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Do Japanese Corporate Employees Love Working Even More Than Americans?

Japan is legendary for its insane work schedules. Corporate employees in America are known to love to stay and work unpaid overtime, but in Japan it’s not unheard of for employees to keep inflatable beds around so they can sleep at the office. The Japanese language even has a word, karoshi, that means “death from overwork”.

The main difference between American’s long hours and the long hours worked by Japanese employees lies in the context.

Americans love being at the office because they hate their lives and hate spending time with their families and would rather be at work. Japanese, on the other hand, do so to show loyalty and spirit. Indeed, Japanese corporate employees have told me (off the record) that they feel bad about being absent for much of their children’s lives, but they cannot leave the office because no one else is leaving; it’s like a giant game of “Chicken” that everybody wins*. And staying at the office makes them look good in front of their boss.

It’s not that Japanese workers necessarily love working the way Americans do, it’s just that that’s how it’s done in Japan.

*or loses, depending on how you look at it.

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You Offer a “Lucrative” Benefits Package? Really?

“Lucrative” is the most commonly heard word before you accept a job (contrast with “proactive” which is the most commonly heard word after you accept a job).

Every job posting I have ever seen has described its benefits package as “lucrative.” Sometimes it even says “lucrative salary,” too. And then during the initial interview, it’s as if HR wants to make absolutely sure you are aware of their “lucrative” package, so before actual compensation amounts are even discussed, the interviewer always mentions again how “lucrative” their offer is.

There wouldn’t even be anything wrong with that if every company didn’t describe its offer as “lucrative.” It’s blatant false advertising when you find out in the fourth round of interviews for a senior position requiring a minimum of 5-10 years experience that “lucrative” means $40k a year. Did I seriously just waste my last week studying up on your company so I could do well in your interviews?

It’s too bad there’s not some sort of National Job Offer Regulation Committee to tell us whose offers are actually “lucrative” and whose offers just suck. I propose that there should be three levels of compensation rankings: “Lucrative,” “Decent,” and “Don’t Bother.”

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Screw Your Black Belt; I’m a Six Sigma Ninja

If there’s one thing corporate employees love more than working long hours, it’s giving stupid names to simple concepts.

There’s a really long explanation involving lots of math, but I will give you the short version: Six Sigma is a methodology designed to eliminate defects and improve efficiency. The name “Six Sigma” comes from being six levels of standard deviation away from the mean of a process on a normal distribution graph. Boring, right? Basically Six Sigma means you’re operating at 99.9997% efficiency.

Like many other things in the corporate world, Six Sigma is full of pseudo-words (things that would be acronyms if they actually spelled anything, but don’t), such as:

DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control)

DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify)

But let’s be honest, that’s pretty typical.

Six Sigma proponents also like to throw around words they’ve borrowed from statistics, like axiomatic design, chi-square testing, homoscedasticity, regression analysis, and the taguchi method.

But the best thing about Six Sigma is its ranking structure. People involved in Six Sigma are given a karate rank, beginning with Green Belt, then becoming a Black Belt, and then, if they’re deemed worthy, they may go on to become a Master Black Belt! I think there’s also a title of Sensei in there somewhere. Hi-ya!

I’m not joking.

I can only imagine how this started. Some old businessmen sitting around in a conference room discussing models to improve efficiency, and one of them probably said “you know, this stuff is awfully dry and boring. How will we ever get our employees to learn all this crap and follow all these rules without them falling asleep?”

They probably pondered that question for weeks.

And then, at a followup meeting, one of them spoke forth: “I’ve got it! If we assign them karate ranks based on how much Six Sigma propaganda they’ve memorized, they will feel self-important and empowered!

And I bet you the reply was “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”

And then I bet you after a few moments of contemplation, he added: “It’s definiately going to work.”

He was right.