I think I'm turning Japanese

Last year while I was job hunting, I came across Career Joy, an incredible resource site for all things career oriented.

The man behind CJ, Alan (to be honest, it's obviously an assistant who put it all together) sends out Monday Morning Motivators, one of the best named weekly newsletters out there. Alan's personal and thoughtful approach to his work is contagious. Today's 'motivator' was based on a Gary Moyer (former President of Jaguar Canada) interview and his experience of working in Japan. Three key concepts of Japanese business styles were highlighted in the book.

1. Consensus building and relationship building: Before implementing a major decision, Japanese managers spend a lot of time "nema-washi", which essentially means, behind the scenes negotiation with everyone involved. This is a universal principle, however, in North America, we don't seem to realize that this can take a significant amount of time and energy to get everyone on board. Gary noticed that North Americans tend to think short term and to be more impulsive in their decision making.

2. Make decisions with patience: Japanese management tends to use eastern logic, while we work with western logic. The two styles don't seem to flow well together. Eastern logic tended to provide solutions to strategy & focus on solutions that were not what he expected.

3. Fix the basics of any problem first; This was my favorite observation by Gary, as the majority of problems have several layers of issues. Japanese managers spend much time getting to the core of the problem. Gary discovered that once you dealt with the real source of the issue, the other elements to the problem were resolved fairly easily.
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