Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Archive for 2009


Humans will be mostly manufactured
Maybe humanss will be manufactured, not born by year 2209. Look around now.  We seem to have already made the choice.  We are waiting for the technology to catch up.  Kids in advanced country planted in front of PC or gaming device or some sort of machine, because there aren’t room for them to play outside.  They […]...
01 Aug, 2009 | No comments yet
Use technology to communicate better
The title seem lame:  use technology to commuincate better.  I hear often that we already use too much technology and not enough face-to-face real life communicaiton. It seems many of us had enough of fragmented, tedius, limiting technology communicaiton in text messaging, both in forms of e-mail and homepages including blogs.  In the world of web 2.0, […]...
29 May, 2009 | No comments yet
President of a major global company, president of a country
Watching Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s speech at UCLA for the inauguration of UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block, I started to think of the responsibilities of a president of a major global company and a president of a country.  Both are ultimately leaders who’s action and decisions affects everyone within his/her company or country. Just as with a country one […]...
02 Apr, 2009 | No comments yet
Understanding Ichiro’s words through American master coaches lessons
My friend and I were having lunch on March 24th, and she showed me that the World Baseball Classic final game was being played in Los Angeles as we were having our lunch in Tokyo.  During my teenage years, with an American step-father who loved to watch sports on TV, our family watched some kind […]...
26 Mar, 2009 | No comments yet
The way Japanese executives think about company responsibility
I don’t know what percentage of Japanese executives feel this way, but last week, I’ve heard it directly from the director of major Japanese companies, like I did from many Japanese executives before. We are responsible for providing livelihood for the citizens.  We have to think of ways to offer meaningful jobs for as many people as possible. He […]...
22 Mar, 2009 | 2 comments
“Japan is all about the way of doing things”
For the past couple of months, I’ve been having fun with Twitter.  Each day, I interact with all sorts of people of the world, finding very intersting information. Today, through Rick Martin’s tweet, I found a very good portrait of Japanese. With usual caveats against sweeping generalization, what this made me think was: Japan is all about the […]...
07 Mar, 2009 | No comments yet
Twestival
The team and I are organizing Twestival in Tokyo. It’s on the evening of 12 February 2009. Please come! ...
08 Feb, 2009 | No comments yet
Now it’s going too far the other way?
I don’t think open plan in office works without having easily accessible private room or cubicle to use in need. Like everything else, it’s not one size fits all.  How the workspace should be layed out depends on your job. I thought of this because recently, I have seen several article that says open plan does not work, like […]...
08 Feb, 2009 | 2 comments
Why meet face to face?
This year, more people than ever attend the World Economic Forum at Davos.  As this video asks:  Why attend?  We are now capable of sharing so much information virtually. It will probably take several generations, if ever, for the humans to become natural at virtual meetings.  In the recent seminar I organized about building a large factory/showroom […]...
30 Jan, 2009 | No comments yet
Potential of Twitter in Japan
Uchida Yoko people thought it was another one of those crazy ideas I brought in. Rather than doing Q&A after panel discussion, I proposed that we set it up so that everyone can post question or comment during panel discussion to realize audience participation. I explained that people would feel freer to express […]...
29 Jan, 2009 | No comments yet


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