Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Effect of time difference on global business

Feb 29, 2004 10:46 am / 2 comments

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?

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