Hey I just won a writing contest on the topic of 'International Business.'
http://writing-contests.helium.com/marketingcontest/leaderboard/388?cms=channel-champions
Kind of scary because I know absolutely nothing about International Business. Hey JPH3, take a look at the one entitled 'Doing Business in Japan.' I threw it up in a half an hour and have no idea whether any of it is true. You might want to let me know because I would hate to fool anyone actually seeking business advice like I fooled the judges. It needs serious revision.
Anyway, these contests are totally hit and miss. I know a lot about hamsters but I only got second in that one this week. Maybe it is good for me not to know a certain amount about something. Point of diminishing returns, probably.
Anyway, back in the USA and glad. Tomorrow we go home to end the boys' momless revelry.
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3 comments:
Great job on the Japan article. On my trip back there recently, some of the elements you’ve noted were more prominent than others, but I definitely think everything you’ve included is correct. A few specific notes:
- The whole thing about business cards is spot on in every detail. As missionaries, we even made up our own ‘business cards’ so we could participate in the ritual, and it actually helped quite a bit with street contacting.
- The group meeting thing is very true too. When we needed to schedule a meeting with one or two people over there, it always ended up being about 20, with all sorts of random people included for no apparent reason to a foreigner.
- It may be that my experience this past trip was unique, but the formalities around gift giving seemed to be much more relaxed than before. That may be a Tokyo thing, though.
Also, you mentioned the American CEO using first names with subordinates, and this actually touches on one area where I see a big (and growing) difference in corporate leadership styles. In Japan, the formal role of the dominant corporate superior has not changed at all, in contrast to the increased adoption of the “open door policy” in western (particularly US companies). The US culture shift has been a good thing in my opinion. Having an open door has lead to more transparency amongst colleagues, less department-level deception, more focus on human values rather than just corporate values, etc. The role of the American CEO has definitely shifted from King-of-the-corporate-universe to that of a more genuine partnership-building collaborator.
In my case at Disney, when I see Bob – definitely not “Mr. Iger” – he greets everybody warmly. There is no pageantry about him, he is always friendly and he seems like the kind of guy you want to hang out with even tho he is the CEO of a $35B company. In Japan, however, subordinates still rarely have open-door relationships with even their immediate superiors, and moreover, a subordinate would never even approach a superior two or more rungs up the ladder for any reason.
This also plays out in Pop culture too. You don’t see movies or tv shows in Japan with the bright-eyed-peon-type who saves the day by telling the president of the company what he is doing wrong. But over here, the corporate chump-to-champ story is the plot of heroics in lots of stories.
There are also very significant differences in the way Western companies and Japanese companies develop ideas – and this translates into very different product development lifecycles. For example, the US product lifecycle has a much larger focus on “Requirements Development” (i.e. conceptual modeling, or planning a product/process before it is built), whereas Quality Control rules the roost in Japan to the extent that multiple prototypes are actually built way before mass production. This is common in manufacturing-heavy industries, which certainly matches up with the post-war manufacturing boom in Japan. We’ll probably see similar maturity in China in a couple of decades.
Anyway, it’s very interesting stuff.
Cheers.
Thanks for the thoughtful and detailled response, I am very relieved that I am not way off. I do need to revise it; these contests are only run for a week and so I never can find even my typos by then.
But this will also help me put a few more personal type of my experiences in there, of course if you don't mind me citing my big-shot international businessman brother!
I am already getting some traffic on this article, and who knows if I make it good I might even sell it and get paid twice. Might get my hourly wage up to like 15 dollars.
Hey was thinking about something, do you really think that the American CEO thing where they say hey call me Bob or whatever is actually a sign of more open-doorism? I have wondered whether some of that generous familiarity really obscures the hierarchical relationships that are really actually still there, meaning there are certainly still differences between CEO's and subordinates, it is just that in the American feel-good corporate atmosphers (kind of like casual fridays where it is ok to be casual in the exact right way and no other) it just makes it so that it is harder to actually tell what the hierarchy is and identify ways where you can't cross the line and make yourself someone's equal. It almost seems to me like if someone is really your boss it isn't that much more of an imposition to have to call them Mr. Eisner in fact it could make appropriate behavior and boundaries a bit more clear and secure, I don't know if that makes sense or not...
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