Collectively Speaking

The team’s visit to Japan last week yielded a number of interesting conversations in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. In addition to speaking with local business leaders and academics, we also had a chance to speak with some western MNC “top talent” professionals who were in Japan to visit their local office.

Asking about the point we noted last week — that things seem to work in Japan — we got a lot of answers that followed one common theme: things work in Japan because there’s a feeling of collectivism, like “we are all in this together,” so people work together to make everything go as smoothly as possible. The railroad engineer wants his food to be good, and the restaurant owner wants her train to be on-time, so both do their job the best they can so that everyone benefits.

That contrasts with cultural attitudes that are common in the rest of Asia, especially the kaisu mentality (a Hokkien term) of being “afraid to lose out,” which can lead people to constantly feel like they are in competition, rather than collaboration, with others in their society. Many business leaders (and not just in Asia, of course) promote a kaisu mentality in their company, figuring that if everyone is competing against each other, they will all perform better. That may or may not be true, but as we see in Japanese society, a collaborative attitude can also yield some pretty good results.

That’s not to say that this collectivism is a perfect solution for creating a high-performance culture. It has one particular drawback that hurts companies: in the words of one researcher, in Japan “the nail that stands highest is the first to get hit by the hammer.” The practical outcome of this is that innovation is limited, because standing out in the crowd — whether for success or failure — increases the chances of getting smacked down.

How do you bring a more collaborative attitude into your company without the risk-aversion and groupthink that can come with it? One way might be to be very, very clear about your expectations. In Japan, the expectation seems to be “we will work together to keep things steady.” But if you are trying to grow your company, you need to set new expectations and make it clear that success and failure of new ideas will be disruptive, and thats’s OK. You need a performance review system and rewards that recognize collaboration AND creativity, and that do not penalize people for constructive failure.

If you can get people to work together for group success, that’s great, and if you can also get them to be willing to take chances and try new ideas, that’s even better. You don’t need to do things exactly like they do them in Japan, but if you can borrow some of that collective attitude, it can carry your entire organization a long way.