The chain of command is a well established military leadership given. I have three stripes, you have none, so do what I say or else. In the post war period, this leadership idea was transposed across to Civvy street by returning soldiers. This worked like a charm and only started to peter out with the pushback against the Vietnam War, when all authority began to be challenged. Modern leaders are currently enamoured with concepts like the “servant leader”. The leader serves the team as an enabler for staff success. Dominant authority is out and a vague negotiated power equilibrium has replaced it. Delegation, responsibility, accountability, mistake handling and punishment are all swirling around in this fog of the new order.

Japan makes the whole construct even more interesting by having built up a legal perspective on staff issues that favours the worker against the company. Judges, also do not see company staff non-performance of duties as necessarily career ending. Add into the mix the fact that in the last 20 years, the number of people aged between 15 and 34 has halved. The bad news is that it is going to halve again over the next forty years. Young people will be in high demand, regardless of how useless they are. We complain today about millennium entitlement. That will be nothing compared to what is coming. Smaller families means more single child households. The Boomer generation will be spoiling their grandchildren on an industrial scale. Scarce resource spoilt brats will be entering society and business. I can hardly wait.

The Universities here in Japan will be taking anyone with a pulse, because they are going to be bleeding red ink all over the place. Does anyone remember the Tandai system of two year colleges? They have all disappeared or morphed into four year schools to survive. Diabolical entrance exams will linger for the most elite schools in Japan, but for the rest it is a race to the bottom of academic standards to keep the doors open. Passing academic classes at a Japanese University has been a joke. If you turn up to class, the chances are pretty good you will be passed. A rather low bar compared to what is happening at varsity in the rest of the advanced world.

So dealing with undereducated, spoilt, entitled lay abouts are our collective future when hiring staff. Even now, between 30%-35% of staff into their third to fourth year of employ are bailing out and heading for the exists, seeking supposed greener pastures. Covid-19 may have put a temporary dampener on this exodus for the moment, but if that is your staff retention strategy, then the future looks bleak for you.

Business is so complex today. The hero boss who can do every part of the business process has become a distant memory. Even if we could do it, should we? The boss should be concentrating on those activities that only the boss can do and should be pushing everything else down to subordinates. Now that is the theory. The reality is most bosses in Japan are doing too much. They don’t trust the delegation system because they have been burnt before. Actually, that is not quite true – they don’t have a delegation system. A dumping of the work system yes, but an intelligent, best practice delegation system, well no. Probably a good time to revisit how that works for all the bosses out there, because they are going to need it.

If we can’t unleash hell as bosses and we have to gain willing cooperation to get the youth engaged, what do we need to do? Communication skills are going to be at a premium. The whole modern apparatus of leadership rests on persuasion power, rather than raw position power. Do bosses know what these young people want? That would be a good starting point. “What is in it for me” is a tried and true motivator across time and geography. Once upon a time that was focused on what the boss wanted but times have changed. Bosses need to spend time with young people, individually, to understand them better. Yes, they may be spoilt little brats, but these are the cards you are dealt, so learn how to play them.

Japan has a wonderful year end tradition where the entire house is given a massive clean up. Dust is dispatched, junk is devolved and everything is made shipshape. We need to do the same with our business and I don’t mean cleaning up your desk. We have two types of people working for us. There are those who receive a salary of some dimension, be they full time or part-time and then there are those who get paid for their services. Some of these services are delivered regularly throughout the year. Others are intermittent, on a needs basis. Regardless, we need to take a good look at these every year to make sure they are still fit for purpose.

As a training company, we have some regular suppliers. Our landlord charges us rent for the space we use and that lease pops up every two years. Regardless of the economy, the office space vacancy rate, the consumer price index or any other intergalactic factors, the numbers always go up at renewal time. It is no good finding ourselves at renewal time and thinking “maybe I should have investigated if there were more appropriately priced alternatives”.

Too late by that time, because it takes quite a while to find the size of space you need, in the location and configuration you require, at a number that makes sense. Better to engage a real estate broker early to start telling you what the alternatives are so that when the time comes you can have some choices available. That data is also a potential bargaining chip in the arm wrestle for the next two years of tenant penal servitude.

Another key player is your accountant. If you outsource your accounting to a firm, they will receive the data from your people and then get into a P&L and Balance Sheet format that you can come to terms with. It also enables someone externally to see what are the patterns of spending and spot any anomalies. Japanese staff are very honest. However, like staff in other countries, they can find themselves in the newspaper for embezzling vast sums from their employers, sustained over breathtaking amounts of time.

If you need an English speaking accountant, we are now fishing in a very small pond. This tends to mean that we lock someone in to do the books and we just keep them forever. We all seek an equilibrium comfort point. We get the service, we are happy with it and we are generally too busy to investigate if we can better it. Once a year, list up some accounting service delivery alternatives and have a conversation about what they offer. Existing suppliers can become robotic in their delivery of their services and they have pruned their services down to the minimum necessary to maximise their return. It might be a good time to see if you can maximise your return instead.

In our case, we need things designed and printed, because we distribute flyers to clients and training manuals to class participants. I am using the same printing company now which I have used for over ten years. I know there are other companies who are slightly cheaper, but I need high quality service, delivered at speed. Being able to get things designed very quickly is something I value highly and will pay more for that service. If that service was diminished then there would be a reason to change. The point here though is, I need to keep track of the size of the disparity between what I pay and what they deliver. I can’t just go to sleep at the wheel and keep using the same folk because I am too busy to know the relative price, quality and scope of the service I am receiving.

Labor lawyers do well here in Japan. The regulations are changing, there is government pressure to not have unpaid overtime and numerous arcane labor rules abound. Our labor lawyer is a pretty good businessman and signed my firm up on a monthly retainer. I took my COO’s advice on this retainer, though I had my doubts. I reviewed that service need and that retainer and guess what? After I cut it, there has been no difference in what we needed as a service. Instead, we are saving that money every month now.

Maybe at one point there was a point. My point though is, don’t let these things just drift along, without making a conscious decision to decide if the service is really what you still need or not. End of the year clean up time is a good time to survey new potential providers and clean up unneeded service expenses too.

I met the owner of a successful business recently. He had bought the company twenty years ago and then pivoted it to a new and more successful direction. So successful, that he employs over 230 staff and was recently listed on the local stock exchange. It was a business meeting to discuss collaboration and I was expecting an entrepreneurial leader, charismatic and personally powerful. Why was that my expectation? Being raised in Australia, that is what successful entrepreneurs in the West are like, so I expected a Japanese equivalent. He was totally different to what I expected.

He had no personal power at all from what I could see. One reason may be that we were speaking in Japanese. It is a subtle, circular language that masks and obfuscates like few others. He had two senior staff members with him, his direct reports and they too were rather underwhelming. It got me thinking about what does it take in Japan to become a successful leader? Here were three of them in front of me and I wouldn’t have crossed the road to meet any of them.

Position rather than personal power counts for lot in Japan. You meet a lot of people here with big titles and pretty much no personal firepower. That is not to say there aren’t charismatic, powerful leaders here. Mr. Nambu who founded the massive Persona organisation is a very charismatic person, who has tons of personal power. He has nearly 20,000 employees spread across his 67 subsidiaries and 11 affiliates. I know him personally and he is very good at dealing with people, both high and low. He started the company while he was still at university, so he is a rare bird in Japan, to take a start-up to serious stardom and himself to billionaire status.

What is the difference between some of the successful Japanese I have met and the nobodies leading many firms. When we teach leadership, we make a point of differentiating it from management. Managers make sure the processes are running on time, cost and at the required quality. Leaders do all of that, plus they set the direction and build the people. By this definition most Japanese leaders we meet in business would be classified as “managers”. Japan is a country of detail, long term planning, caution and perseverance. You can go a long way on the back of that line-up and many do.

My new acquaintance is a manager I would say. I am guessing that he fell into the business he is in, rather than it being the product of strategic planning. What a contrast with Jordan Wang. Jordan is the Dale Carnegie franchisee in Sydney and took the business over two years ago from basically nothing growing it very quickly to a substantial size. I was attending his talk to the Franchisee Association on how he runs his business.

His planning frameworks were very sophisticated. Because they started with basically nothing, he said, he had to come up with a road map. He spent some serious time studying the various frameworks out there and then adjusted them to his reality. Over the next two years he shaped and crafted those frameworks into a formidable machine, to help run his business. One of the very experienced and successful American franchisees commented that “I am feeing less smart” after listening to Jordan. I know exactly what he means, because I too was blown away by Jordan regarding his thinking, energy and that word – charisma.

In Japan, trust is a key requirement for retaining staff, gaining clients and remaining successful. This is the same everywhere, but somehow Japan just brings a much great intensity to the word. If you can gain trust with others, you can build a business here. Over time you can build it, if you happen to have chosen a niche or a sector that is growing and profitable. Being high on trust and low on charisma is no impediment to success here in Japan.

So when you meet a Japanese leader and they are a fizzer in the charisma stakes, don’t necessarily write them off. Look at their numbers, particularly staff numbers as an indicator of how much credence you should attach to them. In my experience, few Japanese excel individually, but put them together in a group and they are most formidable. To keep the group together, their leaders need to have been able to build the trust. The other question you need to ask is have they been able to sustain this over decades? If they have, then you may have a business partner in front of you, even if they seem grey, dull and boring.