The bast way to revive a struggling business

What steps could be taken to revive a struggling business? Which methods do you think are most effective? Which are least effective?

If you ask me some advice about it, I’ll give you the simplest one. Be honest and candid. You might think that’s the most stupid way. However, it is the best way that I've got through all experiences.

When you are facing the struggle business, you would probably try some effect technique to solve it. You might adapt all rules of thumb as possible as you can gather. In such a time, another point of view is needed. People would be likely to skip the most important thing because of focusing on a certain problem.

Opening the problem and sharing it with concerned takes a lot of nerve. Sometimes it needs to lose your title, job, or trust in the business. However, never hesitate it. Be honest and candid. Nor more terrible things will come.

I’ll share my actual accident with you. That occurred 10 years ago. A development team fixed a bug that was detected by an important customer. The slight mistake caused the bug. If a young guy who made the mistakes looked at carefully, the mistake wouldn’t have happened. All member of the team thought so. At the same time, they understood well how critical the problem that they were facing was. They chose not to open the problem and to fix by their selves. After re-provided the bug-fixed software, the customer found another bug that the development team made by fixing the bug.

When you hold the struggling business and would like to resolve it, you should share it with concerned. Even though you have any risks, you should open it honestly. You might get terrible reprimands, but it is tentative. After reviving your business, no one remembers the cause. The least effective way is not to open the problem and to try resolving by closed member.

Differences between Japanese and foreign business culture

The biggest difference is probable a way of organizing meetings.

The first of all, the purpose and goal should be clear. Sometimes I get mails about a meeting that those aren’t written. In the most terrible case, I don’t to know whether I should attend or not. Regarding a meeting space, all people who receive the agenda from the organized are not impossible to come there, because the space has a small table with 5 chairs. On day a coworker David form North Carolina sent me a funny email. It said “Is it a chain mail?” It isn’t incredible for him that over 20 received people concerned with the meeting. If you knew a fact that many people save the mail without reading it, you would be amazed. Once I asked one of them the reason, he said that it was written in English.

Second, each of attendee has a role in a global meeting. Each role is different. In other words, everyone represents a profit in their business. To realize their objective, they discuss and discuss. In Japanese meeting, you might see some people who have kept silence from the start to the end. It seems as if monks are training. They are never interested in the meeting, because the purpose is to share the information among attendees. Even though a children is invited the meeting, he or she has a right of showing an opinion.

Finally, discussion in a global meeting is to get better choice. Younger Japanese are likely to hesitate to discussion. Expressing an own view is considered as an immoral manner in old Japanese society. Additionally, some of old Japanese .the result is changed by discussion. They think that the progress should be scheduled carefully and the result should be already defined before starting the discussion.

If you are planning to work for Japanese domestic company, you have to be patient. These days a lot of the domestic companies impose TOEIC score for a promoting or define English as an official language. However, even if they spoke in English, they don’t always follow the global meeting manner.

Do you like a fixed work schedule? Why or why not?

If my job goes along a fixed schedule, how calm a day is. I wouldn't debate whether pick up ringing call or continue speaking to organize a meeting. I wouldn't drink a cup of cold café latte that was extremely hot 3 hours ago in the closest Starbucks.

If you are interested in Japanese national character, you may know “Yotei Chowa”. “Yotei” means a word “schedule” and “Chowa” is a word “harmonize”. “Yotei Chowa” means that people harmonize with a result that was already scheduled carefully. In old Japanese styled meeting, the result was still decided and there is no discussion among attendees. This is an extreme case of “Yotei Chowa”, but I’d like to work along fixed schedule a little more.

I manage over 15 member technical support team that receive and send several hundred mails a day. My job is far from the fixed schedule.

Every morning I go to office with Starbucks coffee and start reading mails that reached while leaving my office with drinking it. It is my morning ritual in these 3 years. The almost all mails are from US. I wish I would receive a mail that some need my help. Unfortunately when I find the unlucky, I have to rush multiple tasks at a time. In an hour, the US engineer who sent me trouble shooting mail would probably go home. Till them, I have to consider the situation and the next activities and to share them with the engineer. The delicious coffee disappears out my view. While considering the solution for US, mails and calls keep coming. At 10 o’clock Asian market is opened. The office is as if it wakes up from a sleep.

Every when new staff join my team, I ask them. “Do you like tumbling a dice” If they answer “Yes”, I’ll tell them “they will be good support engineer.” My working day is filled with a lot of unexpected things.

An importance of first implreesion

How important are first impressions when meeting new people?

A psychologist says first impression is decided in six to thirty seconds.
Another study is reported that visual information makes up 83% of all information when a human collects information to judge something.　From viewpoint of speech, it is heard that context of speech is only 7% of the elements that decide the speaker's impression to listeners.

These studies show that it is hard to correct the impression once it is concreted. Today a lot of companies have a corporate dress code to improve the impression based on the study.

My company has dress code that employees have to follow. Illustrated dress code description is pinned up on the wall near the door. Since there are a lot of prohibit matters, it has bad reputations.

As the prohibit matters have been added to long time, some of them are out of date at now. Generally trendy outfit is likely to prohibit. Two or three years ago, Crocs exploded in popular and were added on the list. On the other hands, do you know "mule"? It's kind of backless female shoes. Employees don't allow wearing due to safety. However, even now few people know what mule is.

I'd like to share with you a good example that the first impression is conveniently used in business. Another reason why it is difficult to change the first impression is thought that it expresses a part of the nature. Especially, the first impression is an important element in job interview.

Do you see young people wearing business suit in black? They are job seekers. They are worried that they give bad impressions in job interview and choose almost same business suit. I guess it is not good idea, because the outfits hide candidates' character and difference among them. I’m afraid that their impressions don’t remain the interviewer’s memory.

Speaking of succeeded case, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are famous entrepreneurs in US and control their first impression. Just after they started their small company, they look to be real geeks. Older generation funders might doubt they are possible to succeed in their business. Now they give quite different impression to others. I suppose they trained to improve their first impression.

The first impression is an important element, it is hard to change it once it is concreted. However, these days it is easy to find business books about effective clothes or such kind of information on web site. We can improve and control it.

Advice for young people

What advice would you give to a university student who is going to graduate this year?

Consider by yourself and what you’d like to be shall come true. There are two reasons why I believe it.

First, though a lot of young students might insist that they always think for them, students aren't aware of the true meaning of it.

About two months ago, I took a lecture in my university that I graduated from 20 years ago. The lecture was about how to build the carrier and how to learn during the university days. After 60 minutes speech, I discussed with 215 students.

Amazingly, they showed more conservative thoughts that I expected. It looks like older generation people. Of course, they didn’t agree with the thoughts. Rather they seemed to think what they should do to go beyond the old world. For example, a female student asked me whether women are possible to go on the main career streams. It was really incredible that she lives in 21 century. I’ve never been crossed my business by a reason why I am a woman. I have no experience during my 20 year business.

After a while my considering, I found that it was caused by a kind of imprinting. Newborn chicks think moving objects as their parent. People whom young students meet are very limited. Since many of them are far older generation people like their teachers or their parents, the world that students think is very similar to the one that older people think.　I hope they win their own world by their consideration.

Second, the advice is based on my 20 year experience. It is very hard to find that there are no world-wide accidents and no paradigm shift. In other words, we definitely meet big changes and have to change ourselves to fit the changes that surround our society.

When I started my business about 20 years ago, both cell-phone and internet are not poplar. The first day when I started to work for the computer science labs, the first task was to decide my log-in account for computers. The internet existed at the time, but we couldn’t see a word ‘internet’ in any dictionary. Business people used to wear a white shirt and to knot a tie every morning. Almost of all office workers spent all their business life in a same company that they started to work for. How about today? Dismissal and moving are getting popular and structure of the society has been changing dynamically.

Have you ever been to a center of a typhoon? It is fine and quiet. You might forget you are in the storm. It is a true nature of the storm. When people are in a storm, they can’t see where they are. I’m sure that it’s important to consider by one self and believe it. There are no textbooks for changing day. Only what you’d like to be is a compass beyond paradigm shifting.

In a decade, I experienced September 11, Lehman Crisis, big earthquake in east Japan and other accidents. During two decade, the yen rate has repeated decreasing and increasing. However, I know my happiness of my business has been free from changes and accidents. The biggest deciding factor of the happiness is an effort and a way of thinking.


Now, some people insist that it’s a time for a change. A famous professor at London Business school, Lynda Gratton says in her book “The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here" that the way of working have been changing dramatically till 2025. She also predicts the management without diverseness will die and the meaning of leadership will differ from the current.

So I’d like to tell you again. Consider by yourself and what you’d like to be shall come true.

What is the best part of business trips?

Do you go on business trips? What is the best part of business trips? What is the worst part?

My biggest pleasures of business trips are to meet unknown people and unexpected things. However, if you know my purpose of my trips, you would probably be surprised.

I am a manager who leads a technical support team for S/W on PC and has one or two times of business trips every month to visit my customers. The main purpose of business trip is trouble shooting that my staff can't fix. In other words, the almost all customers whom I have to visit are facing critical situations.

About four years ago, an automotive supplier in Shizuoka was my turning point. I visit the customer to report a S/W quality assurance system of my company, because the critical bug in my product were detected on the customers’ evaluation process and damaged the confident of both the product and the company. Whether the company was possible to recover the confident depended on my response. If my response would not had satisfied in the customer’s requirement, the customer would have stop using the product and would have chosen competitor’s one.

The customer’s office located on the top of beautiful hill. The office was surrounded by tea tree farm. On the way to the office, I saw a lot of small wind mills in the tea tree files and talked to sales guy who followed me to the customer. “Which direction is the wind blowing from? With wind or against?”, “Hope with wind”. He said. We kept quit because that our visit was a kind of negotiation that we were not allowed to lose.

The meeting was filled in a gloomy atmosphere. At the end of the meeting, the director asked us the cause of bugs. Are bugs generated by an individual or an organization? The question was very hard to answer. Even though I chose any option, the director would doubt S/W quality assurance system was not enough.

After long silence, he began to speak the problem he held. The bugs had been repeated by the same cause. He told us honestly that he didn’t find the good way to avoid it. We discussed way of testing and reviewing as S/W engineer over a relationship between clients and suppliers and shared the difficulty of developing high quality S/W product.

Till then, I hadn’t found the pleasure in trouble shooting, but I changed my mind. Though I exchange a lot of mails with customer every day, those are technical problems. It is very hard to catch root causes and their thinking that they hold.

Now, I think business trip for trouble shootings are good opportunities to understand the customers deeply even though the customer were upset by the trouble. I’m also sure that it’s easy to build good relationship with customer after visiting them.

Compared with the best part and the worst part, it’s difficult to find the worst. If I were to point it, someone who can’t catch me at my office call me while I’m spending relaxing time after a critical negotiation. Those are probably overseas calls. The calls dispossess my relaxing time of drinking beer seeing nice view in Shinkansen. It is just another pleasure among Japanese business people.

Part-time jobs during university

Do you think part-time jobs during university help prepare students for their professional careers? Why or why not?

Yes. In cutting edge technologies, many founders started their business during the university. As you might know, Microsoft, Facebook and other famous enterprises were established in Harvard University. The success was caused by their founder who was a genius. However, I’m sure that inconvenience and free university days incubated amazing idea that no one came up.

Speaking of myself, I had worked for the laboratory as a programmer during university. The reason why I started working is very simple. It was a shortcut of my carrier. The part-time job game me more than I had expected.

What is a difference between writing program in lectures in the university and writing it for earning money? I think it’s had to find a significant difference between them. However, my way of learning was changed dramatically. Getting a certain purpose make me consider it deeply. Until I started working, my concern is whether I’m possible to pass exam in high score. I had never had questions nor didn’t try researching it deeply.

The biggest things that I learned through my part time job, might be break through skills. Though getting money was out of my scope, I thought my result should have more than worth of my earnings. I tried writing program without bugs. At the laboratory, I shared a single computer with researchers and engineers. Once the bug detected, I had to wait to re-use till next day. It is hard to believe today, but it was very common two decades ago.

Generally, it is very easy to find programing language text books. On the other hand, there are very rare textbook about programing skill. Even though I got such kind of books, it is another thing to fix the bugs that I faced. The first things I did is to ask the professional engineer who worked for the laboratory give me some advices. It was tough work for me because I never had talked with older people who are neither my family nor teachers.

Fortunately one of engineer treated me as a engineer not a beginner. The experience gave me a policy as a professional that the true engineer share the knowledge with anyone.


If a university student were two minds about a part time job, I’ll recommend starting it. The job reminds the importance of learning in university, changes the way of studying and definitely gives them unforgettable experience that is their polestar in the future.

The best things that has happened to my carrer

Seven Years ago, I led marketing training for new employees who just graduated from university. It was really tough work but gave me various things. At that time, I was just promoted to a section manager and the job developed a fundamental skill of managing.

In the training, a team consisted of seven or eight new employees and a facilitator. Since the company hired about eighty new employees, there were ten teams. The goal was designed new product for the company and made a presentation for board member including CEO.

The training was over three months, included two times of half day marketing lectures need to interim report. Except those events, the operation was managed by each team.

I’d like to share three most difficult of my role.

The first is to be a good facilitator. I was not familiar of the role. Wikipedia say “A facilitator is someone who helps a group of people understand their common objectives and assists them to plan to achieve them without taking a particular position in the discussion.” The facilitator should be neutral. It needed patience that I expected. For example target range for the product they were designing was absolutely narrow. They know same generation well, but didn’t know order generation at all. Generally 60s is better consumers, because their income is higher than 20s and they have more free time. Additionally they are positive about something new. However, they avoided the 60s from target consumers. In such a time, a facilitator had only to tell “Look at all generation. You might skip important things.” Even though they chose wrong options, the facilitator didn’t allow pointing it.

The second is to pull and lead small team. Till then, I’ve led small team that consisted of two or three members. However, the new employments are quite different and my experience was not useful. Sometimes, they started to argue. It seemed to lack of productive discussion and negotiation skill. One day looking carefully, I found their irritation was caused by their hunger. The team meetings were held after business hours. I brought a box of sweet that I bought on my business trip and gave it them. They discussed peacefully. Exchanging such tips of managing team with other co-facilitators is my fun. After a while, some teams became to have a break time with snack while meeting.

The third is improve time management. Just promoted manager is quite busy. They have to organize a lot of meeting, visit customers, evaluate their subordinates …. They have to face a lot of unknown things. Additionally, I have to manage new employee team. I know I couldn’t join all meetings. Through the experience I learned manager have to select jobs and sometime leave the job up to someone.

On the training I found another aim of the training. The training was also for new managers. Actually facilitators are new managers who just passed the job promotion.
Just a week before the final presentation for board members I was in Hong Kong. I joined meetings and rehearsal for presentation over phone. Since I spent my time in noisy convention halls in Hong Kong, it was difficult to listen to their saying. However lack of the facilitator brought together.

My team finished second. I had to do another thing, because one of member believed the first prize and I need to tell that he must accept the reality. After the presentation, we had party that all board member new employees and facilitators joined at. Some member of my team asked me to talk with the CEO Yamaguchi.
“I’m very glad to see you, Mr Yamaguchi” one of member said.
“Me, too” The CEO answered friendly.
I’ll never forget the scene.