Volume 2 Issue 3 - 2009
Preparing Tomorrow's Leaders | Training Global Business Leaders | Compensation Storm

Training Global Business Leaders

The Japanese Experience

Reiji Ohtaki 

Many Japanese companies expanding their business abroad now recognized that it is an urgent priority for them to train a cadre of Japanese and non-Japanese global business leaders. Up until a few years ago, training of non-Japanese executives working in overseas offices of major Japanese firms was limited to “business-cum-pleasure” training trips or international conferences at head office.

In an effort to promote globalization, major Japanese companies have now begun to seriously train their non-Japanese executives to become global business leaders. Such companies as Panasonic, Toshiba, Canon, Sony, Mazda, Mizuho Bank, and Ajinomoto have started to implement global training programs for their non-Japanese executives. The training programs, which started on a trial-and-error basis, are now becoming regular and periodic.

Definition of “global leader”

“Global business leader” literally means a person who runs a business operation that expands globally. The capabilities of a global business leader should include such things as management prowess, communication capability, and cross-cultural sensitivity. A global business leader should be familiar with the management concepts and philosophy of the company, and must be able to preach that philosophy to people around him in different locations, and act according to its principles. A global business leader must be a leader who has a strong commitment to the company, whose passion moves the heart of people around him, and who maintains a strong camaraderie with his subordinates and colleagues.

It goes without saying that a person with such a profile has a very high market value. In any country the employability of such a person would be very high, and such person always attracts the attention of headhunters. In Japanese companies also, those executives that have been sent from America or Europe, and now work within the domestic management circle, have gone through the corporate training programs. Since these executives already have the basic skill of a global leader, for Japanese companies to train up global business leaders, the objectives should be to:

• Retain global business leaders
• Learn the management philosophy and concepts of the company and in so doing, make them into global business leaders who can thrive in their own company. 
• Let them expand their network in the company to make their job easier, and create better working environment.

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Using filmmaking to facilitate deeper understanding

A successful global business leadership training program must strive to achieve these objectives. In the case studies below, we outline how this can be done.

A large Japanese manufacturer finds that simply translating Japanese management concept into a foreign language is not enough to enable a trainee to fully understand the intent of the concepts.  Instead, they use a creative approach that effectively achieves their training objectives.

In this training program, the speeches of the founder and discussions with the “old boys” who actually worked with founder are part of the training program. This approach gets trainees interested in the corporate history and gives them a proper understanding of the underlying principles of the management philosophy from the perspective of those that shaped in the philosophy.

The founder’s speeches and the old-boy’s discussion are combined with filmmaking to ingrain a deep understanding of corporate concepts and philosophy into their up-and-coming global business leaders. Filmmaking is used to facilitate and focus the group discussions. Over the course of the five-day program, groups of five executives plan and produce three-minute videos. Each video is meant to introduce the company, in a simple way, to a new manager who has joined the company in mid-career.

It is no easy task to make a video with people you just met a few days earlier and who speak different languages and have different cultures and education background.  The new filmmakers must use their imagination and come up with creative ideas to express management concept that they have just been taught. The filmmaking entails a process of understanding management concept with your left brain, and expressing it with your right brain. This helps the trainee to understand the concept much more deeply.  The end result is a unique experience not soon forgotten.

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Aligning action plans

In the second case, a service industry company’s objective is to increase their aspiring global business leaders’ understanding of the company’s strategy and leadership improvement process. After listening to a presentation on the medium-term business plan, participants were asked to create a scenario on the shape of a particular business line in 10 years’ time. They must include an outline of the management parameters to handle the “future” projected in the scenario. The parameters need to encompass strategic, organizational, and human resources issues.

In this program, participants were given a 360-degree leadership assessment in advance, and during the training conducted in Japan, professional coaches gave one-on-one feedback to each trainee. After making formal presentations to their strategic proposals to management at the end of the training program, participants are required to make action plan accordingly to improve one’s leadership. By so doing, each leader must integrate his or her own action plan with the corporate strategic action plan. 

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Reaction from participants

Those foreign executives that have taken part in these training programs have had a positive reaction. Especially for those whose company had never organized this kind of activity before, the opportunity to visit the corporate headquarters alone is a huge incentive. The rare chance to meet with the president and directors, as well as the opportunity to meet and network with key personnel from other subsidiary companies is quite motivating.

While the foreign executive trainees usually had a positive reaction to the Japanese management concept introduced during the training, some Japanese firms are quite reticent about sharing these concepts with their foreign managers. This may be due to past experience where they simply translated and distributed the company’s management philosophy to their overseas management staff. In such cases, the foreign managers often had a negative reaction. It was traumatic to the Japanese management that deeply believed in these concepts. They became concerned that the management philosophy was too Japanese, which they feared resulted in fixed ideas that were not easy to erase.

Most of the overseas staff that underwent this new style of training are actually quite interested in Japan and Japanese corporations - that is why they work for Japanese companies. After the positive reaction as a result of the training, some companies have gone even further to disseminate their management philosophy to non-Japanese manager. In addition to distributing translated version of company history or management philosophy, they now use DVDs and other media to convey the “live message” of the company’s founder and top management. 

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Contact

For more information, please contact Reiji Ohtaki, Director and Chairman, Aon Consulting Japan, at reiji_ohtaki@aon-asia.com. 

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