Peter Drucker has been in in business in Japan. He said Japanese management
was still good for 20 years after the bubble economy even burst.
Japanese managers are surely great. They always manage to achieve targets with
their constant endeavor. However, when they become a CEM, that's not the case. Once you are a CEO, you need to have clear vision, solid mind and achievable targets to lead your organization.
There is no decision to make everybody happy and it's not the end when you fail if you learn something from failures. It would be ok if you end up expanding your business.
A friend of mine got an email this morning saying below.
Typhoon #18 is close to and possibly entering main island of Japan. Please reconsider going to the office in the morning to avoid any risks. Even after the typhoon is over, take high precautions and avoid going to the office.
Who would go to work after reading the email. My friend of course didn't, but he was worried about not going to work on time. He called his boss and his boss said "you need to come to the office!! The half of us are already here!!"
This describes a typical Japanese custom. And also What I was interested in is I found out over the age of 40's business people went to work on time and below the age of 30's and Japanese who studied abroad stayed at home this morning. This would show Japanese older business people are more loyal to a company(or they are scared of being accused or standing out in a company) and Japanese younger people are more westernized. If you don't have any appointment, meeting or visitor on a typhoon coming day, would you really need to go to work in the heavy rain and wind?
Universal health care is a good system to run in a nation. Under the extreme individualism or capitalism, there is no safety net for the poor. I believe redistribution of wealth is necessary.
CEO Fujita from Cyber Agent wrote a column about an employee leaving the company is controversial now. The out line is the employee submitted a paid holidays with his resignation letter. He was in charge of a big start up project. He failed a previous project and its loss was hundreds million yen. He was given a second chance. He wanted to leave because he got a better job offer by a competitor of Cyber Agent
Mr. Fujita got furious to show the company's discipline and not to make another employee like him. Mr. Fujita is usually calm and hardly gets angry. But this incident was considered that it might give a bad sign or bad precedent to all the employees. He got furious on purpose.
I have been assigned to a CEO in a oversea subsidiary and currently I work in the head office as a employee. In the country I worked in, the locals don't mind job hopping for salary increment and their priority is money, their dreams. That's their business culture. You can say that to some extent in Japan as well. The Pareto principle says 80% of all employees just merely work but the rest, 20% of them sympathize company's vision or management principle and want to work for the company.
The other day, I had a colleague who left lots of time from the workstation and give me a bad work performance. I finally told her off logically and gave her a caution and the next day out of the blue she gave me a resignation letter because she was too sick to keep working. As you can guess, I wasn't ready to take over her tasks and I had those mixed feelings. 1)I was angry at her unprofessional responsibility. 2)My work loads would go up and I wanted her to stay in the company a bit longer. 3)I was sad I couldn't change her business attitude. However, What I did to her was I took the letter and I was worried about her health and show her my understanding her difficult situation. What I did was different from what Mr. Fujita did. The reason why I acted like this is there is something we never understand just like my worth ethic and the locals' that I worked with or Japan's history perception and Korean's.
Michael Moore makes a speech in the most conservative city in Utah. The minority, the Mormons escaped from religious persecution to Utah. However, a liberalist, Michael Moore is not allowed to make the speech by the majority in the city. This is a very ironical movie.
I finally watched One step on a mine, it's all over,
about Taizo Ichinose, a Japanese battle field photographer.
It's been 15 years since it came out.
I wanted to become a journalist.
I totally agree with the importance of information disclosure.
It was a core point of media that a professor in this divided state
shouted all information is through filters.
We need to have media literacy, otherwise you would be manipulated and
agitated by media.