In Japanese business culture, there is a situation where you have to visit a company and say I’m deeply sorry for what I did and just bow and bow. <...> Usually, I accompany a salaryman who made a mistake. I take the identity of the salaryman myself, then I apologize profusely for his mistake. Have you seen the way we say sorry? You go have to down on your hands and knees on the floor. Your hands have to tremble. So, my client is there standing off to the side—the one who actually made the mistake—and I’m prostrate on the floor writhing around, and the boss is there red-faced as he hurls down abuse from above. Sometimes, I wonder to myself, “Am I actually doing this?”
This actually sounds like something that could be spun into a separate startup in Japan - people who will pretend to be you in intense politeness-related scenarios.
I understand within that culture an apology must be made, and there's a ritual to apology that has to be observed, but I don't understand why an employer would be willing to put up with the ruse. Is there really no social or cultural stigma involved with paying to have someone else to do it on your behalf?
The implication I believe is that the company is large enough that the boss would not personally know all the employees. The actor is pretending to be an employee that is responsible for the mistake that the hiring party made, but is not pretending to actually BE the person who hired them.
Or, the client company never met the employee responsible for the service company’s error (they were just tracked down by an internal investigation in the service company) and so theoretically the service company could have sent anybody and the client company wouldn’t have known the difference. The service company wants to send the error-committer, because going through this process is a punishment of sorts; but the client company doesn’t know/hasn’t met who they’re being sent, so the error-committer can fake things along the way.
They could probably correct the problem by just sending an escort along with the error-committer, but maybe this kind of thing doesn’t happen enough for them to really care.
If you use and opensource project to do your work faster your boss will not be mad. You boss , your bosses boss , your bosses bosses boss only cares about one thing. Getting the job done on time and on budget. Whatever means you do it by as long as there are no bad repercussions is fine with them Im sure.
Just dont take credit for work that is not yours. Basically if asked dont lie. But if you are never asked then it seems the boss does not care of the details.
I don't mean to be insensitive but that is straight up bizarre behavior. In what way does Japanese business culture benefit from this? I'm open to ideas that it does add something.
I don't know if it's helpful but I can give two examples where it's harmful. In both cases the intense hierarchical culture actively obstructs bad news.
It's not beneficial, it's just how it is. I worked a job in Japan where one employee was late delivering a project, so his manager spent literally his entire day standing over his shoulder and berating him loudly for not getting it done sooner and being a failure. As you might imagine, this did not help get the project done sooner.
This actually sounds like something that could be spun into a separate startup in Japan - people who will pretend to be you in intense politeness-related scenarios.