Today I'd like to write about the exclusiveness of Japanese organizations. Formerly I was working for one of the largest real estate companies in Japan. When I entered that company by mid-career employment, the company was expanding their urban development business and starting mid-career recruiting in a large scale. One third of the company's employees were employed from another company and the rest was those who started working in the company just after graduating colleges. If you focus on the number of mid-career employees, you might say that this company succeeds in integrating the mid-career employees with their own organization. However, my experience was far from smooth integration.

When I started working in IT department of the company, I encountered strong allergic reactions of those who have long experience in the company. I was hired in order to participate into the development of mainframe systems. The company had its own unique notation for drawing Entity-Relationship diagrams and we had to follow it when we make the physical design of databases. My first ER diagram was severely criticized only because of some minor wrong notations and caused negative feelings among them. So my boss had to decide to assign me to the tasks of client-server systems. After assigning to the client-server systems, I could make the company-wide rollout of groupware thanks for good support of my colleagues.

From my personal experience, I have to say that Japanese organizations sometimes show strong allergic reaction when they integrate Japanese people from outside of their organization. Even among Japanese, Japanese sometimes show refusal attitudes when the counterpart has different organizational context. These five years there happened large merger and acquisition between large Japanese companies, such as Mizuho Financial Group and JFE Holdings. They needed several years to integrate different Japanese companies into one group including the time necessary for nemawashi before actually M&A happened. After the merger and acquisition, the real integration could happen only when they succeeded in implementing appropriate measures or only when one company was much stronger than the other company.

Even in case of Japanese-Japanese merger, they took several years to integrate different companies. That's because each Japanese company has strong context of its own corporate culture. Japanese salary-men entered a company with the intention of working in the same company until retirement. We try to integrate ourselves deeply into the company specific cultural context. It is simply annoying and inefficient to integrate us into another corporate cultural context in the middle of our career. Today younger generation has become relatively indifferent about the corporate culture. However, it is not because young people are more open-minded and flexible than the middle-aged people. That's because young people are obliged to become indifferent about it for the sake of changing companies more easily because they can't expect lifetime employment any more.

But as long as both parties are Japanese, we can integrate with each other after several years because we share the common basic cultural context. Generally speaking, clear inequality of power between the companies involved in the integration makes the integration much more easier than in case of the companies that have equal power with each other. Even in case of the companies with equal power, we can integrate with each other as long as both parties are Japanese companies. On the contrary, as long as both parties are considered as equal, Japanese require that the company specific cultural context is always respected and conserved. If a foreign company tries to integrate a Japanese company by saying, "We are equal partners", then the foreign company has to conserve the cultural context of Japanese partner. If the foreign company says, "We are equal partners" and at the same time if they criticize the cultural context of the Japanese partner, including business processes and branding strategies, it is an annoying contradiction from the viewpoint of Japanese.

In addition, I think that it is simply impossible to integrate a Japanese organizations and a Western organization below the middle management level. Inside of Japanese companies the business processes below the middle management level, i.e. on the field level, are deep-rooted in the company's own cultural context. You can't change the business processes on the field level without changing the corporate culture itself because the corporate culture of Japanese companies are mainly fostered in the field-level business behavior. Japanese employees' feeling of ownership of field-level business processes is the basis of the whole corporate culture. If you want to change the business processes without conflicting with the cultural context of Japanese companies, the only ways is to replace the top management with non-Japanese, just like Mr. Ghosn in Nissan and to leave all the other tasks to Japanese employees.

This strategy, changing only the mission/vision level, i.e. top management level, into Western style, has two decisive advantages. The first advantage is that, for Japanese employees, mission/vision means nothing because, as we explained above, the corporate culture is born in the field-level business behavior, not in the top management behavior. So the drastic changes of mission/vision doesn't cause any conflict with the corporate culture that is specific to each Japanese company. The second advantage, the more important one, is that the ownership of business processes among middle managers is conserved and that, as a result, all employees below the middle management level can be kept motivated. If the top management empowers the middle management to reform their own business processes for themselves, we can motivate them to support the reform of the whole organization. If we succeed in motivating the middle management, they will motivate the staff level employees to reform their own business processes in turn in a cascade manner.

If we admit that Japanese companies such as Nissan succeeded in radical organizational reform, that's because they replaced only the top management with foreigners and most part of the organization is still managed by Japanese managers. Replacing the employees below the middle management level is terribly counter-productive because even the merger between Japanese companies causes serious conflict between different corporate cultures below the middle management level.

We are not working for changing Japanese culture or the corporate culture of the company but for increasing the company's profit. The efforts to change Japanese culture or the corporate culture can be justified as long as they contribute to increase our company's profit. If such efforts for integrating different cultures hinders the efforts to increase the company's profit, we must immediately stop such silly efforts. We should not dream a too ambitious dream. We should not underestimate the difficulties of integrating different cultures. It will take at least more than 100 years for Japanese people to integrate different cultures because we Japanese fail to integrate Western culture even after more than 100 years have passed since we opened our country to foreigners. As you know, we are still struggling with English language and with Westerners in our workplace. If you expect that this integration will reach 50% level in 50 years, you must be optimistic enough to be diagnosed as delusion of grandeur.