141: New Staff Development Challenges

<p>Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist,  made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society.  He referred to Japan’s current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and yaruki (guts).  What does this mean for business and for our companies if we are staffed by young people without these three Ys?  As leaders, how can we reverse this trend and produce more engaged teams?  Is it too late already?</p> <p> </p> <p>Diligence has a strong pedigree in japan.  Retainers in samurai society were trained to be ready to die for their lord anywhere, anytime.  In the pre-war period the majority of people lived in non-urban areas, where agriculture was the main pursuit.  This required you to pull your own weight as part of a group effort.  The harshest punishment was ostracism or murahachibu, which meant no cooperation from the group and possibly death the result.</p> <p> </p> <p>In the post-war period, previous firebombing of cities and industrial centers meant Japan had to drag itself up from the ashes of defeat and a strong national unity formed around doing just that.  As Japan’s GDP grew, salarymen would sacrifice their families for the company and proudly count off the leading economies Japan had surpassed, as collective notches on the belt of a resurgent Japan.</p> <p> </p> <p>The 1985 Plaza Accord triggered the surge of the yen and the biggest global shopping spree possibly ever seen on this planet. Japan was coined Number One.  The bubble burst, Japan went into decline and has been lurching along the bottom ever since.  The Lehman Shock in 2008 and then the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown in 2011 has underlined Japan’s continuing fragility.  The social contract has been broken and companies now prefer to hire part-timers, to enjoy the greatest flexibility to respond to future downturns. Company profits are soaring but employee wages are not moving.  Abenomics seems to have run out of gas.  The roots of these three no Ys are not hard to find.</p> <p> </p> <