Management Style
American	Ego-based	Manager can freely act based on their own creativity.
German	Fact-based	Manager acts based on subjective facts as much as possible.
Japanese	People-based	Manager must care as much as possible what stakeholders think.

There was an interesting thing about the cultural difference between American, German and Japanese management. When we were talking about how to improve the management within our group, one manager (we call him 'manager A') said as follows in order to characterize American and German management style. "American managers say different things in the evening than in the morning and immediately start acting as he says. German managers carefully analyze everything before doing something". Then this Western manager A asked to one of Japanese managers, manager B, "How will Japanese managers do?" Manager B answered, "in the middle of American and German managers".

This is really a typical Japanese answer because of its preference of happy medium. But this answer is completely wrong. If we assume that what manager A said is true (I don' know if it is true because I have no experience of working in foreign countries), we can conclude that American management is based on his/her own thought and that German management is based on the objective facts and data. In other words, American management is ego-based while German management is fact-based.

As you can see easily now, it would be meaningless to talk about the medium of ego-based and fact-based because the difference between these two tendencies is not of quantity but of quality. In order to give an appropriate position of Japanese management style, let's draw the following picture. This picture assumes that in the world there is ego, other people and things (everything other than ego and other people). This picture itself might be a typical Western view of the world that is easily understood by Westerners. We have no choice other than to take this picture as an example to make Westerners understand what we are going to discuss now.

Based on this picture, we can say that American manager makes decision based on the subjective view (ego-based) while German manager makes decision based on the objective view of the things (fact-based). You see there is one element untouched here, i.e. other people. This is the appropriate position of Japanese management. Japanese manager makes decision based on how other people will think or act according to the decision. When Japanese manager is about to make a decision, the first thing that comes to mind is people who will be affected by the decision. So Japanese management is people-based. When we say 'people' regarding Japanese management, the word always means all stakeholders other than the decision maker.

The example we described at the beginning of this essay proves this. When Japanese manager B was about to answer the question of foreign manager A, the first thing he thought was what manager A expected from him by asking that question. So he answered just as manager A expected. It is natural that his answer became typically Japanese: "in the middle of American and German". Actually manager A got satisfied with this Japanese style answer because this answer itself proved that the manager A's view of Japanese management is correct.

However, as I repeatedly say, the answer of manager B is wrong. The expectation of manager A about Japanese management is also wrong. When we observe the behavior of this Japanese manager B, we can clearly see the risk of interaction between Western and Japanese managers. Japanese managers tend to try to act according to foreign manager's expectation. Too adaptive Japanese manager enhances the Western manager's wrong image of Japanese management. Western managers can't meet true strangers as long as they are talking with too adaptive Japanese. The worst thing is that both too adaptive Japanese managers and too little adaptive Western managers don't realize it. How funny this situation is!