Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Knowledge used for business management

Jun 13, 2004 09:37 am / Add a comment

Cur­rently, I am work­ing rig­or­ously with a for­eign cap­i­tal com­pany in Tokyo. 10 years ago, this move project would have been rel­a­tively sim­ple. For a smaller project of about 200 peo­ple, the head­quar­ter per­son would have come to Tokyo two or three times for key meet­ings, then with selected architec/design com­pany that speaks Eng­lish and under­stand the head­quar­ter coun­try cul­ture, direct the project remotely over tele­phone calls, fax, courier mails with Tokyo project team doing the local implementation.

Now with the illu­sion of most infor­ma­tion being avail­able as soon as it is needed, such project is much more com­plex. Var­i­ous stake­hold­ers wants to con­trol the project as they would in their home ter­ri­tory, but it is not pos­si­ble. What hap­pens is lack of trust between the Tokyo mem­bers and head­quar­ters mem­bers result in num­bers of tele­con­fer­ence and request for more and more infor­ma­tion via e-mail, all the while frus­tra­tion devel­ops on both sides. Why don’t they under­stand what’s impor­tant? Why do they only think of forc­ing their per­spec­tive? We fall into the trap, feel­ing victimized.

With this kind of sit­u­a­tion or for any kind of busi­ness man­age­ment for that mat­ter, I found under­stand­ing a lit­tle about biol­ogy, chem­istry, human behav­ior, soci­ol­ogy, psy­chol­ogy helps more in achiev­ing bet­ter result than about “busi­ness man­age­ment”. In the end, it turns out sin­cerety in achiev­ing big­ger com­mon goal is more effec­tive than know­ing the­o­ries, because every time I write e-mail explain­ing or ask­ing for some­thing, or talk on the phone to work out some issues, the other per­son always react to sin­cerety and trust that comes through in every word.

Of course, I’ve stud­ied var­i­ous busi­ness the­o­ries and con­cepts and prac­tices, and they are impor­tant as bases to help me under­stand the par­a­digm and gen­eral belief by busi­ness peo­ple. But so far trust is the way the pos­i­tive action took in projects I have been involved in Tokyo, LA, NY, Lon­don, Ban­ga­lore, Hongkong, Sid­ney, etc. And trust, to me, has been pay­ing atten­tion to the other per­son dur­ing each inter­ac­tion, see the other per­son as basi­cally some­one hon­est who wants to do the right thing, and speak my mind in a way in that is respect­ful of the other person.

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