Companies consider the wellbeing of employees in America

Ten years ago, a big system integration firm, Unisys, employed more than 10,000 IT workers in Toyosu, a district of Tokyo Olympic Village. To get there from home, I commuted more than three hours in both ways with packed trains in the morning and at night. It was just a grueling experience to consume a lot of energy in uncomfortable ride to Tokyo.

To beat the traffic and save energy, I applied for a work-from-home program as a voluntary home-working experiment from the personnel department. With a quick application to submit a…

Squash out of the board room

Three and a half decades ago, my job search started right here in Tokyo. It was a hot summer in July, 1985 when I return to my home from Ann Arbor, Michigan. No clear job opportunity existed for me except I found a promotional flyer on the bulletin board at International Student Center. A rare recruiting advertisement came to my attention from a half-way around the world. A 100-year-old tech titan, Toshiba, was looking for a job candidate to expand business abroad. Toshiba was on the rise.

I called them for the job and…

You must rethink a job at the most profitable firm in Japan

For more than a decade, I had been teaching management at universities in Tokyo. The teaching record at the end of 2019 shows that I taught at five different institutions, a total of 1,300 students except seniors, 600 classes, and three management subjects. The subjects range from marketing, international business, and introductory management. The goal of teaching management at universities is designed to support college students to find a good job before graduation. …

The academics identified three challenges to sustain the ouput

The frequency of work from home, a new style of work, is gradually fading into one or two days a week. The conventional work from office will eventually be taking over and people return to their offices three to four days a week. The personnel department calls it a new normal, a hybrid work style a lot of people talked about at the outbreak of covid-19 a year and a half ago.

Three scholars published a discussion paper, “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT…

The growth continues behind outsourcing and computer graphics

College students in Tokyo were consistently bored with instructions in the classroom. On Fridays, my class of international business was full of those students from Tokyo and Asian countries such as Mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Nepal. It was a very challenge task for most college lecturers to keep young students awake during 90-minute exercise. One day, I changed a method of instruction to flip learning style, a new practice to engage in interaction between students. My students could choose any topic from business and give a solid presentation to the…

Giant streamers compete with scale and scope

Three decades ago, a legendary professor of Georgia Tech, stood on podium. He was professor of the year 1991, teaching international business before graduate students in Atlanta, GA. Before teaching, he flied more than 200 times between Atlanta and Russia to develop Coca-Cola business in a communist market. The next assignment sent him to Tokyo for eight years, earning him an expert of global business in the beverage industry.

One of the things I remember from his class is that in global business, the headquarters must consider the economy of scale as well…

People’s hearts are lost in the most beautiful village of Japan

For more than three decades, a pack of groceries has arrived at the front of my house. A driver of local Coop, a door-to-door delivery service, kindly brings a stack of food from the local areas to the third floor. The areas include Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima for years, well-known prefectures demolished by the catastrophe on March 11, 2011. A long ten year period has passed for locals as well as Tokyoites who eat food from those areas. Last March, lessons of Fukushima strike my family with grief, frustration…

The host city is under the state of emergency until June 20

Three months past since the roll-out of vaccine in the early March, a slow but steadily increasing steps toward the vaccination facility set the count-down to the opening of the Olympics. With luck of priority seats for shot, my son aged 31 received a second Pfizer dose in three-week period since the first one in May. A mild side-effect appeared in a brief period of time, forcing him to stay home half-a-day with the fever of 99 F and a pain in his left arm. My father-in-law (87)…