The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Japan is a unique country where underperformance is not considered a legitimate reason to terminate someone’s employ.  Leaders new to the country will often run into this issue.  They arrive with a mandate from HQ to “fix” Japan and get it up to a required performance standard.  As soon as the new broom brings in changes to achieve the HQ revenue targets, the trouble starts. Change is never an easy thing for Japan to deal with because the same old, same old is a known commodity and therefore a safe choice.  New represents risk and everyone here has been raised to avoid mistakes and errors and new things are inevitably going to be difficult to execute perfectly from the start.  Ergo, don’t do new things. The new boss will have religion about the changes they want to see and in short order they discover that despite all of that head nodding agreement in the room, no one is executing the agreed changes.  The answer is simple.  As far as the Japanese leaders are concerned, they have not agreed but they have chose