zeph wrote:ChrisF1 wrote:Friends always tell me the Japanese business culture is very different from Western business...
I guess so. One major difference I have heard about is that when the company hits a rough spot, the CEO's all take hits on their salaries before any non-executive personnel is fired. Western companies tend to lay off the workers first and preserve executive pay.
I have some experience with Japanese companies and troubled project, working from Europe it was difficult.
One thing is the hierarchical way of communication. Normally with a western company you call the responsible engineer and ask him your questions. Perhaps you will get some filtering from his management but usually communication is pretty straightforward. With these companies I had to have my management relay the question to the management on the other side. They consulted their engineers formulated the answer, which got back via my management. It is extremely inefficient. It sometimes took me over a week to get a simple piece of information.
Another thing is lack of escalation culture. When a project here goes awry, we step in and poor more resources on the project, replace people on key positions, hire outside help etc. I'm not saying that that is always as successful, but with the Japanese projects that I was involved in they just kept running the same team and started pushing them to solve it. Even when it became painfully obvious that the team despite their hard work would not provide the solution.
I don't know the background of that, whether it is the belief in the Kaizen principles (improvement from the work floor) or that it is a hesitation to admit that the project is not going well.
I'm certainly no cultural expert. Although I have heard similar stories from others, I don't know to what extend my experience is representative for Japanese companies or Honda in particular. But if it is then I can understand some of the difficulties Mclaren is experiencing now.