The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Getting change anywhere is a difficult process, but Japan is a special case.  Often in business, we represent the change.  We are the potential new supplier and that means a change.  They have been doing business with someone else and we want them to stop doing that and do business with us instead.  There are many currents underpinning Japanese culture and its resistance to change. I have been training in traditional Japanese karate for 52 years and part of that process is learning set sequences called kata.  These are fixed moves that cannot be varied in any way.  There is one way to do the movement, one order and our job is to replicate that same movement thousands of times until we have perfected it.  There is no possibility of doing it a different way - in other words, no change is possible.  This is a powerful metaphor for many things in Japan where there is only one way of doing things and it cannot be varied.  This is prime change resistance in action.  I find this at home too.  My wife is Japanese and