Fujiko Suda

Building trust in workplace

At my farewell party last night, I sat next to the marketing manager. He is Scottish with a great sense of humour, and he has a gorgeous smile, but well known for his capacity to talk shop passionately non-stop for hours on end. My last night with the company, and here I am. If it is my fate, so be it.

But I didn't want to spend the night in misery, so I decided to pay attention and take interest in his talk, making comments and asking questions. Sure enough, talk started out with the subject of work, but through twists and turns, we were deep into discussion about Japan and its history of religion onto cause and effect of religion. I was quite surprised by his knowledge of religous history in Japan, his passion for learning and his strong desire in living true to his beliefs. He recommended Hirohito and the Making of Modern Day Japan and A Problem from Hell for me to read.

After the dinner, three peole whom I worked closely and I went to have coffee at a comfortable cafe nearby. They said sympathetically, boy, he was at it again, talking shop, wasn't he? They looked surprised when I told them that we had a good discussion about culture and religion.

We work with people who are directly related to what we are doing. Although everything each member of a company does is related one way or other to everybody else, we are so busy trying to effectively perform our job. It is off hours, the time like last night that we end up sitting next to someone we are not entirely comfortable with for the dinner that we learn something new, something important about other people within the company. In a society like Japan where people working for a large organization live far away from where they work, and the content of work is so foreign to their family, it becomes a problem of allocating time for either colleagues or family. But as I experienced last night, buidling trust in workplace occurs at non-business hours, be it working overtime or having dinner together.

Effect of time difference on global business

It's a rainy Sunday morning, and I am at home with the youngest son, husband and mother-in-law. I wanted to listen to some music and turned on the radio (Usen 440). We have access to radio stations at various parts of the world, but as it has been for the past 2 years or so, I ended up selecting the station that was not location specific. Why? Because I wanted to listen to music that would enhance my enjoyment of morning feeling. The selection of music reflects not just what's hot and popular in that particular location, but more than anything the time of the day. DJ's character and attitude differs dramatically between morning traffic time and relaxing time of after work hours.

Because I've had to deal with time difference for for maybe 15 years and always being on the side who had to accomodate to the other side of the world, I did what I had to do, send fax, e-mail, call on the phone, participate in conference call. But difinitely, things would have been so easy if I was working with people who were on the same time zone as myself. Come to think of it, many years ago, I got worn out after 1 year of intense global projects coordinating communications between Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, Atlanta , San Francisco, Hong Kong and Bangkok, and I moved onto another position. And somehow, I ended up getting involved with similar situation recently, but it isn't too bad because I am only dealing with two locations at a time besides Tokyo. Reading Isaoblog's entry (sorry folks, I thought the entry was in English but it's in Japanese. Please use Babel Fish or similar traslation service to read it in English if you are interested) about difference in people's attitude in a simultanuous meeting tighing up various parts of the world once, I thought, here's another factor business people with no experince dealing with time difference thinks in working globally. It is something we all take for granted, but we are animals who live in accordance with times and seasons punctuated with movement of our solar system. We are also social animal that take part in local behaviors. We have rules that are critical in building trusiting relationships, and one of them is being on time, reacting to behaviours and emotions of others. At midnight conference call, sitting in a dim apartment room, hush of the local world, talking to people in bustling daytime office, it takes much energy to synchronize. It takes so much energy, when we have been working for some period of time with such life, we begin to lose touch with local people. I think this is why projects fail, disharmony develops at local location.

No matter how convenient things become, easy connectability to communicate, reserve flight ticket, hotel and rent-a-car, this social and physical factor from regular rythmn of daily living, global business is never easy. Are there any company out there with real sympathy and good system to rigorously deal with this type of very hard to identify complex factor?

Is changing workplace cosmetic?

Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Pardox of Innovation
Richard FArson and Ralph Keyes

This is an unusually seductive approach: making cosmetic changes that give the appearance of dynamic change without requiring any fundamental revision in the way business gets done. SEnding employees to seminars on innovation. Hiring consultants to create new corporate names and logos. Offering cappuccino in the commissary. Some staid organizations note that livelier ones have a lot of scruffy employees who can sometimes be seen throwing Frisbees outside company headquarters. Hence, they loosen their dress codes and encourage employees to be more playful. Without a deep and genuine interest in promoting change, such cosmetic efforts seldom have the desired effect.

Development of innovation

Reading Jung is hard. He will not give me a break. He is not like Joseph Campbell who learned much from Jung, offering comforting words, smooth way of acceptance. Jung forces me to scrutinize the world around me, how I perceive the world, questioning me, do you understand? Who are you? Now that you understand, so? As I toiled my way through The Essentail Jung, I have come upon the pages that forces me to think about my efforts to create workplace that would stimulate innovation.

Anyone who wants to educate must himself be educated. But the parrot-like book-learning and mechanical use of methods that is still practised today is no education either for the child or for educator.

Clearly, no one develops his personality because somebody tells him that it would be useful or advisable to do so. Nature has never yet taken by well-meaning advice. The only thing that moves nature is causal necessity, and that goes for human nature too. Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. ... The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force of inner or outer fatalities. Any other development would be no better than individualism. That is why the cry of "individualism" is a cheap insult when flung at the natural development of personality.

Jung is speaking of development of an individual. At least from my experience of how I am, with my children, his statement is true. And from what I have experienced with myself as well as with close interaction with people I worked, I suspect this statement to be applicable to development of an organization. I regret to say that as far as I can think, I have never personally witnessed neither emergence nor acceptance of innovation.

I am doubtful that I have the authority to direct my clients to do anything with their workplace for innovation when I have not even seen the birth much less at what kind of workplace such birth took place. I know how communication happens, I know how I work within various spaces. I would, however, dearly like to witness the emergence of innovation as a journalist uncovers a headline news.

I am reminded of what Susan Strange was supposed to have said about scholar's need to be a journalist. I do not consider myslef a scholar, but I have the need to be a journalist of workplace, work life to be useful to anybody.

Last Samurai - Mastering

Last Samurai is receiving rave review, and I think it deserves it. As a movie, it is very good. But when I try to learn something from it, the gross difference between reality and made up movie story on important factor about life is rather disturbing. This is discussed in books written by actual practioner of their art, be it sports, management, research and development.

Captain Nathan Algren in the Last Samurai practices Japanese swordsmanship for a few months, and he becomes a master. I can laugh it off in parodies, but I find it difficult to just swallow it in this kind of movie, even with understanding that it's objective is to entertain. The movie has the kind of reality that even illusions can seem as reality.

Somehow, with this kind of things happening all the time in movies, TV shows, mangas, even those seasoned adults often start to believe aquiring masterful skill in an art needs only a few months, at the most.

In the real world, hardly no one ever wins gold medal in the Olympics without many years of long hours of practices daily. All professional sports players spend much of their time practicing. Nobel prize winners including Tanaka-san spent hours after hours, years and years in the lab. Effective business managers and project managers spend years developing their skills. Why then, do so many business consultants who spent limited amount of time actually involved with real projects, actually working for real business are trusted to make effective changes in their client's company?

As I write this, I could see my business associates smiling and saying, there you go again! You make these surpriing connections, that seems to come out of blue.

Here is my biggest thing, at the very end of 2003. I felt as though I did not get anywhere, made no progress this year. But here is my personal conclusion. In order to master the art of business as a major factor in giving meaningful life to people living in many of today's advanced country, time spent mastering the art is crucial. When one wants true success in work life, this part can not be shortened.

Steelcase University

How IT changed our lives so far

IT. Does it supposed to make life easier for us? More fun?

Life has become more complicated because IT created ways to measure simple things at amazing speed. Since we humans love measurement, and if we can have measurement quickly, than we will compromize on content of matters being measured.

Like sales forecasting. How beautifully numbers are collected and sorted out to be presented to the headquarters people. Those who submitted the numbers may have to eat their numbers, to fudge with them when one order is cancelled and two replaces it.

Like office fitout cost. If we can provide desk, chair, computer, what else do we need? Why would we need graphics in an office? Why would we need to worry about layouts?

Like call center operation. China has the best numbers in numbers of calls picked up, short duration of the calls. But when the calls are monitored, poor quality of servicing each call is revealed.

On the other hand, IT made train ticket pass so much easier to use for everyone. Blog is possible because of IT. We can be connected to family, friends, partners from many places, regardless of time.

This really dawned on me last Tuesday when I was preparing for Wednesday morning presenation. The stuff I was going to talk about was merely background of our work, introduction. Then why am I trying to create nice chart on the computer when it's only to make handwritten words on the whiteboard look more formal. The audience are not even interested in seeing these chart in the first place anyway. Why am I spending 5-6 hours on such stuff? And what time I have spent doing this kind of things in the past!! When I gave up on trying to create pretty stuff, and did the introduction solely by speech, nobody argued. Nobody disapproved. As I expected, they wanted to see the main part done by the architect.

Time to get away from being the slave to the Powerpoint. Words. Excel. I guess I will save about 10 hours per week. Thats the total of 1/4 of my working hours!! I can spend things up so much with this 1/4 of time saved. I repeat, I was wasting 1/4 of my work life because of IT convenience.

This is just time factor. I wonder how much quality factor will be gained by being un-addicted to the IT.

Innovation and age

S. Chandrasekhar mentions in Truth And Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science "that a man of science past sixty does more harm than good." I believe it is the same way with business leadership. Not only that. I believe any sort of key department leader should be no older than late thirties. I look around, and 99.9 percent of department managers in Japan's major companies are well over 40. Which means they are good at avoiding failures.

Okay, quick quiz. How old were current major IT companies' CEOs and their officers when they made tremendous difference, and grew at steep rate? Apple? Microsoft? Dell? How about Japanese manufacturing companies. How old were Konosuke Matsushita when he started his business? Ibuka and Morita? Honda? Now, how old do you think the executives for these companies are?

Innovation comes easily to younger generation. We need to learn to support them, not hinder them.