Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Work result expectation difference by cultures

Jul 11, 2003 16:03 pm / Add a comment

I could under­stand how it takes a genius to dis­cover the obvi­ous things hap­pen­ing around us. Dis­cov­ery is for the humans to see the truth. Truth is all around us, all the time. How blind we are. It takes so much liv­ing, pay­ing close atten­tion to the nature of the mat­ter to see the truth.

The truth about dif­fer­ence between cul­tures, and how each cul­ture has dif­fer­ent value sys­tem. I was read­ing about it, but it didn’t have deep mean­ing to me, until I lived it in many ways, then with a sin­gle inci­dence, it clicked. It’s like Archimedes dis­cov­er­ing mass when he was tak­ing a bath. Like New­ton dis­cov­er­ing grav­ity when he saw an apple fall.

My dis­cov­ery isn’t so grandeous, and it’s some­thing that has been dis­cussed many times before, as in Tobe and Nonaka’s Essence of Fail­ure, and Yamagishi’s From Safety Based Soci­ety to Trust Based Soci­ety.

It is about the basic dif­fer­ence between Japan­ese and west­ern cul­ture in:
1. Value placed on work process
2. Value placed on result of the work done
3. Value of accu­mu­lated knowl­edge, how it is used.

I spent my first 12 years of life in Japan, and with Japan­ese blood and bases learned, val­ues of work process, val­ues of result was that of Japan. Then with those bases, I lived and learned in USA for the next 18 years work process and result value the north Amer­i­can way. After com­ing back to Japan, I joined US national com­pany, work­ing closely with west­ern nation­als, in their sys­tem which stressed mak­ing each process explicit using lots of words. (Except in IT, which I couldn’t fig­ure out why.) Then when I joined my cur­rent com­pany, I came in charge of Japan­ese accounts.

My Eng­lish isn’t the best, but my Japan­ese is worse. I thought in the begin­ning it was the lan­guage thing. I kept on try­ing to pro­duce explicit evi­dence of progress in work process, using report as means. But no, unless there were big prob­lems, Japan­ese were not inter­ested in how I was pro­ceed­ing with my work. They were sat­is­fied with my daily com­mu­ni­ca­tions, for me to just show up, be there. I was sin­cere, acted with respect, and made rec­om­men­da­tions accord­ing to what seemed best for the clients. And when I showed up con­sis­tently, it cre­ated results. But I was never asked to pro­duce mate­ri­als that backed up how my results were cre­ated. So I got used to doing busi­ness that way, using very few writ­ten sen­tences, just lots of face-to-face com­mu­ni­ca­tion. What mat­tered most was the mood we had together as we worked together. This lasted for four years.

Well, the four years ended with my cur­rent inter­na­tional project, north Amer­i­cans, British, French, Asian all involved, but no Japan­ese. It took me two weeks or miss­ing the points of direc­tion that was given to me, not under­stand­ing very well what I was being asked to do. I was pro­cess­ing work in Japan­ese way with these non-Japanese.

After being asked to “add some meat on the pro­posal”, “show me every­thing” for the 10th time, each time being asked to add some more, it hit me!! Right, they want me to be explicit about my work! These peo­ple want what they are doing to be clear, under­stand­able process for any­body to see, not just us who do the work!! I was being amnesic. For­got­ten about what west­ern cul­ture expects as part of the work, which is to make it all explicit so that any­body can take any part of the work process, re-create it.

I was thun­der­struck. This is why the west­ern world has been mak­ing progress at such speed, because the knowl­edge is not all lost when some­one leaves, because at least there are bits and pieces in explicit writ­ing that one can fol­low any time later.

Okay, there are var­i­ous degrees of demand­ing explic­it­ness in West­ern cul­ture. Irish his­tor­i­cal writ­ing has noth­ing about Grace O’Malley, whereas British his­to­rian made a care­ful record when she vis­ited Queen Eliz­a­beth I. But com­pared to Japan­ese cul­ture which is so engaged in the moment, tak­ing so much things into con­sid­er­a­tion fear­ing much of total effect will be lost if one tried to log­i­cally describe each aspects, west­ern cul­ture is extremely explicit in recordings.

The Japan­ese lack of inter­est in mak­ing work explicit in writ­ing is appar­ent from num­bers of patents that are sub­mit­ted by researchers. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of that sit­u­a­tion is recent Nobel prize lau­re­ate Koichi Tanaka. Num­ber of papers he has pro­duced are very few com­pared to that of sci­en­tists and researchers in the west. Maybe we as Japan­ese will never change this cul­tural char­ac­ter­is­tic. Even sci­en­tists and researchers carry the arti­san mentality.

Maybe this is why Japan­ese are and will con­tinue to be the mas­ters in tech­no­log­i­cal incre­men­tal improve­ments. With incre­men­tal improve­ments, the team mem­ory will carry on the progress, whereas with inno­va­tion, one per­son would have to accept liv­ing in explicit mode.

My lit­tle project do not need such worry, but hav­ing my full mem­ory back in work­ing explic­itly, I think I will very much enjoy work­ing on this project. And I think it has been a true bless­ing for me. See? I was able to express pro­found dis­cov­ery, even though it is a dis­cov­ery just for myself, in writ­ten words.

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