Being a slave is sad, but making your employees slaves is embarrassing

31o5 is a Japanese engineer and businessperson who runs a software company in Bangkok, Thailand. As a manager, she has to constantly deal with unreasonable requests from her customers in Japan. In her latest blog post "
1 week work is 8 * 5 = 40 hours, not 24 * 7 = 168 hours" she points out a typical vice in the Japanese customers' way of thinking.

In this post, she puts:

When I say 1 week work means 40 hours work, it doesn’t mean we can work 168 hours. Or maybe I should say opposite way, when I say 40 hours work, means it takes 1 week, not 2 days.

Now I noticed some kind of people expect us to work overtime and holiday as DEFAULT. A client send us data 20:00 pm on Friday night and said deadline is Monday noon.

There were only 3 hours working time, but in their mind, there were 2 days + few hours.

In this particular case, she says she got it done by herself, not asking her employees to work in the weekend. But she also regrets having done so because she had to sell her labor at a cheap price and could not manage other projects in the meantime.

She is a sort of exceptional manger for a Japanese. In similar cases, most Japanese managers would order their employees to work in the weekend without hesitation. In Japan, work is considered somewhat "sacred". It's easy for us to cancel appointments with our family and friends in Japan. All we have to say is "I have to work and I can't come over. Sorry", and then they will not object to it.

Yes, work is important. You can make your living by working. You can express yourself through work. But your private life is as important. You are always supported by your family and your friends. Without them, how could you enjoy yourself in life?

If you are a lowest-level employee, you are just forced to work overtime. Several years later, you would get promoted and have a few employees under you. If you are soaked in a cooperate culture where overtime work is taken for granted, you might casually force your employees to work overtime all the time.

But think about it. What's your job as a manager? A manager is supposed to allocate work evenly to each employee to accomplish the business goals of the division that he or she is in charge of. The ideal state should be no overtime work at all because overtime work is a result of the failure of task allocation by the manager.

As a manager, being a slave is sad, but making your employees slaves is embarrassing. If a company forces its employees work overtime regularly, it should reconsider the structure of work flow so that they can leave work on time and enjoy their private lives at will.

Twitter as a global brain

When I was using twitter yesterday, I noticed the fact that the structure of following and followers at twitter just resembles neural network. I thought that this structure was so obvious that everybody had already taken it for granted. However, I got some positive feedbacks from my twitter followers so I decided to elaborate this idea a little further on my blog.

Twitter and a human brain look alike in many ways. Both of them are networks with a tremendous number of small nodes. These nodes are brain cells or neurons in a brain, while they are users on twitter. A neuron has many inputs and outputs called synapses that conduct stimulus. Similarly, a twitter user has following users and followers, where inputs come from following users and outputs go to followers.

Twitter and a human brain have the same mechanism to channel information. So we may say that twitter has literally become "a brain" now . Just as collaboration of all the brain cells creates a thinking process collectively, twitter "thinks" when innumerable people tweet, exchange ideas and influence each other. On twitter, we all become one brain.

Be open-minded

The other day, I had an interesting conversation with Thomas, a German gentleman living in Saigon. He has been a consultant in many different industries. (His blog)

He has been living in Asia and hopes to continue to do so for a long time toward the future. Although he is a German national, he says that he is not too keen on mingling with the German community in Saigon. His mind is more international-oriented and he hopes to have more international friends, not only German ones.

I felt empathy with his statement. When an expatriate community becomes introvert, its ethnicity gets even more condensed than that of their motherland. German expatriate communities become more German than the society in Germany, and Japanese expatriate communities become more Japanese than the society in Japan. This is probably because these people try to overcome fear of living in an alien land by clinging to their own ethnic community.

That's the exact reason why I feel reluctant to dive deep into the heart of the Japanese community in Saigon. While, according to Thomas, the size of Saigon's German community is about 500, the Japanese community here is said to be much larger with the size 5,000. However, many of them do not understand much of foreign languages, either English or Vietnamese. When they don't speak a foreign language, how can they effectively communicate with local Vietnamese people and expatriates here? It is natural for them to just stay inside the Japanese community and form a dense and complicated web of human relationships there. It would resemble a small village in ancient times.

I think we need balance. Having friends from the same ethnic group can be comfortable. But if you wish to have a more exciting life, you need to take some risk and go beyond the complacency. We should be more open-minded and embrace different thoughts of people with different backgrounds.

Good bye, the old good days of Japanese economy

Dr. Nobuo Ikeda is a professor teaching economics at Jobu University in Tokyo. He is better known as one of Japan's most popular bloggers. He is a great commentator as well as a belligerent agitator who vehemently criticizes contemporary Japanese people's complacence.

He was recently interviewed by a famous British business magazine, The Economist. He found the questions of the interviewer quite reasonable but sometimes hard to answer. To make his points clear, he posted an entry titled "Why Japan Is So Slow" on his blog site.

He points out the fact that although a long-term relationship between a supplier and a maker used to be efficient and help boost Japanese economy, its effectiveness is disappearing very quickly now due to change of the economic climate.

Now the game is over: when the future is not so bright, the payoff of "defection" would be greater than that of "cooperation". So the long-term relation became inefficient and fragile. It also changed politics: the Liberal Democratic Party has redistributed the rent of growth, but the source of the rent dried up. So voters want change, but they don't know what to change. And the DPJ doesn't know either. So we can't expect too much from them. Real change would occur when the LDP is divided after it lose the election, and the "third party" emerges.

I could not agree with him more. Japan's future is bleak. Japan will see hope only after going through several political turbulences. It's still a long way to go.

Japanese customers v.s. English-speaking customers

I have been thinking of this question for many years: which customers should I focus on, Japanese customers or English speaking customers?

Japanese customers and English-speaking customers are in sharp contrast to each other. Pros of dealing with Japanese customers are at the same time cons of dealing with English-speaking customers. Contrarily, cons of dealing with Japanese customers are at the same time pros of dealing with English-speaking customers. I will summarize pros and cons of dealing with Japanese customers and English-speaking customers below.

*When dealing with Japanese customers:

**Pros
- If you are a native Japanese speaker born in Japan, you have a huge advantage over other nationals because you are supposed to know very well what Japanese customers expect and how they behave.
- Market competition is mitigated thanks to the lingual and cultural barriers. It is often difficult for non-Japanese to enter the Japanese market without understanding the details of Japanese business practices.
- Japanese customers are more loyal than English-speaking customers. Once a good relationship is established, they tend to stick to that relationship.

**Cons
- Japanese customers are unable to express their needs effectively. They are unable to document their requests. Suppliers must infer what they want from the conversation with them. It is often very ambiguous.
- They are reluctant to make a written contract with suppliers. Even after entering into a contract, they often try to change the terms of agreement.
- Decision making is often too slow. This is due to their complicated internal decision making processes.
- They often look down on suppliers and don't look at them as partners on equal footing. As a result, they often make unreasonable requests to suppliers in terms of prices, quality and date of delivery.

*When dealing with English speaking customers:

**Pros
- Before starting any business, English speaking customers make a clearly described contract with suppliers. All the terms of conditions are well-written in the contract. There's no ambiguity.
- English-speaking customers are less likely to ask for an unreasonable request which is not described in the contract.
- The English-speaking market is huge and spreads across the entire world.

**Cons
- The market competition is fierce. There are so many competitors throughout the world.
- English-speaking customers are less loyal. Once they find more favorable trading conditions in your competitors, they don't hesitate switch suppliers.
- If you are not a native English speaker, you will be disadvantaged in terms of communication. Communication can be more difficult and costly.

In summary, Japanese customers tend to stick to a long-term relationship. It's very difficult for outsiders to get into a relationship with a Japanese customer. But once a relationship has been established, they rarely switch suppliers. Contracts are often written incompletely or even non-existent, and human relationships are more emphasized. In contrast, English speaking companies conduct business strictly based on contracts. No contract, no business. They don't stick to a certain supplier and are always in search for better trading conditions.

To my personal preference, I like the way English speaking customers do more. It's more strict but also more transparent than that of Japanese customers. When we work with diverse suppliers (unlike homogeneous suppliers found in Japan), we have no choice but to do business based on contracts. A contract symbolizes human rationality and it is the only common element among heterogeneous people.

Mistrusting Japanese companies

Although I am a Japanese person born in Japan, I have never liked the way Japanese white collar employees work in Japan. They always put the customers first ... often way too much. They accept unreasonable requests from customers so easily that they often look more like slaves rather than equal partners.

For example, let's say it's 4:30 pm on Friday now. You are an employee and thinking of the weekend's plan at office in Tokyo. Now the telephone rings and you will hear your customer telling you casually: "Oh I am sorry but can you finish this new work by 10 am Monday?" Yikes. That's tons of work. It means that you have to work overtime on Friday and throughout the weekend. But you have already appointments with your friends and family.

What do you think? Would you accept it? If you work in the culture of English speaking countries such US and Canada, you might say like this: "I am afraid I simply can't make it. Would you mind putting off the deadline a bit further like next Wednesday?" However, you can't usually say like this in Japan. You are exposed to a very strong social pressure and it's very difficult for you to refuse such a request from your customers.

I don't think this makes sense. This is a really terrible business practice, but is commonly observed in Japanese business scenes.

I can't deal with these Japanese companies. That's against my values. Of course, not all the Japanese companies are like this...but I have to say most of them are still like this.

Closing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be

I am a big fan of TED. The website has so many great speech videos. As the site puts, those are exactly the "ideas worth spreading".

One of the greatest videos is this:
Michelle Obama's plea for education

Well, I am not much of a political person. I do like President Barack Obama, but it's because I find charisma in his personality, not because I support all his policies.

Likewise, I like this video because I find the speaker is a woman who has overcome numerous obstacles in her personal life, not because she is First Lady of the United States.

But Barack reminded us on that day, all of us in that room, that we all know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. We all know. And he urged the people in that meeting, in that community, to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas, to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same.

I am aware of the reality as well as the ideal. I am looking at both now. I am struggling between the two. One day I have hope, dreaming of the ideal. Another day I am discouraged, seeing the reality and how large the gap between the two is.

As Mr and Mrs Obama say, we must try our best to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This is no easy task. But we have to assume the responsibility to make the world better place for our children.