Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・Solutions should not be limited to what companies should do. It should address what people can do in the whole Japanese corporate society.

・Meeting where they are. Skillset, seniority, cultural understanding etc. The current reality of the people should be properly acknowledged and their issues are to be addressed accordingly.

・There should be two different approaches whatever solutions we may want to implement. When we approach a group of traditional domestic Japanese people who are still not fully aware of what it is going on outside Japan and when we approach a group of internationally experienced Japanese people with high level of expertise, we should approach them differently based on their needs.

・It always has to start with the top management. They should create a task force to create a specific plan for company transformation.

・How can we make them come out of their comfort zone and old management style and talk more openly with one another? That is the challenge.

・In order to modernize Japanese companies, many senior Japanese people who don’t have any expertise, have no international communication skills and no willingness to adapt the new era, in another word, those who are not adding value, have to be made redundant. Companies can not keep spending money on non-essential but senior and costly employees simply because they have been there for a long time. They are blocking the career paths for younger and more talented people. When companies can still afford to pay them out, they should review their workforce seriously and pay the early retirement package and let them go. It must be a painful process but if companies go near bankrupt in the future, then they have to let everybody leave and probably they can not afford to pay out decent money any more.

・Maybe the name “early retirement package” does not sound appealing enough. Shall we call it “Your 2nd Career Support Package”?

・It is very difficult to encourage senior leaders to make themselves redundant and sacrifice themselves. As long as their companies are going down in performance, their competitors will force them to change or resign. Let the market reality do the clean-up job. Or M&A may place a foreigner CEO and executives and they will do the clean-up job.

・If the top leader is the right one, he/she could carry out the workforce modernization project in the management layers below. ・What people in the West do after retirement? Well, they enjoy life. Well, that’s only a minority. The majority of old people are also struggling.

・Probably more financial education is needed so that Japanese can survive after retirement.

・If the older people stay on in the company, what should their role be? They should not hang around with their outdated behaviors and practice ad impose them on younger generations. The role of leaders is to be reviewed.

・Succession plan should be conducted in a more thoughtful manner. If you are in the top management, you should pick as your successor candidate someone a way younger instead of someone only a few years younger. Otherwise, how can the next generation mgmt. team can really grow, innovate and transform the company in today’s such a fast-paced business world?

・We all have to become recyclable talent so that we can be able to add value even after today’s job or even after leaving the company. Otherwise, once outside the company, we have no choice but to be handled as burnable trash.