Worklife

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

Archive for 2012


Outliers: The Story of Success

I have a habit of re-reading the books I find I like and worth­while over and over again. Out­liers by Mal­colm Glad­well is one of those books. Glad­well talks about how sheer time one spends doing the thing she enjoys are directly tied with achieve­ments and suc­cess tied to that activ­ity. The exam­ple he used was […]

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17 Mar, 2012 | Comments Off
What to localize, what not to localize in Japan

Accord­ing to the World Bank, pop­u­la­tion liv­ing in Japan in 2010 was 127.5 mil­lion. Although Japan­ese live in small space com­pared, by global stan­dard, most has high stan­dard of liv­ing. So many com­pa­nies come from over­seas try­ing to cap­ture the mar­ket based on the demo­graph­ics, and over the past 22 years, I have taken part […]

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23 Feb, 2012 | Comments Off
Japanese SNS Activities by Market Sector

About 3 years ago, I found myself doing some SNS based PR work for my friends, and one project lead to another. It has been excit­ing and fun to be on this new ground, and like every­thing else before in my life, work came in not as result of for­mal edu­ca­tion, but learn­ing by reading […]

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02 Feb, 2012 | Comments Off
Mentoring

Recent post­ing by Sonic Rim’s Uday Dan­da­vate on Anthrode­sign group mail caused me to think about my own expe­ri­ence with search for men­tor. (Thank you, Uday!) About 7 years ago, I felt a keen need for a men­tor of my own gen­der. Maybe it was because of “coach­ing” boom in Japan at that time, and the […]

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31 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
Update on affect of the great earthquake

Under­cur­rent would be some­thing that Japan­ese over gen­er­a­tion has been famil­iar with, which is sur­viv­ing the nat­ural dis­as­ter and rebuild­ing after great cri­sis. We are warned that another big earth­quake is due, this time with epi­cen­ter of the quake even closer to Tokyo, but this time on the west side of it. We are still […]

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31 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
Tipping in the US vs No tipping in Japan

It occurred to me that in blog, I can be casual, that there’s no hard and fast rule. So maybe I’ll loosen up a bit here. Some for­mal sound­ing stuff, but prob­a­bly more, at least for a while, relaxed kind of writ­ing for read­ing. I believe social psy­chol­ogy per­spec­tive is the root of the dif­fer­ence in […]

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29 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
Research conducted in Tokyo now

Product/service devel­op­ment, design research related peo­ple like ethno­g­ra­phers, inter­view mod­er­a­tors, recruiters, coor­di­na­tors, inter­preters, etc. have been keep­ing busy in Tokyo since lat­ter part of last year, as over­seas com­pa­nies are again very inter­ested in research­ing Japan­ese mar­ket. After the Great East­ern Japan Earth­quake in March 11, 2011, it has of course been an inter­est­ing study […]

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28 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
History is no longer created by limited few writers

Joe Paterno, for­mer foot­ball head coach at Penn State, passed away last Sun­day. Because of his posi­tion, power and influ­ence he had over the past decade, so many peo­ple has been react­ing in var­i­ous ways over what has been called the biggest US col­lege scan­dal and the way Penn State fired Paterno uncer­e­mo­ni­ously to handle […]

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25 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
Recent Ethnography Research, Particularly of Recruitment Challanges in Japan

Over the past three years, I have become more and more con­cerned with the dif­fi­culty in cre­at­ing highly excit­ing learn­ing ses­sion for for­eign inspiration/innovation seek­ing cus­tomers of both design com­pa­nies and end user com­pa­nies. It has a lot to do with recruit­ing process for peo­ple to research. I see fol­low­ing prob­lems in recruit­ing, some of […]

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22 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off
Happy New Year

Best wishes for the year 2012! At the end of 2011, I felt the impor­tant end to a phase in my life that lasted for 7 years. Call it, learn­ing to be a leader phase. Of all the places, I learned how to be a leader from spend­ing lots of time with my fam­ily. I could […]

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01 Jan, 2012 | Comments Off


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