Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Behavioral traits of big global companies

Jun 15, 2004 00:18 am / Add a comment

What do well estab­lished big multi-national com­pa­nies do? Most of them tries to opti­mize. And by hav­ing many peo­ple involved in mak­ing sure they are opti­miz­ing, they lose momen­tum and oppor­tu­ni­ties locally. It isn’t a bad thing. It’s a mat­ter of per­son­al­ity who are attracted to some­thing like this, incli­na­tion to like safety.

We vis­ited two global com­pa­nies that were not con­cerned with opti­miza­tion. One was old estab­lished brand, but was ven­tur­ing into new ter­ri­tory. Another was a young com­pany who’s main con­cern was inno­va­tion, fun, unique­ness. They both jumped at the 2003 prob­lem in Tokyo (over­sup­ply of new office build­ings), and real­ized sub­stan­tial sav­ings in office move, spend­ing that money in cre­at­ing really great envi­ron­ment for work. The peo­ple I was with were from sub­sidiary of global giant com­pany, where big HAL was watch­ing out for them. They wanted to move when 2003 prob­lem offered them wild oppor­tu­nity, but they did not get the approval to move. They had lots of spe­cial­ists within their related com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ized in sav­ings, and the HQ had their spe­cial­its ana­lyze with­out local visit. Con­se­quently, they lost out on 3 mil­lion dol­lars sav­ings. Can you imag­ine mak­ing 3 mil­lion dol­lar net profit?

And then my other glob­ally well known com­pany always putting Japan on the back burner, because the HQ has the pro­fes­sion­als but they could not spare their time to look into Japan sit­u­a­tion at that time. They missed out of 2003 oppor­tu­nity, for much big­ger sum than 3 mil­lion dollars.

Peo­ple who were involved with these missed oppor­tu­nity cases no longer care much for their com­pa­nies. They do what they are told to do, bid­ing time to go work for some­one else who would value their opin­ions and their work.

What is the cure for some­thing like this? If we look to the nature for answer, it shows aban­don ASAP if growth is the objec­tive. Yet I still search for ways to improve the sit­u­a­tion for for­eign cap­i­tal com­pa­nies in Japan.

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