LE Part 10: Tenacious Creativity and "Japanese Business"

 The last chapter (in an assigned part of reading) is about "Tenacious Creativity," and it illustrates the importance of finding solutions with tenacious creativity. The most impressive quotation for me is "think the unthinkable," which means we should not dismiss "any ideas, no matter how farfetched, without throughly considering it."By reading this chapter, my honest impression towards tenacious creativity is that it's not so easy to do this: I need stamina, tolerance, optimism and many other qualities i learned from previous chapter to find a solution with tenacious creativity. It's not so easy.

 Another quote which got my attention is "rather than expecting things to go right, successful leaders under these conditions should be prepared for things to go wrong." My essay topic for this term is Japanese negotiation. My essay illustrates what Japanese distinct negotiation style is and finds out problems in it by looking through the skills of ideal international negotiators, and analyzes how Japanese people can fix these problems. The main reason why I decided to write about Japanese negotiation is based on my regrettable feeling towards Japanese business which I've begun to have since I went out of Japan and recognized Japanese business situation in an international scale for the first time when I was sixteen. (I decided to stay abroad and began going to a high school in Switzerland at the age of 16. ) In my diary, I wrote, “it is regrettable that Japanese corporations frequently lose international competitions and cannot expand their business even though Japanese people have brilliant ideas and advanced technology.” A few years later, in 2012, Yomiuri Shimbun issued an article which states, “despite its technological prowess, Japan has sometimes failed to make its technologies the global standard--typical examples being its analog high-definition broadcasting system and mobile phone technology.” It was issued in the middle of struggle when Japanese automakers had been trying to make their own EV (electronic vehicle) charging connectors a global standard. Until then, I believe Japanese automakers were being ahead in developing the charging system, but American and some European automakers began concerning about the fact Japanese automakers would monopolize the EV market in the future, they decided to invent their own charging connector, which was different from Japanese one in advance at that time. And then, the struggle of which charger should be the global standard started. What I really think Japanese business people should have done is to talk to Americans and Europeans beforehand. They could have expected that kind of things happened since Japanese corporations had been the only one being ahead in developing chargers in competitive automobile industry. If Japanese business people in automobile firms had known the idea of "rather than expecting things to go right, successful leaders under these conditions should be prepared for things to go wrong," they could have dealt with the problem beforehand and that's the thing I really feel it's regrettable. Japanese creative ideas and minute technologies are brilliant, and Japanese people should be more proud of them and make a best effort to promote them internationally, by acquiring leadership skills.
 I think I've written too much here, but since I left Japan and stated my high school life in Switzerland at the age of sixteen, I began to think about who I am, my identity, and one day realized I'd been thinking about any things or problems from "Japanese" perspective. Then I think my love towards Japan, my home-county, got deepened, and began to be more proud of being Japanese. From my, one Japanese girl's perspective, it is so regrettable that Japanese business does not expand because of the lack of their leadership skills, and what is worse is that Japanese business people don't really see that right now. They tend to focus on acquiring English as a language, but they should take one or more further steps to be international business men / women so that Japanese business with its brilliant idea and technology will spread abroad and can be global standards in this globalized business world.

Bye!