Featured Articles
Match Made: After a Long Engagement, Japan and India Tie the Knot
BANGALORE–It's a marriage made in heaven: The bride brings to the altar the world's fastest-growing middle class–young, well-educated and with money to spend–and the groom the world's most advanced manufacturing technology and billions of dollars worth of soft loans to fund badly needed infrastructure projects.
Working with Japan
Losing More Than Your Temper
By Patricia Pringle
America—a Nation of Straight Talkers When we do teambuilding work with Japanese and American companies, we ask our participants to do a self-assessment of their communication style. They discover their general preferences for direct and indirect speaking. They examine how they would communicate in different scenarios—for example, how would they let someone know they did not agree with their opinion? At the same time, they also develop an awareness of how their counterparts from other backgrounds prefer to communicate. As you might imagine, Americans across the board are much more direct in their speech than Japanese. Not only that, and every industry is different, but in the United States often the higher you go up in an organization, the more likely executives are to speak very directly. This applies to both men and women. In America we admire straight talkers. A leader should not beat around the bush. Japanese, on the other hand, want to avoid conflict and are more comfortable with expressing themselves indirectly. Once again, every industry, company and individual is different, but in Japan the higher the executive, the subtler their communication style. This doesn't mean that Japanese executives are pushovers. It means that they don't need to raise their voices to be heard.
Contents
2011 January Contents
2011 January Contents
Products Of The Month
Three-in-One Frying Pan
One of the frustrating things about having only one frying pan and one burner on the stove is that once an item has been cooked, it must be moved aside and turns cold while the next item is being fried.
Ranking
SPENDINGWhat do you want to increase your spending on? Source: JTB (Conducted among Japanese of all ages in local areas)
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