Getting More by Stuart Diamond

Author:Stuart Diamond [Diamond, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71691-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

CULTURE AND BUSINESS

Let’s look at an example that involves a business situation, one that has occurred several times with my students. It demonstrates the kind of incremental steps and role reversal necessary to bridge cultural gaps.

You are a smart female graduate of a business school. You have accepted a job as an associate in the Tokyo office of a major international consulting firm based in the United States. It’s a two-year assignment. You’ve been to Japan on various trips and speak Japanese pretty well from your studies and visits.

You are assigned to be the main contact with a traditional Japanese manufacturing company. Management and the board of directors are all male and very conservative. They will have nothing to do with you as a consultant. They go around you constantly to your boss, a man. Or they treat you like a secretary. A 2010 report by the World Economic Forum said women occupy just 24 percent of company jobs in Japan, second lowest only to India with 23 percent, among the twenty-seven major countries studied. And very, very few women are permitted into the corporate suite. Many women in the Japanese workforce do clerical tasks like serving tea: they are called O.L.’s, or “Office Ladies.”

Your choices are either to mark time in the office for two years, returning to the United States with your career having advanced very little, or to do something about it, and shine. If you use the right negotiation tools, it will take about six months for you to become a full-fledged consultant, respected by the Japanese company.

Let’s first consider how a traditional, all-male Japanese management views a young, bright foreign woman in their midst, inserted as an advisor and essentially as an equal. The word that comes to mind is threat. Let’s spell this out. A threat to the established order. A threat to a thousand years of history. A threat to the cohesion of society. A threat to tradition. To them, it could easily suggest a break-up of the family (“What if all women behaved this way?”).

So getting inside their heads is critically important. You may not like how this kind of inquiry makes some Japanese males recoil. But we’re here to deal with the real world.

Of course, their perceptions and their feelings are just where we start our process of changing their perceptions to move toward our goals. As I’ve mentioned, problems are the start of the analysis, not the end.

Two key negotiation tools you need to look at here are their interests (needs) and third parties that could influence them.

Let’s first make a partial list of their needs (interests): to profit and attract the best people, and to be seen as innovative, socially conscious, international, competitive, focused on the long term, and collaborative.

And third parties: shareholders, employees, customers, government, U.S. partner, public, competitors, board of directors, media, and colleagues.

Having done this, we can see how to reframe the situation. Far from being a threat, the young woman represents profit, the future, competitiveness: she is among the brightest of the new generation of young businesspeople.

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