Episode #114: Masatsugu Shimono, ex-senior Vice President, IBM Japan
Japan's Top Business Interviews
Masatsugu Shimono is the former Senior Vice President at IBM Japan. Mr. Shimono has a longstanding career of 40 years with IBM, primarily in Tokyo but with a short stint in New York. Mr. Shimono majored in Computer Science at his university when computers were new and computer science was quite different to what it is now.
Mr. Shimono says that to gain engagement on his teams, he focused on closely managing his 10 direct reports. In addition, he held regular meetings, and communicated well with them. He says that he held round table discussions and regular Monday meetings. Whenever there was a need for innovative ideas, Mr. Shimono says he tries to lead the discussion in an innovative way. He praises IBM for being so diverse in terms of racial background, gender, nationality, and age, so gaining diverse perspectives is easier at IBM than it may be in other companies.
Mr. Shimono says that the understanding of the Japanese culture is quite important and the general awareness about Japanese culture is much better than it was 20 years ago. His advice to colleagues and people looking to come to Japan would be to be patient. He believes there is globalization on various levels, 1) Globalization of Japan 2) Globalization of Japanese People 3) Globalization of Japanese companies. For newcomers to Japan, he suggests making changes and innovating Japanese companies, as this will be received well. However, trying to change Japanese people and their culture may be met with resistance. He advises even if someone doesn’t agree with the Japanese way of doing things, forcing change can be tricky and advises people to keep an open mind and be patient.
Mr. Shimono says learning Japanese is not necessary when coming to Japan. He says learning the Kanji script is integral to the Japanese language and this can be quite difficult and incredibly time consuming for adults. Mr. Shimono says nowadays there are a lot of interpreters available and many software programs that can bypass the need to learn the Japanese language.