Information sharing and reporting is often a cause of friction in Japanese companies. Here is one extreme example that shows just how serious the implications can be. A Japanese company abroad appointed their first non-Japanese CEO (previous CEOs were Japanese). This person, let’s call him John, had only worked for American and European companies previously.…
“Even monkeys sometimes fall from trees”, as goes the Japanese expression. Despite over 30 years of working experience with the country, this expression came to me as I realized that I had made a cardinal mistake during a kick-off meeting with Japanese clients. First things first, let’s gain a grasp of what this expression really…
Very often we are asked how to address Japanese business partners or colleagues correctly. Here are a few tips, which of course apply equally to written correspondence as well as to conversations. As a rule of thumb, in Japanese business life, the surname name is always followed by the honorific suffix “san” (meaning “dear” or…
Here is an important piece of information that will help you work with Japanese colleagues here and at HQ. If you have ever seen PowerPoint slides created by Japanese you will have noticed 2 points: 1. Every slide has an extremely dense layout. This is owed to a very detail-based approach in Japan that states…
The coronavirus COVID-19 has shaken up the way we work. We now know more about Zoom or MS Team applications than we did a few months ago and have all been invited to an “online apero” at this point. As managing director of a company specialized in multi-cultural training to improve business efficiency when working…
During one of my seminars I gave in Japan, I realized the different reactions Japanese and Westerners have towards being told they have made a mistake. I am talking about the very first, almost instinctive reaction towards someone who is telling you something is wrong in your presentation, in your report or in the…
Non-Japanese participants to JCO’s sessions often express their incredulity when their supposedly polite Japanese colleagues are suddenly answering their phone albeit being in the midst of a conversation with them. “They just left me standing there…” says one German employee in a Japanese company. Another observation that seems to clash with the notion of the…
Have you ever tried to brainstorm with Japanese colleagues? If you did, you might have been disappointed by the lack of participation by your colleagues. You might have thought “I can’t believe they are top class engineers and they don’t even have any ideas.” When you ask Japanese colleagues to brainstorm, you are asking them…
We often hear that Japan has a culture of shame (vs. guilt in the West) This affects many areas of work and life, as to how you are perceived by your neighbors, your colleagues and your clients is extremely important. The focus of this article on Japanese business culture is how this concept of shame…
Let´s start with a short question on the use of emoji. Like many things that surround us, emoji originated in Japan and can be translated as 絵, e = “picture” plus 文字, moji = “letter”. They were developed for mobile messaging at the end of the 1990ies. (here is a comparison of how they looked…
