It Was Important For My Vietnamese Friend to Deliver Fax

 Here is an impressive experience of mine in Vietnam. In 1996, all Asian advanced countries were so much interested in doing business with Vietnam or in Vietnam. We were looking for an opportunity to form a Joint Venture with Vietnamese company. Ho Chi Ming City, Sigon was full of people. They were riding bikes, circling around in the city, selling bags on streets, talking with each other in loud voice. They were full of energy. I always stayed in New World Hotel in Ho Chi Ming City. One weekend, my friend has his family schedule, so he excused leaving me alone for entire weekend. Honestly, I was glad that I could explore in the city. Saturday afternoon, I went out of the hotel entrance to walk. I tried to walk across to the other side of the front road. I could not do that. So many bikes and motorbikes were going around. Despite that Vietnamese people walk across the road, I could not find a moment even start walking across.

I walked around my hotel about half an hour founding no chance to walk across any part of the road. The traffic was not so fast but so heavy, I did not feel I could go across the road safely. After half an hour of effort in vain, I gave up and walked back in to my hotel. The hotel was modernized. They had western style restaurant, Chinese style food, exercise room, running machine, training bicycles, meeting rooms, communication rooms with PC and fax machines, and so forth. My stay was comfortable. Giving up exploring in the city, I started working on my computer. It was almost sun set when my room phone rang and my office colleague wanted to send me a fax document for me to work on. Having not so much things to do for the rest of the weekend, I was half glad I had something to do. I told him my fax number.

It was funny that I waited for more than 2 hours, my fax had not come in. I called hotel staff and they told me I received no fax. I called up Tokyo and found my colleague is still preparing for his fax. I told him I would go down and eat dinner. I had several beers in my dinner and came back to my room sleepy. I thought I could work on his fax next day. The next day is Sunday and I had no plan anyway. I crawled into bed and slept.

It was passed midnight I was awakened by someone who is loudly banging my door. Shaking sleepy head I woke up, dressed, and walked toward the door. I asked what it was. A hotel crew answered back loudly, "Sir, you received a fax". I was a little upset because I was disturbed my sleep. I slammed open the door and asked, "How come you did not just slide in the fax from the bottom of the door?" He looked a little surprised. He sounded wonder why my reaction was kind of harsh. He answered, "Well, sir, I thought the fax is needed to be delivered urgently. That is why they fax you, right, sir?" His answer backed me off. He is right. They faxed it because they needed to fax it to me. I explained that I was sleeping and half drunk. I thanked him and tried to tip him. He excused my tip and said he was glad he could be useful for me.

This hotel crew taught me that we could not react from our own judgment when we are in the different country, different cultural background.





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Do You Need Ex-Employment Help?

How do you feel if your company fires you after long years of your working for them? What do you think will happen next after you left your office you were familiar? You must be thinking who replaces you and who takes your office, and who will take over your works you once was so enthusiastically pursued.

You wonder what was all the effort you put in for your work, your company, even putting family matters aside. You might have taken next earliest possible flight for business trip leaving unhappy your family behind. How dear this company still could dump me!

I myself went through this experience in the process of being independent from my previous employer after 20 years of. I know personally how difficult it is. However, you should not be suffering from it too much. You need to know that it is your mind tricking yourself and torturing you. It is important for me to make sure that these people shall not suffer, go through all the pains, fell like meaningless trash of society. I would like you to enjoy the transit from employment to ex-employment.

Now, it is about the time to set your mental status of being ex-employed and enjoy the process. You can either try to find next job or go independent to be your own. You can be excited and enjoying the process of starting something new for you and your family.

If you decide to be a business owner who is ex-employment after long years of hard work for a company, you must have felt strong, ambitious, anticipating, rigorous, expecting all new challenges in front of you.

Yet, sometimes you feel depressed. You feel small, sad, lost, disconnected. Despite that you used to hate your employer, company, office, boss, you miss them. Feel isolated and lonely.

Even you feel only something worse will be coming after enough bad happened. You feel different in talking with people. You are afraid that people look down on you, laughing at you. You are afraid of calling, talking, taking challenges, though you were so much anticipated to be your own. I felt this way. It took me long time to got out of this kind of condition.

Your strongest supporter in your new business challenge is your family. But you cannot talk with your family about it because it will make your family feel unsecured. You hope that your family feels strong about you, don't you?

But, there is a solution to get out of this kind of depressed mental situation. You accept your problem and address it with people who you can trust. Get associated with the people who has same problem. Especially talk with someone who could overcome these problems. Remember 3 things:
1. It is your own mind which plays trick on you. If you redirect your mind, you can take a look at the bright side of the things.
2. Be straight and be honest to accept your problems. Everybody will have problems if they are put in your position.
3. Don't hesitate or feel ashamed to ask for help. Ask help for someone who you can trust. It is better if you can get help from someone who had same experience as yours.


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Where Do You Find Typical Cultural Difference?

Have you read a textbook for driving? I have not until I was forced to do so by traffic violation ticket agent, taking driving test again in Tokyo. It was back in 1978. In 1985, my employer that time transferred me to New York. I needed to take driving test in New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicle in April that year. Since there were enough materials for the test such as Japanese reference books, past record of test questions and answers, I did not have to read the driving textbook of New Jersey State. There was nothing I could do one weekend, I decided to read through the driving textbook one time for making sure I could pass the writing test.

As reading, I found there are some differences in the way the driving textbook was written between New Jersey State one and Japanese one. Putting language matters aside, I found New Jersey one spent more than 3 pages explaining how accidents happen and how you can cope with them. For example, New Jersey textbook was explaining when your car gets out of control in high speed driving, you should not collide cars going to opposite direction. You should avoid head on head collision by all means. It continued that you should collide something stopping still, instead. It further suggested that you should select to collide some other cars going toward same direction as yours, if you could.

In my experience in Japan, reading driving textbook and attending traffic schools, no Japanese textbook explained how to cope with accidents, no instructor in the traffic school I attended explained about it. This caused me to think about why there are this kind of differences of approach in driving textbooks.

It is my opinion based on several conversations with my Japanese and American friends that basic understanding about traffic accidents are different between US and Japan. US or Western Culture believes that accidents will occur, no matter how drivers were cautious, conservative, and safety conscious. An accident could happen due to mechanical failure. Also it could be caused by another driver driving close to you at the time of accident. Therefore, it is logically reasonable that a driving textbook has full explanation on them as much as helpful.

On the other hand, Japanese approach to car accidents is a little bit different. They believe that car accidents are bad things that should not occur. Or car accidents are the things drivers should avoid by all means. They would admit that accidents do happen. But they believe that preventive maintenance is more important than explaining how to deal with accidents. So their driving textbook is talking about how to check their car before long distance driving, make sure that you do not drive into harsh weather, sleep well in previous nights, wear comfortable clothes and shoes, etc, etc...

For relatively long time, I was thinking that New Jersey driving textbook approach is better than Japanese one. Accidents happen. It is good to learn how to cope with accidents. But, quite recently, I started to think that Japanese approach might not be so bad. They are trying to teach us that we should determine not to cause an accident or should be well prepared so that we should not have any anxiety for an accident, so that we would be able to drive with full confidence.

I do not intend to give you my judgment to decide which is better. It may be the best if we can do both. We can be preventive maintenance conscious, at the same time conscious about coping with an accident. There are some small things that tell us cultural background and difference.


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When a Japanese Says it is Difficult

Suppose you are working for an American Computer Corporation who outsources software development to a Japanese Software house. You flew to Tokyo for the discussion meeting with this Japan Software for your next project. You did your homework and the presentation went quite well. You dined with the Japan software staff and drank and sang together. You thought your trip purpose was 99% made. Their staff sent you off to your hotel and made sure you went back to your hotel safely. You slept well that night, despite that you usually do not sleep well with a different pillow than from your home. You thought they are treating you that well because they like your project, and you are sure you could make this deal done next day.

The next morning, Japan Software sent the same person to pick you up and they took you to their office. They were kind, courteous, and nice, smiling. In their office they added more software engineers for your meeting. You thought again you are very close to your success in getting your project done. Only the thing you noticed is that they did not get to your business points. They talked about unrelated or general things such as the general computer market in the US, stock plunged last week, what was the cause of it, etc, etc...

You became a bit frustrated so you stood up and requested to get back to business points. They looked a little shocked but regained smile and started to talk to each other to themselves. It took a while finishing talking to themselves. The oldest guy from Japan Software started to talk:
"Yes, Mr. Smith (whoever the name could be), we all found your project looks very interesting. We did our internal meeting yesterday and early today. There are some points which are VERY DIFFICULT for us."

You need to clarify asking him:
"Well, Difficulty? Uhmmm... OK, let me ask you what kind of DIFFICULTY you are talking about? Technical difficulty? Schedule difficulty? Budget difficulty? Staffing difficulty, or what?"

Mr. Japan Soft looked a little embarrassed. He needed to talk back to his Japanese staff and answered:
"Umh, it is a general difficulty. It involves some technical, some staffing. It is difficult, anyway."

You are more confused. So you asked him again:
"Well, why don't you tell me what is your challenge here. We may be able to help you with that. We will be able to address and discuss about it."

Mr. Japan Soft:
"Mr. Smith, it is not a matter of challenge, it is DIFFICULTY."

This conversation can stop here. I need to tell you that you will not be able to get this deal done. No chance.

I would like to show you how Mr. Japan Soft would have thought in his mind during this conversation:
"Oh my goodness, this person never understands I am saying it is DIFFICULT. He must have recognized by now that it is impossible for us to do this project."

There are 2 things we can learn from here:
1. The fact that the Japanese company treats you well has nothing to do with business. They will do the same to anybody who visits to this company. The majority of Japanese are trained to be courteous even to their enemies. They will be more polite if they know that they need to say "NO" to you. This is confusing even among Asian cultures and causes misunderstanding that Japanese are double sided.

2. The Japanese word for DIFFICULT is nothing so much different from English. It does not mean impossible. But, in this case, Mr. Japan Soft meant it was impossible, hoping that Mr. Smith understand that it is impossible and they do not want to make this deal in softer way. This way of saying is quite common in Japan even in business. For Mr. Japan's mentality, it is too harsh to say it is impossible.

Isn't there any way to avoid this kind of misunderstanding? Yes, there is. You could set a rule before your meeting starts. Your opening statement could be:
"I like to be straight. If I go too straight, I apologize now. But let's go straight and clear so that we do not leave any misunderstanding behind."


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