Episode #302: As The Leader, Never Assume In Japan

Leaders are busy people. Processes become established and we assume they are working properly. You are sent in to run the Japan operation and or you join a new company here and you are faced with major tasks, like raising the revenues or reducing costs or expanding market share or all three. These tend to be the big chunks of work which command all of your attention. Because these are usually not start-up operations, there are existing methods for the functions of the business. Over time, you start to play around with how the business is run, introducing innovations or making changes. Time moves on and you assume that these changes are part and parcel of the standard operation procedure for the business. In Japan, assume nothing.

When we take over and concentrate on the key KPIs we have been given, we don’t have a lot of time to dig down too deeply on the operations component. This is a mistake, because there are bound to be inefficiencies, anti-client structures, brand damagers and worse tucked away in there.

It can be simple things like expecting customers to fill out eleven fields on your website to get some lead generation magnet. Maybe it is a free report or an industry survey, or a piece of research. Maybe it is really crazy and the customer has to keep filling out these fields every time, if they want more than one thing off the website. That drives people nuts and you have to ask why that is the way it is. Often, you find out that fairly clueless people decided that they needed all the information from the first, rather than having a strategy to attain it over time. Or maybe that is how it was with everyone at first, but cleverer people worked out that was blocker and dropped the requirements down to an email address to get better traction with getting leads. Your firm however has persisted with the old model.

It might be how easy or hard you are to do business with. I met the President of a large corporation here. We did some presentation coaching work for a big event he had coming up. A thought occurred to me a little after we had finished and I wanted to share it with him, to make sure his presentation was a total success. I rang the general number, asking if I could speak to the President, using his name. I was told he was unavailable. Okay, so could I leave a message. No. Okay, could I talk with his secretary, because obviously the person I am talking to who picks up the phone is an idiot, happily destroying the brand. No, the secretary is unavailable as well. Dead end right there.

This particular President joined this major corporation over a year ago and he doesn’t speak Japanese, so I would be 100% sure he had no idea how callers trying to reach him were being treated. He would be assuming that everyone in the company is busily working hard to make the wheels of commerce turn as quickly as possible. Just to make sure it wasn’t a language problem I was facing, I asked my own executive assistant to call them and she got the very same treatment.

So call your own company. Do it during the day but also do it before 9.00am or at lunch time or after 6.00pm, when the usual person isn’t there to answer the phone. This is when you discover that the brand is being hammered by people who have no idea about brand. They are unhelpful and unfriendly in tone. When you ask for the person you want, they say that they are not at their desk and then go stony silent. They don’t say helpful things like, “please allow me to take a message and I will make sure they ring you back”. They don’t pick up the phone and give their own name, they just say the company name and that is it. None of this is helpful. You probably have temporary staff working for your organisation and no one bothers to train them either and they are often the person manning the phones when everyone else is out. The person with the least skin in the game is now the owner of the brand image.

Japan is interesting, because when I discuss this with Japanese business people here, they can’t see the issue of not saying your name. They try and justify it. “Why would you volunteer that information to everyone”, they say?. They don’t understand that this is saying, I will take accountability and responsibility for the business of this phone call and give the caller a point of reference to help them. They say a fish is the last thing to discover water and this is a similar problem in Japan. This is a country of group think, in so many facets.

The other thing to look for is when people start changing your innovations. You think you have brought an improvement to the system and that this is now the way we operate around here. It is always enlightening to discover you are the only person operating under that assumption. They change it, don’t tell you and you usually only find out by accident. They usually change it, because they can’t be bothered doing it the way you want. They see it as bothersome and don’t get the why of the change or the value of the change.

A good rule of thumb in Japan, is dig deep on how things are done from the operations point of view. If you make changes or introduce innovations, keep checking that people down at the bottom of the totem pole have not scuttled your ideas.