Episode #100: Noriko Silvester, President & Founder, Candlewick Co., Ltd.

Noriko Silvester is the President and Founder of Candlewick. Candlewick is a Public Relations consulting firm that works with clients in the Food, Beauty, Travel and Education space with a strong focus on products that influence people’s wellbeing. They support overseas clients with their transition into the Japanese market, developing a strategy that considers differences in consciousness, customs and business in their home market and Japan. Mrs. Silvester started her career working as a secretary working at an American Financial Institution in Japan. She later realized that she wanted to get more involved in the business side of things and moved her way into sales and then got into Japanese cosmetics. She did marketing and sales for 8 years before moving briefly to a pharmaceutical company that had moved into Japan at the time, the company pulled out of Japan. She later started working at a Swiss company as a Brand Manager and they also pulled out of Japan. At this point, she started to feel that someone else was dictating her life, so she decided to start her own business. She founded Candlewick in 2004. She wanted her company’s name to have some meaning. Candlewick was the name of her husband’s grandmother’s home which was also close to Candlewick Lake. She also added that the wick is the string at the core of the candle that is necessary to light it, so it is like the message that is core to a business functioning well.

Mrs. Silvester says that she finds that sharing knowledge and sharing experience makes people more open and likely to share. She also notes that the default Japanese tendency is to be less proactive. She is currently trying to get people on her team to be more proactive. She says providing people with experiential learning automatically forces them to be more proactive. For example, there is a foreign staff member on her team and most of their clients are overseas clients, so her staff automatically must be more proactive to work properly. The handling of mistakes depends on the staff’s attitude, if the staff consult with upper management and do everything within their power to do things correctly and there is still a mistake, she says that upper management takes responsibility of that, however, is someone is very casual about making mistakes and not taking responsibility, she can be very severe about that.

Mrs. Silvester’s advice to someone coming to Japan for a posting to Japan who doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t know Japan she would say to cover 4 areas:

Staying in the box is the default option. Staying comfortable with the familiar is ingrained into Japanese culture
It is good to have a mentor, a leader who is heading an organization would be helpful. A foreign mentor running a company in Japan would be helpful to speak with and learn from.
Reading books about leadership in Japan to allow them to gain some insights before coming to Japan. Mrs. Silvester says she recently read a book with the title is "Making Rules, Breaking Rules that she found insightful.
Experience and join the community. She says Japan has a long history and things are ingrained in the culture and people have a way of working. Learning and trying to understand this would be very helpful. Learning Japanese would be helpful in the workplace as well.