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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

A friend who worked at a major Japanese bank said that its pretty much an unsaid rule that they won’t promote any non-Japanese after a certain level.

Can’t see that being good for any business if you constrain outside talent like that.

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This applies to most all major Japanese companies. There have been two notable cases of non-Japanese execs rising to CEO, Carlos Ghosn of Nissan and Michael Woodford of Olympus, and both ended up as cautionary tales of what happens when you refuse to be just a pliable figurehead and try to effect real change.

Also Howard Stringer.

> non-Japanese execs rising to CEO

To note, naturalized South East asians do raise to CEO. Son Masayoshi is of Korean ancestry for instance.

When you say “non Japanese” I suppose you mean “westerner that doesn’t naturalize”. Which makes me realize, I genuinely don’t know how many US CEOs have kept a foreign nationality while helming a huge company in the US. I’d assume not a lot.

Masayoshi Son is 3rd-generation Korean-Japanese. For all practical purposes he's Japanese, and he naturalized in 1990.

Son is just a founder. Nothing weird to be a CEO. It's hard to find other asian examples except some industry (for example, pachinko for historical reasons).

There’s a combination of few “big” companies being founded recently, and the stronger attractiveness of China and Korea to young founders I assume, but Japanese-Korean ventures will naturally have a fair share of Korean CEOs (Lotte from the top of my head)

I would also assume entertainment business has also a number of them, but they might also not put it forward for image reason.

I think some cultural relativity is needed to tamper that, the US has a generally open minded idea of what it means to naturalize (both legally and culturally). There's also a pretty number of big companies founded or run by first generation immigrants in the US.

> Son Masayoshi is of Korean ancestry for instance.

Korea is East Asian. Southeast Asia consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Add Howard Stringer (CEO of Sony, 2005-2012). He's pretty close to a cautionary tale, but that time period also included a major earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster as well as the 2008 credit market collapse.

I mean, that should work as long as they are also good at identifying talent. There are plenty of Japanese people who are very good at their jobs, and being racist (if we're going to rely on pure pragmatism) doesn't in itself make management incompetent. The problem is that the line of thinking that makes racism sound like a good idea is one that also leads to other poor decisions.

No I think it is still bad in isolation as it's prone to group think and you lose the chance to exploit experience generated globally which may be unique and irreplaceable.

Racism does actually restrict your competitiveness, theres been a bunch of studies done on this. Regardless of the availability of sufficiently skilled Japanese labor, humans are pretty non-fungible when it comes to specialized skills. Losing access to the worldwide pool of labor is just deliberately kneecapping their own companies.

Humans are non-fungible, but despite the rhetoric, I don't think any company is actually hiring the best people they possibly could. There's so much noise in the hiring process to begin with, I have a hard time believing that racism is the one obstacle between the status-quo and paradise. More likely, there are a hundred things wrong with the hiring process, and racism is number 86.

You are right that it restricts competitiveness, but even before that, integrating people thinking different and from different backgrounds requires a level of flexibility and resilience that is probably missing from these entities.

It’s not rare to see Japanese people looking for companies that recruit foreigners and “exotic” profiles, using that as a canary to signal a company that can deal with a range of issues, and won’t try to have them quit if they take a parental leave.

I suppose with their birthrates, that pool of Japanese talent is only going to shrink.

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