The Leadership Japan Series By Dale Carnegie Training Japan

The President of a company is a very powerful force.  They drive the direction, the strategy and the culture formation inside the enterprise.  In Western corporations, there are big salaries and big incentives tied to the leader’s performance, especially around profit achievement and share price gains for shareholders.  We project this idea on to Japanese companies and imagine they are basically built in the same way.  This idea seems fine, until you ever have to get a decision from a Japanese company.  This is when you enter the twilight zone of differences about how things are really done here.   Japan has some specific features which make the leadership terrain quite unique.  Mid-career hires are the norm in the West and the exception in Japan, as far as larger firms are concerned.  New graduates are malleable and the company leadership wants to install their group think, culture and conservative action methodologies in them.  Seniority is a respected Confucian attribute in Japan, which has little currency