59: Dr. Jochen Legewie, Partner & Chairman Asia, Kekst CNC

<p>Dr. Jochen Legewie takes us through his 30 years of leadership journey in Japan, starting at Daimler and then as Partner and Chairman of Kekst CNC, a global public relations firm. Dr. Legewie only picked up Japanese by chance as a side hobby, but his unique background in Japanese specialization and language ability, combined with a PhD in economics gave him a competitive edge and landed him a research position at Sophia University. Dr. Legewie then left academia and started at DaimlerChrysler, which at the time was investing into Mitsubishi Motors. Dr. Legewie first started off on a contract role, providing expertise on Japan to the German executive team, but when the German CEO became the CEO of the entire company, Dr. Legewie became Officer Head of Communications, overseeing 100 people in customer relations and PR.</p> <p> </p> <p>Dr. Legewie calls this experience leading a large team so early on in his leadership career to be “crazy.” He reflects that this position was mainly building “cultural [bridges] in both directions” by convincing both the Japanese employees of Mitsubishi Motors and the German headquarters to work cooperatively. He recalls some of his early leadership challenge was being the middle person between the Mitsubishi Motors employees and German headquarters, as well as communicating and understanding English speaking employees who on the surface seemed to have a westernized way of working, but was in fact, resistant to change. When convincing people of various backgrounds to buy into the same direction of the company, Dr. Legewie says: “I found it very important to put on paper to visualize things that we are attempting, which is not necessarily a change. It's just the next step. Sometimes it was a big change, 180 degrees, but some were just the next step, but to make sure that people [understood] it, you had to put it on paper and go through it and invest time to explain it. [Additionally,] ask why are we doing this? Japanese people are smart if they understand the background. But very of