Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Old Model Communication

Jan 07, 2005 10:23 am / Add a comment

The old model com­mu­ni­ca­tion I am talk­ing about is peo­ple work­ing across the bor­der with the advan­tage of time dif­fer­ence, where some deci­sion could be relayed just slow enough that the peo­ple at the other side of the bor­der could not affect the deci­sion made by your side.

10 years ago, when US com­pany based in Japan decided to move, a lot of the US head­quar­ters wishes were not exe­cuted with the excuse that the details of the wishes did not reach the imple­menters in Japan in time.  The excuses could have been:  fax did not come through because the paper ran out dur­ing the evening, mes­sage on the voice mail was not clear, when Japan side tried call­ing dur­ing the busi­ness hours in US, the per­son respon­si­ble for par­tic­u­lar mat­ter was not at his/her desk.  These excuses could have been used to stall any action eas­ily for 2 days, and often for 1 week.  If some hol­i­days were involved, which hap­pened reg­u­larly, 2 weeks to 1 month delay was common.

Although this old model com­mu­ni­ca­tion is out­dated now, major­ity of peo­ple from mid 30s and older who have been with for­eign com­pany based in Japan still live by this old model.  They reg­u­larly attend con­fer­ence calls, write dozens of e-mails every­day, some even do IM.  They have lap­top com­put­ers at home, use broad­band which con­nects to their com­pany intranet, mobile phone that they keep by their side 24 hours a day, and even receive e-mails on their mobile phone.  And they still live by this old model com­mu­ni­ca­tion, think­ing stalling is still a valid busi­ness tool.

What hap­pens is such behav­ior only cre­ates mis­trust and frus­tra­tion.  Not only that, since this old model com­mu­ni­ca­tion no longer works and the head­quar­ters peo­ple find out just in time to can­cel the project or change the specs of inte­rior fin­ish or what­ever, addi­tional costs incurs from stalling the flow of commuincation.

I know this, because I have been liv­ing the change of com­mu­ni­ca­tion speed for the past 15 years.  I’ve watched how peo­ple manupu­late the com­mu­ni­ca­tion speed to do what they wanted to do for many years, and for the past few years, manupu­la­tion is becom­ing more and more dif­fi­cult.  The new model com­mu­ni­ca­tion is much harder on Japan side, because the con­fer­ence calls and phone calls, urgent e-mails are still done dur­ing busi­ness hours of head­qurater coun­try, and often it involves 2 or 3 time zones within US.  Also, Japan­ese employee’s action is still based on com­mand and con­trol where man­agers deci­sion is sim­ply exe­cuted.  I have not yet seen any­body offi­cially say to their man­ager, I belive things are this way, and it should be done this way instead of the way you tell us to do. 

So the solu­tion to all these is, even in this age of new model com­mu­ni­ca­tion, visit each other’s offices, have face to face meet­ings at the actual place, have break­fast, lunch or din­ner together to talk about per­sonal stuff, become friends to do busi­ness.  I haven’t seen any bet­ter way of build­ing a trust­ing busi­ness rela­tion­ship where each party acts on best of inten­tion other than this per­sonal way.

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