海外現地法人で働くことを通して学んだこと

〜イギリス赴任日記〜

2001年3月11日


イギリス赴任を通して学んだこと。

日記原文-----------------------------------


2001/03/11　「海外現地法人で働くことを通して学んだこと」

I decided to summarize what I learned and got from working at this company to prevent to forget precious experience by working at subsidiary of Japanese company in foreign country. In my case I have worked in foreign subsidiary in UK for 3 years and 4 months as Network engineer but called assistant manager.

I’d like to leave what I learned in this special circumstance surrounded by local staff.
1. Working as staff from Hq.
I was in very special circumstance in this company because we have like two bosses in one time. One is in this company and the other is in Tokyo Hq.. The boss in Tokyo is depending on the business we are handling. The main mission as this company's staff is same as other staff in this company which is how we can make this company success, how we can beat our competitor, how we can earn the money from our customer. This is very basics for all other company and easy to understand. This is not the point I’d like to say. The main mission as Hq's staff is more difficult. Our role as Hq. is to reduce the cost by delegating your job to local staff because the labour cost of Japanese is very expensive and this makes our service expensive. To provide competitive service we have to reduce the background cost and localizing is key driver for this. Now this is easy to say but difficult to perform.
The concrete action for this is to make local staff work and you do manage them, not move your hands but their hands. You use your brain, they use their physics. However this make local staff irritated because it looks for them that Japanese doesn’t say anything but saying or complaining. To avoid this misunderstanding, you have to explain this background with them and encourage and support them sufficiently for them not to think they are isolated.

2. Management in multinational company
In this company, variable nationalities are existing and you have to be careful for what you are saying and behaving because sometimes what you did is very impolite for particular nationality. However to be honest with you, I haven’t paid attention for this issues so much so far and I haven’t been in trouble. Maybe fortunately I was cleared the some criteria naturally or I haven’t realized. From my point of view, as far as you are careful to listen their words and pay attention to their expression, you won’t be in trouble because that’s I did as usual.
In addition to above, I learned it’s important to understand their strong and weak points as general management issues. J is very good at managing project because he is timid and efficient. Therefore he can’t help to think about next actions. On the other hands, N is just thinking what he is doing right now. This means he can’t think the project as a sequence but individual job. What this is telling you is he is not good at leading teams or dividing jobs to several parties and managing that because we can’t think next actions.
If I talk about the educational level in UK or in blue colors, I can say they don’t like paper works. They didn’t leave any document behind after they finished one project and what will happen if they need to do same thing after the timing being, they start doing same thing they did in first time and that’s just waste of time. This is coming from the low education level in entire UK. There is good example to present this that we found they can NOT do easy calculation like addition or subtraction. However in this company we have to hire these guys because our budget to recruit staff is very limited. This means we have to spend our time to educate them to make them do basic business operation like paper work and explain them why these paper works are necessary. Taking an initiative is World Common sense.


ここまで-----------------------------------

　『その当時を振り返り』

海外赴任で学んだことは多く、英語力、知り合いがいない中での生活力・精神力など精神的にも技術的にも大きく成長したのは間違いがない。

それに加えてあえてここでは、「海外現地法人のあり方を会社全体の視点で見ること」、「複数の人種がいる中で会社をマネージすること」を記載しているようで、これは海外現地法人を立ち上げるときの大前提となる考え方だろう。きっと今となっては当たり前のことだろうが。