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The salaryman's business education

The day after his training program ended, Hiro reported to his assigned branch bank and started his career as a teller, sitting behind a counter receiving cash from customers. After four months, he moved to a loan department, where he reviewed customers' credit applications. Credit analysis at Ringo was quite formalized, virtually disregarding the customers' characteristics. There was also a prescribed language for making comments on the credit analysis form. When Hiro used different expressions with the same meaning, his boss returned the form for correction, so Hiro soon figured out that the most efficient way to produce acceptable work was to copy former documents, changing only the financial figures. His boss reviewed both the original document Hiro had used as a model and Hiro's analysis, and, if the two matched, with changes in the specific numbers only, the credit application was approved.

Once, while working on a credit analysis, Hiro discovered that Ringo had not done any business with the applicant for three years. He asked his boss if he could drop the analysis and was told to proceed. Hiro's manager explained that it didn't matter if the bank hadn't done any business with the customer; it would be much more trouble to terminate an unnecessary credit analysis than to copy documents that had been approved in the past. Hiro encountered similar situations many times, finding that, even if the original need for a routine had changed, it was very difficult to terminate routine processes. In the case of the credit analysis, Hiro's boss commented that Ringo might do business with the applicant again someday. There was little chance that this would happen, but even a remote possibility sufficed; flatly terminating a relationship is extremely difficult for Japanese organizations. If for some reason the credit approval had not gone through and the client had asked for some business, Hiro's section would have been criticized for dropping the credit analysis. Changing past models might be efficient, but it is also a risk most salarymen would prefer to avoid. As a result, like most of his classmates, Hiro found himself working long hours to stay ahead of routines that had piled up over the years.

After a year at the branch, Hiro was appointed a sales associate. He covered individual small or medium-sized companies within a territory, advising them on their investments, financing needs, business plans, or anything else they requested. Hiro's sales team included seven salarymen, tightly controlled by a branch manager, a deputy branch manager, and the head of the sales team. Every month, the managers assigned each sales associate targets in at least ten areas, such as opening new accounts, increasing the amount of time deposits from customers, generating new loans, and so forth.

Every Monday morning, the entire team and all the mangers met, lined up in a room according to seniority. The most junior person began the meeting by reporting to all the others what he intended to do during the upcoming week. Then the next most senior sales associate made his public report, and the meeting continued in this fashion until the most senior associate had detailed his intentions for the week. The managers quizzed each associate about the details of his plan and offered advice. The meeting was equivalent to seven separate briefings for the team's management; each associate had to listen to the entire dialogue between the managers and his other six colleagues. The meeting took a great deal of time away from Hiro's main task of calling on clients, but efficiency is not the driving purpose of the kaisha. Hiro's job was to learn the business strategies of the other people on his team and to absorb the model of his seniors, so he would know how to behave when he was promoted to a comparable position.

Hiro's team also had a meeting every evening, at which each associate reported on his activities. The members of the team lined up in a row in front of the managers, and from most junior to most senior, each described what he had done during the day. Usually there wasn't much to report, because a sales associate could do only a limited amount of work in a day, but the purpose of the meeting really wasn't to convey information. The managers focused on what each associate had not accomplished during the day; the associates spent most of the meeting listening to their managers yell at them, "Why didn't you do this today?" Sales associates had so many targets that there was always something that had not been achieved. Evening after evening, Hiro and his teammates were lambasted for their failures and shortcomings. The evening meetings were not meant to be an adult conversation, and the salarymen were smart enough to know that one did not argue about the points raised by the managers. Most sales teams at Ringo operated the same way, and some of Hiro's peers on other teams learned how to duck the occasional ashtray thrown at them by their managers. Like it or not, this was the basic Ringo model for learning how to do business in a bank. The authority of the managers was absolute, and anyone who did not obey his boss would be out. After the daily meeting, Hiro's team--minus the managers--went out drinking together, spending the evening complaining and venting their frustrations.

It never occurred to Hiro that his bosses behaved this way out of ill will. He felt that this was how they learned about business from their superiors, and they were simply modeling the behavior of their seniors. The managers understood quite well how the salarymen felt and would take each one out for a drink from time to time to have an intimate conversation. On one of these occasions, Hiro's team leader told him, "I like you because you are quite an easy guy to yell at." Hiro felt that his superiors cared about him and wanted him to have a successful career. The evening lectures struck him as the way they showed concern for their juniors by treating them as they had been treated when they were just starting out.

Excerpted from Inside the Kaisha: Demystifying Japanese Business Behavior, Chapter 1, by Noboru Yoshimura and Philip Anderson (c. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1997 ).

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