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A post on Iraq: I just can't help it Wednesday April 25
I try to keep this blog very apolitical and uninfluenced.
Part of my daily reading is Google News; it keeps me up to date on what is going on in the world and what is going on in the Western media. I don't see it to be comprehensive, but if I were to start this post by going on about the number of untold news stories out there that deserve telling, we wouldn't really ever get to a point.
Anyway, the reason I like Google News is that it filters many sites, floating the most popular stories up to the top. This way, rather than actually see world events, I can keep track of the American public consciousness of world events. I am not going to claim liberal media bias or media bias at all -- rather, watching the daily news only teaches us of specific events, leaving the analysis of the trends to "the analysts", as we are too busy going to work every week day, driving our cars, going to the bars on the weekends, and eating late-night Mexican food to really take any sort of social responsibility about world events. I'm equally guilty of this, so I'm not chastizing anyone here.
I read one article tonight that compared Iraq with Vietnam, which is not a new story; we have all heard this comparison before. The original administration that entered the affair failed to grasp the potential consequences and scope, and the operation slowly expanded (we call this "scope creep" in the project management domain, and it is a very important factor to keep in check), eventually spiraling out of control.
This article commented that entering Iraq was akin to "punching a hole into a hornet's nest", as much like Vietnam, we are not seen as liberators, but rather forces that get in the way, aimlessly trying to help one side in a power struggle. One key difference, though, is that the enemy last time was a political idea -- communism -- and now it is Islamic extremism. Well, I'm glad to see that America has gotten less xenophobic.
Something about that expression with the hornet's nest got me. "Man, this is really what happens when you let a small number of self-interested unicultural men and women rule the most powerful military on Earth," The result? I don't think that I need to explain that.
I'm not mad. My father is plenty mad, and I fully expect him to leave a comment about how angry he is. I understand his anger -- Iraq has cost the United States over 3,000 lives, and we cannot even count how many Iraqi civilians have died. Certainly, the argument that they would have died under Saddam Hussein's rule would also apply here, but without hard facts from either side, it becomes an inarguable, moot point, and thus I will only discuss the American lives for the time being. Couple the deaths with the tax expense to the American people, which my father is one of, and I can understand his anger. No one wants to pay to have their own country's citizens killed for an unworthy cause.
But me? I'm not angry. I cannot be angry about things that have happened in the past. My own father has told me that life is ten percent of what happens to me, and ninety percent of how I react to it. If I am angry, I lose my ability to be rational (as I did when I visited the DMV last week), and when I lose my ability to be rational, I am no different than the self-interested individuals who created the mess in the first place. I don't want to be like them.
Karl Rove was pretty upset when Sheryl Crow touched him on the arm. Have you seen Sheryl Crow recently? I wouldn't be upset if I got any sort of attention from a woman looking like her. Using one square of toliet paper, though, is absolutely ridiculous. A much better idea, if she wants to be economical in the bathroom, is to use greywater for toliet water, or to turn off the showerhead while soaping/shampooing.
Just think for a second how many hundreds of gallons every second would be saved in your local municipality if half of the people did that while taking showers in the morning. In this way, let's not be angry. Let's get to work on the problems at hand.
As for Karl Rove's poor attitude, is it just a sign of a sourness resulting from failed policies and a more-or-less ruined political career? Possibly.
Otis Redding, Coffee, and Doughnuts Sunday April 22
There's a Mister Donuts near my apartment. It's quite an established chain in Japan that sponsors, yes, doughnuts, and unlimited refills on their weak, American-style coffee. Which is perfect for sitting down and reading the paper. Funny thing about Mister Donuts. Actually two things. It's an American brand that doesn't exist in the States anymore (like Tower Records, which also survives in Japan), and the original name is "Mister Donut", but Japanese people can't pronounce a hard 't' at the end of a word, so it's much easier to make it plural, hence why I call it Mister Donuts even in English.
Even better about Misudo is the music they play. It's not quite Muzak, but they have their own jingle and own "station". Sometimes it's all Beatles. Sometimes it's random eighties hits. No matter what though, it's not crap Japanese music, and that in and of itself is worth the 268 I pay to have a bottomless cup of coffee in an old-fashioned, smoky environment. Started in Japan in 1983, it doesn't look like it has changed one bit since that time.
I'm not sure where I am going with this other than to make light of the interesting result when you take a cultural relic, stew it in a secondary culture, and view the result in context of each original culture. Anyone who wants to come to Japan, I'll show them what I mean. It's better than Denny's, I promise.
Not such a good week in the news Wednesday April 18
I keep up with "world affairs" by looking at Google's summary of news headlines. This tends to be US-centric, as one might expect, but I must say, the world has seen its fair of bad news in the past week or so. Lots of violence in Iraq as the country falls further into the depths of what may easily become a civil war, and now 32+1 people dead in Virginia, all but two of which were just trying to get an education.
I really don't get it. Really, I don't. Crazy people, people who have snapped, I get that. Humans are, by nature, fallible.
What I don't understand is a country that allows the clearly-fallible human, specifically weak regarding matters of the heart, to possess guns that will so-clearly take the lives of innocent bystanders.
This isn't the first time such a thing has happened, and it certainly won't be the last. Wake up, America. The 2nd Amendment is 200 years old. Accept the changing times. No one really needs handguns for hunting.
My thoughts are with the families of those who have lost their loved ones.
Monday: Lost in Translation Monday April 16
Today was a Monday. American English speakers already know what I mean. Unfortunately, Japanese does not seem to have the same translation.
I'm not going to run through the laundry list of things that happened today as a measure of garnering sympathy, but rather as a way to express just how ridiculous today was, and how much I enjoyed it, for what it was worth. Life is only 10% what happens to me; the remaining 90% is how I react. Cheers to Mr. Swindoll for coigning that one.
I really don't even want to recount what happened this morning, because it's just going to make me very angry again. Long story short, I was at the DMV. That should be enough. I was remarking in a raised tone in Japanese to a helpless woman and her very incompetent manager about their inability to interpret the Illinois Rules of the Road that were clearly written, in English, in a little book right in front of them. How is it my fault you can't understand English, yet this is the foreign licenses counter? Is this a joke?
Having wasted two hours at the DMV when I was supposed to be at work, no farther along in getting my license, I went to a nice Chinese lunch with my placed candidate, myself, and the cockroach from the kitchen that decided to be dead and in my food dish. Awesome. Protein!
Did I mention it was rainy and cold all day long?
Or that I forgot 100% to meet a candidate that I had scheduled time with?
My one client meeting went rather successfully; I did the whole thing in Japanese with little issue, but at one point had some trouble expressing myself. I wanted to say, "Forgive me, I'm having a bit of a Monday," but no one likes a complainer -- especially in sales -- and moreover, I was staring at a sea of dumbfounded faces. My test audience had no idea what it meant to say that it was a Monday. How Japanese.
Yup, it was one of those days you were best off coming straight home and going to bed. While I'm not in bed, at least we don't have cockroaches, DMV incompetents, or rain in my bedroom.
Fuel on the fire: Climate Change Sunday April 8
I've seen a lot of articles recently on global warming and climate change. There are a lot of people in different camps here: the "it's all a bunch of bull, we'll be fine" camp, the "the world is ending and I never even got to do fill-in-the-blank", and the pragmatic, but somewhere in-between, "if the climate changes we can expect these phenomena to occur, how shall we react?".
I think I'd place myself firmly in the third.
If the ancient Greeks taught us anything, it should be that hubris is a no-no. We do not own this Earth, and the ecosystems that run it are, despite what you may initially consider, more powerful, uncontrollable, and destructive than any weapon human can conceive. With such a threat -- living or not -- at hand, I would like to just flat-out write off the "everything will be fine" approach. Normally, I would justify such a write-off, but I think I can safely end this point by posing the rhetorical question: "when was the last time everything worked out perfectly when you just said, 'oh, don't worry about that, I'm sure it's just nothing, and it will go away if we ignore it for a little while longer'?"
I'm not also a fan of the "oh my god the world is ending yesterday" approach. Nothing is ever as good, or as bad, as it seems. Thus, I think the best, and most enlightened approach, is the third: we must accept that the climate may change, anticipate those changes, and be ready to respond to them (as a human race) if we are to continue to survive as a species with the best possible outcome for all parties involved (namely, living human beings).
I'd like to extend this group to "living beings", but you and I both know that if it comes down to it, the world is going to choose homo sapiens over canipus lupis if it has to. What animal would not look out for number one?
The best way to tackle any problem is to define the endpoints, and start working in both directions as soon as possible to find the middle ground. Endpoint one: where are we right now? How many tons of greenhouse gases is each country generating currently? Given our current forestation and ecosystem, how many tons of greenhouse gases should the environment be able to sustain with zero change due to such emission?
Define an equation based on those two. How much more forestation do we need? How much energy is spent in making forests, and is that counter-productive? If so, how much do we need to cut emissions? Sure, there are a lot of difficult-to-answer, heavy questions here. I know for a fact there are a lot of smart people in the world. If we've come this far, we can definitely salvage this situation.
Endpoints 2a, 2b, 2c: after 10, 20, and 30 years respectively, incorporating growth anticipation, how much more efficient does human existence have to become in order to maintain sustainability? Once everyone knows where things are going, it becomes very easy to get there -- this is what governments and world order exist for in the first place.
The key is getting people in these key positions to make these issues a priority.
This is the age-old politics problem: abortion stances, healthcare costs, and fuel prices on the election trail make for better material to get votes. The real issues are the ones that exceed the average consumer, thus making the average consumer a very poor source of decision-making authority (i.e. voting) on who should be in power to make decisions.
I do think that democracy is the best political system the world has experienced yet, but those societies have a tendency to be reactionary as opposed to preventative -- a path that cannot succeed when tackling an enemy that has an ultimately stronger position than you. The only path you can take is avoiding the conflict all together.
The power of each of us turning off a light is one thing -- it may make a small difference.
What the world needs is a reevaluation of its major energy systems. Coal power plants must be replaced immediately unless they can become as carbon-free as the cleanest power source available -- solar or wind. Certainly, carbon is generated in the production of the materials for these, so I do not insist that they are carbon-free, but infinitely better than coal plants.
Also, transportation. For goodness' sake, sell your car and buy a hybrid. Seriously. Now. It is good for the economy, too. Be patriotic.
One of the best people I have ever known, Keith Schasko, sold his car after the first Gulf War and committed himself to riding his bicycle to work every day -- even in the cold, Illinois winter. He had a motorcycle for long trips. Anyone who knew Keith well enough would probably list him in the top five most respectable people they've ever known. I certainly do.
So, what are you doing to put pressure on the Powers That Be to keep us out of the red and in the green?
Foreign Recruiting in Japan: a clash of cultures Tuesday April 3
Every book I've ever read about anything management- or business-related always has to pay pennance to "multiculturalism in the workplace". I'm not quite sure when this buzzword initially appeared, but I do know that it even made it as far as one entire lecture of my project management class (which was a nine-week class).
I am willing to accept that different cultures have developed different habits for business, and that within the confines of these societies, things probably work pretty well: things work well inside of their own cultural norms, and if they didn't, the cultural norms wouldn't be, uhm, norms.
What happens, though, when you have a foreign-capitalized company operating in Japan? Who makes the rules? This question, and its many answers, is one of the things that keeps my job interesting.
My office, by example, is a Western business office. You have a product? Great. Is it a good product? Fantastic. How much does it cost? A little more than the market price. Is there value in this transaction? If both parties believe yes, then "sold". If there is doubt, the negotiations begin. This is pretty standard fare. Relationships are important, but the product is king. Ask all the mom-and-pop shops in the States their thoughts about this. Definitely their local-community relationships saved some of their business, but no one loses to Wal-Mart.
Japan isn't much different, and the rules of a capitalist society still apply. Cheap items tend to sell better than more expensive ones, given that they are of equal value. Common sense. Yet, where there is a perceived difference in value, Japanese people seem to be slightly more willing to pay the extra price that their Western (er, American) counterparts. Nonetheless, capitalism worldwide has this concept: brand marketing and perceived-value. Again, common sense, no rocket science here.
There is a difference, though, when applied to my business, recruitment consulting.
Do we go with the straight-up, I-have-the-guy-for-you sales approach, or do we take the long-haul, Japanese, build-the-relationship approach?
It depends on the client. Some clients are filled with Japanese people who are tired of the Japanese style of business and prefer to deal in a Western sense (product, value, transaction). Some clients are filled with Japanese people who, except for a small, executive layer at the top, function exactly like a Japanese company, and don't want to talk to anyone they don't know about some service they're not sure they can even see the value in.
I can't say I blame them.
Lesson for any wanna-be recruiters in the Japanese foreign company market?
Talk to the people at the top: they know how to straddle the differences. That's why they're on top, and they'll adjust to either style you throw at them. Another lesson for free: what do you think you have to do if you want to be one of those people at the top?
Maybe that mulitcultural education bit isn't so bad after all.
» Tags Multiculturalism Business Practices Japan Recruitment
