Foreign Correspondent: Japan
Foreign Correspondent: Japan
About the author: Previously lived in Japan for one year as an exchange student and speaks Japanese with a fair degree of proficiency, still can't fully understand newspapers but can get the gist most of the time. Currently woking in an all-Japanese company (except for one Chinese guy) and is actively seeking Japanese female company. This blog of sorts is aimed to be a record of events and thoughts on those events.
2008年8月10日 Problem? Do exactly what I did in 1986
Due to "popular" demand this report will convey my current impression of risk management in Japanese companies. In Japanese business the general logic seems to be that if you make a decision you incur the risk of the decision being wrong and hence you should try to have as many of your decisions made for you as possible. In a western company you find that employees who can't make their own decisions are the first ones to come under pressure when performance appraisal season kicks into gear. Those who avoid hard decisions are the ones who get canned or at least never make it to senior management. Here I would term risk management as blame management.
Even if most Japanese companies claim not to have lifetime employment they still have the mindset of lifetime employment. The effect of this is that pay-scale depends largely on how long you've been with the company, whilst promotion is often a meaningless name. With a western company where much of your promotions and pay revolve around you making good decisions and this leading to good performance, in a Japanese company these motivators for making decisions are lost. Taking a gutsy decision incurs the risk of it failing and being associated with them, whilst the benefit of it succeeding is not necessarily translated into future management success. The best course of action is to only make decisions that are insignificant, passing any and all potentially risky decisions up the management chain. This also happens in the west to an extent, but the people who do it aren't promoted or given raises easily and their job security is always in doubt
What this means for my company and many like is that decisions are often passed so far up the chain of command that they are passed to those who are undoubtedly talented but applying their talents in many areas simultaneously. This means they lack much of the specific knowledge as it relates to the state of the market. The our market is shrinking at the moment and is getting down to the core customers, hence specific knowledge is not such a problem for my company as it is for others as it isn't a rapidly changing beast. However if you keep approaching the market as we alwas have then at best we'll tread water, many others are sinking dramatically. What we need is innovation and this management structure stifles it.
However I do think that our company is more innovative than most given the way we are linking certain departments to create products. I wont go into detail on them here but it is worth considering where this innovation comes from. The truth is that my company president understands the current situation, he is also has very good judgement. The real seeds of innovation in the company ar coming from the president himself, and though he gives people the room to innovate he is generally powerless to change such an ingrained cultural nuace.
What does this centralisation of any and all risk management on the higher up managers? Well nothing for SMEs like mine. The shorter distance to higher management and the smaller amount of risk management to be undertaken means that for smart companies it's not such a problem. But this method could not be applicable to large companies as far as I can see. I do know that in our industry we're kicking the crap out of the bigger companies for return on equity but there's too many factors at play to draw such broad conclusions. But given what I've seen I would have to conclude that somehow giving younger employees more ownership (sorry for the buzzword) over their projects they could not only become more innovative as a company, but attract more of the young talent to their company. Something that seems to be taken for granted in Japan, even though so many of their youths go to university and then decide that their time is better spent not joining a company.
Th outcome of all this is that potential innovators are avoiding making decisions whilst their bosses, lacking fresh input from lower down, make decisions the way they always have, having been cut off from regular society by the microcosm of their company.
Dr. Boy --Dr Boy 11:07, 10 August 2008 (GMT)
2008年7月23日 Culture based on fear;
"Employee feedback" is not a phrase that I would wager is heard too often in the Japanese workplace. There's quite a good reason for this. The entire workplace environment in a Japanese company as far as I can ascertain seems to be structured on this lack of clarity. The effect of not having any clear worker feedback, even in the form of "well done" or "good call" (and not just to me but to everyone else in the office as far as I can see) is that no one worker can know if what he has done is good enough and will ostensibly try to achieve the best possible outcome in all undertakings. What little feedback there is is often unpredictable or downright illogical, such was the case last week when a worker was given a thorough talking down in the morning orietation meeting by a superior. His crime? In order to make a deadline he had put in unpaid overtime working until 10pm at which time he submitted his report via e-mail. Apparently this was too late at night for the manager who then said the employee was slacking. This was in front of the other 20 or so employees in the office orientation meeting, which is the entire branch office, and in the Japanese culture such public remonstrations are a source of great shame. If I were him I'd be half pissed off, half confused.
This certainly has the effect of forcing people to at least act busy but in actual results the outcome is less clear. The real question to answer is not why the employee worked until ten but why it took him until ten to finish it. Given this lack of predictability and general culture of uncertainty workers in Japan seem to spend more time looking for ways to tell people they're busy than actually being busy. I find myself doing the same thing to adapt, which is absurd because I have a job I know how to do with lots to do and limited time. So in a culture where everyone is afraid they could be singled out as the slacker for any or no reason at all we see that everyone becomes the slacker, even those who are too busy for slacking. The real reason that the manger was complaining was because the employee hadn't attributed enough time to the task to meet the deadline, which is quite a legitimate concern, however the manager fails to see how his inconsistent application of feedback (positive or negative) has had a meaningful contribution to the problem.
In this context the efforts of managers to spur activity by singling people out seems to give the managers an appearance of grumpy old men and occaisionally being dismissed as such (although this would never be said to anyone in the company)
You could just say that "this guy's a foreigner, albeit with a good grasp of the language and culture, he probably just doesn't understand the feedback system". You'd be right to an extent, however I'm not the only who doesn't understand the feedback system. After my boss's boss talks to my boss about something he has done well or not so well my boss then goes and calls other people in the company and asks them what his boss was talking about to try and get a feel for the situation. This seems to be because no one can ask simple questions to superiors.
There is every chance my analysis is wrong, but it's a starting point to work from in analysing workplace problems over here. It's worth noting that misinterpretations are usually more damaging than a lack of interpretation, and I should therefore keep my mout shut for the time being.
**Clarification: For the record feedback happens but it's cryptic**
--Dr Boy 15:27, 23 July 2008 (GMT)
P.S. Next time I'll either be considering "Company President: destructive habits that waste time and employee loyalty", "Life Employment: yes they seriously still do that", "Gender Descrimination: At some point it stops being a joke", "Japanese Management Style: Problem? Do exactly what I did in 1986" or "Japanese Uni Chicks: Undertanding when what they say is true or false"
2008年7月21日 Crazy Japanese;
I've been here for three months now and have seen the odd thing or two which I would describe as unusual. For instance to your right you will see a photo of me staring in aggrivated disgust at a panty vending machine, although the laundry status of these garments remains a mystery (I have too much self respect to buy and check these things) it remains an oddity to the western gentleman.
My current theory is that they're actually clean and designed as sexy lingerie you would bring back for your girlfriend or wife to wear, given the Japanese penchant for bland cotton underwear. But that's no where near as hilarious as telling people that they're actually used underwear bought by Japanese businessmen.
But it leads into a discussion in more general terms. Why is it that the extremes of Japanese society get so extreme? Anyone with an internet connection can witness first hand the the horrors of Japanese porn, or perhaps a better proxy is Japanese fashion. The question is why is it that a society which demands such conformity ends up with diverse sets of extremes and little if any middle ground? The short answer is I don't know. The long answer is that I don't think I know for sure but...
The "but" in this statement is Dr. Boy's social theory of peer pressure(tm). For an example lets look at fashion. People go on at length about the various subcultures of Japanese fashion and their various extreme machinations, but to look at these in detail is to miss the point. There are really two kinds of Japanese fashion, normal and abnormal. Normal is conservative, abnormal is anything outside of conservative. When you consider that anything outside of conservative is abnormal then when you dress as a goth you may as well wear a 19th century wedding dress, if you're going to dress as punk you may as well have a foot tall mohawk because if your style were underdone then you fit in nowhere. Not extreme enough for the extreme crowds and too extreme for the conservative crowds. This problem would also probably not occur if Japanese people didn't identify themselves with the group they're in as much either, however these groups themselves would not become extreme if not forced out of "normal" group. Japanese people need to rethink their expectations if they're going to bring down their suicide rate and get their Hikikomori problem under control, but culture doesn't change easily.
There's also a high probability that I'm just talking shit.
--Dr Boy 14:30, 21 July 2008 (GMT)
