Sleeping with saboteurs

BAD BEHAVIOR is a reality of working life everywhere, Japan not excepted. There’s bullying, cronyism, sexism, etc., but perhaps the most curious is the insubordination that is commonplace in many organizations here. Contrary to the stereotype of obedient workers, I have witnessed many instances of Japanese employees simply refusing to follow orders and actually going out of their way to sabotage the company that employs them. In the West, there is an easy solution to this problem — terminate the troublemaker with extreme prejudice. But that’s rarely done in this country.

I had always assumed that tolerance of insubordination was due to laws that prohibit termination of an employee under all but a very few conditions, but when I asked an HR consultant about this I got the following reply.

“In practice, it is relatively easy to terminate an employee in Japan. The Japanese Labor Code appears on its surface to be highly protective of the employee, but it lacks the teeth (legal remedies) that would render it truly so. Beyond this, many Japanese employees are ignorant as to their legal rights, while others consider the system so onerous as to preclude their bringing legal action against an employer. I would also observe that Japan is not a litigious culture, as is the US. Japanese employees may fear being stigmatized as troublemakers if they defend their rights under law. In short, there are many disincentives to use of a system that does not contemplate the relative power of employer and employee.

In Japan — and absent real remedies for wrongful termination under tort law — employers can reduce or eliminate severance packages by power-harassing people out of the firm. Some Japanese HRMs are specialists in these techniques.

But, employers ARE wary of things ‘going legal’ — and especially so when labor unions are involved — in so far as a lawsuit may result in public disclosure. It is purely a PR issue/branding issue in many organizations — preservation of FACE on the local front, avoidance of a compliance flag in the home office (if gaishikei).

If the legal system is protective of employees, it is so in this perverse way. It enables them to draw negative attention to an employer as opposed to having their day in court in a functioning legal system. 

I would guess employees who sabotage their organizations have measured their relative power to avoid dismissal. Employers send signals, give a green light to this behavior when they do not address it. They may give a yellow light when they commit their own breaches of law. I think that in gaishikei you generally have leaders who lack confidence in their ability to manage labor issues in Japan. They wax conservative, avoid confrontation.

Certainly, any manager struggles to address insubordination or sabotage. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge a failure of leadership on pretty grand scale. Call this an ’un-virtuous cycle’ or a very slippery slope.”     

Need for greed

WITH THE SEQUEL TO THE MOVIE Wall Street having just been released, now seems like a good time to revisit the idea that greed is good. Because Japan could use more greed, and here’s why.

Japanese society is obsessed with perfection. Perfectionism keeps trains running on schedule within tolerances measured in seconds, and is a big reason why Tokyo has more Michelin-starred chefs than any other city in the world. It’s generally a commendable trait, but perfectionism has a flip side — fear of failure. And fear makes Japan as whole cling to tried-and-tested methods while slowing the uptake of new ideas and technologies.

For example, it’s not uncommon for Japanese hospitals to delay the implementation of medical technologies until long after they’ve been adopted in other countries. And that even includes inventions made in Japan. Sometimes this is due to regulations, but regulations can be nothing more than an institutionalized form of fear of change.

Institutionalization of fear is also part of the corporate culture of many Japanese companies in which salarymen are rewarded with steady pay raises so long as they don’t make a mistake. So they avoid making decisions and thwart innovation. Contrast that to the best practices in the west, where indecisiveness leads to career stagnation or even job loss. The incentives are exactly opposed.

Which brings us to ambition and its evil twin greed. In the 1980s — in the heydey of the Japanese economy and, indeed, Gordon Gekko — the fear endemic to Japanese companies was counterbalanced by a greed to dominate world markets. That generated an energy you could feel in the air. But now that greed has mostly expired and so have most traces of ambition.

With so many companies paralyzed by fear, there will be no sequel to Japan’s boom years until greed makes a comeback.

What’s all this, then?

Despite belonging to some of the world’s biggest companies, many Japanese brands are unknown overseas. photo source: iSeeKanSai

IT’S PRETTY MUCH UNDISPUTED that Japanese brands punch below their weight. That is to say, despite having some of the world’s largest companies by sales volume, Japan falls short in the number of brands with strong global reputations.

In the most widely-accepted survey of brand equity, Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands List”, Japan is notable by its underrepresentation.

Why is that? The causes are many and interrelated, and include the nature of Japanese company shareholders, the domestic distribution system, the background of top management, the national education system, a language barrier, and a misunderstanding of the role of advertising. I’ll be covering these factors over the course of this blog, but a good place to start is corporate culture.

First, a bit about myself. I worked for many years as the chief creative officer of the Tokyo office of multinational ad agencies. In presenting ad concepts to a wide range of clients, it became clear over time that what most of those clients perceived to be marketing problems were at root HR problems — specifically, problems caused by organizations that incentivized stasis while disincentivizing innovation. Evidence of this is plentiful, but let’s begin with this article in the Japan Times.

Quote: “Sriram emphasized that human resources will hold the key to competitiveness. Companies can no longer compete with a labor cost advantage as manufacturing shifts everywhere and capital can be raised anywhere thanks to the global money flow, he said. As companies seek more skilled and talented human resources, they ‘go to where the talent is, and the talent will choose’ which companies to join. And unless companies have established the system to do so, they will be unable to secure talented workers globally, he added.”

That is why these days I’ve started focusing on organizational change as a route to stronger brands.