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.
FUJIKO SUDA 