Meetings

Friday

I think that there was a lot of useful information presented at the meeting I attended today. Unfortunately, it was entirely in Japanese. There was a helpful young junior planner (same from last night’s dinner) who tried to translate, but I think she was in over her head. Unless, “doctors are pathological” is the key insight in the oncology category.

At one point, about 90 minutes in, the pres turned to me and said, “OK, Colleen-san. Now you will make a presentation.” Uh, OK. Since I had no idea what was being discussed for the whole first part of the meeting, I took a shot in the dark and presented a few slides about media strategy. I talked for about 10 minutes. The planner/translator fell asleep.

When the meeting ended, I asked the planner what the next steps were. She said, “We will have another meeting to decide that next week.”

Some thoughts about meetings in Japan: When I recently had dinner with a Japanese friend, he told me that his boss often tells him to come to a meeting without telling him what the meeting is about. I noticed this, too. The first few days, I was sure they were sending me home because they would approach me very seriously and say, “Colleen-san, we would like to have a meeting with you right away.” But the meeting was usually them requesting something really mundane, like market information or tactical ideas. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s a real lack of curiosity from the other workers. We’d all get called into a meeting and I’d say, “What’s this meeting about?” and they’d just shrug. In my short time here, I’ve noticed that decisions rarely get made in meetings. People make presentations and everyone nods and then leaves.

I did some research about this phenomenon of really useless meetings and it turns out that this is common practice in Japan. It’s not that the meetings are really useless (to the Japanese); it’s that they have a system of consensus management that is very difficult for westerners to understand. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.