some problems. Firstly the native English speakers don’t realise that the way they are speaking – conversational, lots of “witty” asides and sentences which tail off – is alienating the group at the other end. All the classic Japanese group meeting behaviours start to emerge – eyes shut, furrowed brows or side conversations to clarify comprehension and intention.
The solution to this is to speak “international” English – clear short sentences, lots of clarifying and comprehension checking statements and questions and use of visible agendas, notes and slideware.
Still, differing expectations about the functions of meetings can affect the outcomes of a video conference. In Japan, decisions are reached outside of formal meetings. A person wanting to make a proposal will talk informally to all possible people affected, and maybe send around a proposal which will be marked as approved by all the different teams concerned. A meeting might then be called, but it will be for rubber stamping purposes, to report back or to draw up action points. In western cultures, however, meetings are seen as the chance to brainstorm or resolve differences.
Finally, there is one vital piece of communication that video conferencing cannot enable – “informal contact.” In Japan much of the negotiating and trust building is done outside formal meetings – in pubs, karaoke bars and restaurants. It’s the infamous honne and tatemae problem – there is the official opinion, which will be expressed in group meetings but to know the real story, you have to be out of the office, talking one to one, or amongst a select few.
Face to face continues to be necessary from time to time, not just in the first phase of virtual team building. I’ve had plenty of beers and trust building with Japanese colleagues over the years, but when speaking one to one on the phone, in Japanese, they sometimes cannot be straight with me. The reason for this is not profound – open plan offices are the norm in Japan, so everyone can hear what you say.
This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
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
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
We are delighted to announce that Business Communication, written by Pernille Rudlin and Rochelle Kopp, was published in Japan by Lightworks and First Press on 21st June 2008.
ビジネス・コミュニケーション
ライトワークスビジネスベーシックシリーズ
ロッシェル・カップ 著 パニラ・ラドリン 著 ファーストプレス 版
2008年06月 発行 ページ 107P サイズ Ａ５ソフトカバー 1,260円（1,200円＋税）
ISBN 978-4-904336-01-4 (4-904336-01-1)
ビジネス・コミュニケーションとはコミュニケーションの基本は、「自分の意見を他人に伝えること」と「他人が言おうとしていることを理解すること」に尽きる。ビジネス・コミュニケーション能力を身につけることは、ビジネスパーソンが成果を上げるための最も確かな方法の一つである。世界標準をマスターする!日経新聞、日経WOMANで活躍中の著者が 日系企業へのコンサル経験を基に執筆 日本人が陥りがちな弱点の克服法を米英スペシャリストがわかりやすく解説。
Written with young Japanese managers in mind, the book contains short case studies, graphical illustrations and descriptions of various key topics in business communication such as giving feedback, making presentations and brainstorming.
第１章 効果的なコミュニケーションの要素
１ 明快さ
２ 一貫性
３ 前後関係
４ 礼儀
５ 確認
６ 簡潔性
７ 論理的な構成
８ 衝突の回避
第２章 一般的なコミュニケーションのタイプ
１ 効果的な質問
２ 説得力のある主張
３ 要求／指示をする
４ 情報の伝達
５ ポジティブ・フィードバック
６ ネガティブ・フィードバック
７ 問題解決
８ 非言語コミュニケーション
第３章 特殊な状況下でのコミュニケーション
１ ビジネスメール
２ ミーティング
３ ブレーンストーミング
４ インタビューを受ける
５ インタビューをする
６ 交渉
７ プレゼンテーション
８ 危機管理
It’s available on Amazon.co.jp and Rakuten
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.
When I worked for a Japanese multinational in the UK, I used to answer my phone with the name of the company. Annoyingly, this meant I was often mistaken for a secretary or a receptionist, but I persisted because I knew it was what our Japanese customers and colleagues expected. We all had direct lines, both in the UK and Japan, but in Japan there was ‘group pick up’ for each team and it was considered unprofessional to let any phone on the team ring more than a few times. Voicemail was not used and still is not widespread in Japan.
Japanese customers expect to get through to the person in charge, the tantosha, or someone who is on their team. We had a whiteboard calendar in my Japanese office, where everyone wrote in their business trips and meetings, so each team member knew where the others were. We also knew the basics of each other’s business, thanks to the fact that, as in most Japanese companies, we had an open plan office, with teams clustered together, so we could hear and see what other team members were doing. So not only could we tell the customer where the tantosha was, but we could usually say something more helpful about the status of their business than “can I take a message?”
A tantosha is not necessarily in charge of the team nor do they have ultimate decision-making authority but does have day-to-day responsibility for that customer’s business.
The term ‘madoguchi’, window, is sometimes used, when someone is the ‘window’ into an overseas office or another partner company. They may not be the expert or decision maker that the other company ultimately need to speak to, but they are the ‘first port of call’ or may be in charge of the overall coordination of a deal.
An Australian fund manager I met last week commented on this ‘madoguchi’ system. “I think the poor Japanese guy in the company we were dealing with was confused and overworked, because he seemed to be the only person on their side working on the deal. Whereas on our side there were about half a dozen people he had to talk to, each expert in their own area, and each with decision making authority. He, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any decision making power at all.”
Japanese customers are accustomed to this idea of an assigned contact person, who is accessible at almost all times, who is part of a team that works collaboratively, and the access point to a network of decision makers and experts. In the UK, many of the professional services firms I advise, such as accountants and lawyers, have adapted to this expectation by setting up a “Japan Desk”, manned by Japanese speakers, who deal with incoming client queries, divert them away from using costly senior management time and provide customers with accessible, consistent and knowledgeable service.
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”
For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter.