Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Searching for workplace change case studies

Jan 07, 2004 01:51 am / Add a comment

When I worked on a work­place change project for a non-Japanese com­pany in India last year, I thought my days were num­bered work­ing on Japan­ese com­pany projects. Now it appears as my days are num­bered for work­ing on Japan­ese com­pany projects.

There’s this thing about Japan­ese com­pa­nies obsessed with search for case stud­ies, and it applies for those for work­place change. If some­one else is doing it, and it is work­ing, they rea­son, it must work for them too. What is largely ignored is that some­one else’s suc­cess is depen­dant on that company’s matu­rity level, human net­work and trust level, and most of all on their per­cep­tion of value. Maybe the case study might have one or two sim­i­lar­ity with the com­pany who is search­ing for a good case study that is applic­a­ble to itself, but each case is dif­fer­ent, and it is mean­ing­less to pro­ceed with change based on just on one or two similarities.

Maybe we can think in term of com­par­i­son of tree’s pro­duc­tion of fruites. Peach, chest­nuts (fruites? not sure), Per­sim­mon. They say it takes 3 years before peach or chest­nuts trees pro­duce fruites. It takes per­sim­mon tree 8 years. The tree barks have rather sim­i­lar col­ors. The tree height not too dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent, espe­cially between chest­nuts and peach. So do they yield fruites at the same time of the year? No. What types of par­a­sites like these trees? How do we know for sure what works for one tree will work for another?

What I am find­ing is that when peo­ple work for a large com­pany, they adapt to the orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior, which is do not take action unless it can be rea­soned, regard­less of rea­son­able­ness of the rea­sons. Jung’s “Com­men­tary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” pro­voked these thoughts.

I had always worked with the tem­pera­men­tal con­vic­tion that at bot­tom there are no insol­u­ble prob­lems, and expe­ri­ence jus­ti­fied me in so far as I have often seen patients sim­ply out­grow a prob­lem that had destroyed oth­ers. This “out­grow­ing,” as I for­merly called it, proved on fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion to be a new level of con­scious­ness. Some higher or wider inter­est appeared on the patience’s hori­zon, and through this boraden­ing of his out­look the insol­u­ble prob­lem lost its urgency.

I agree with gen­eral con­cept that orga­ni­za­tional behav­ior is what makes orga­ni­za­tion. It is often good that too rapid change do not hap­pen. How­ever, I need to change, to grow. Jung says that seem­ingly insol­u­ble prob­lem works itself out with time. Why, so easy. I just have to out­grow this prob­lem of need­ing to change and grow by mov­ing onto some­thing else that would give me joy. Not work­ing on a major Japan­ese company’s project, for instance.

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