HUMOUROUS IN JAPAN, BUT MAYBE NOT IN AMERICA

I am sending this blog from Heathrow airport as have just arrived back from Tokyo on a 12-hour flight and just wanted to share with you how exciting it was to see the expansion of our Japanese team. We speak a lot about America, Europe and China but not so much about Japan (which is around 16 per cent of our turnover) headed by James Smith who is now the Regional Director for Asia. I think the combination of the Asian and Chinese offices will explode in the next three years. We got excellent feedback from our Japanese customers who congratulated our team in Leeds for their excellent customer service; this is indeed praise coming from some of the most demanding companies in the world.

I never cease to marvel on how technology changes our world, especially the way in which we communicate. As from Wednesday of this week from 2pm GMT and 9am EST our Leeds headquarters is joined together with our new offices situated in the New York Stock Exchange by a continual online video link. For New York and Leeds to speak to each other, all they literally have to do is to knock on the screen and there we are. This will also be impressive for our visitors who may even have the opportunity to have a peek of the Statue of Liberty which you can actually see from our offices at 20 Broad Street. The feeling of connection with our colleagues across the pond is ‘awesome’ – that’s the American word not mine. This new facility will also help towards our Green Policy by reducing our omissions as we will be able to substantially cut down air travel between our offices.

I am so looking forward to getting home, my flight takes off to Manchester shortly, I had some very interesting experiences in Japan... some of which I may share with you next week and some I possibly won’t. It is such a different culture, it’s taken me a long time to really understand our Japanese staff and customers. They are very demanding, very loyal, very formal, very firm but very, very fair providing we constantly keep them updated and if we make a mistake we apologise – in the Japanese way. But that’s not enough; just like all our customers they want to see consistent improvement.

There was a moment when Toru (our senior BDM and also my interpreter) looked extremely anxious when I told them that we had mind blowing technology which we would be launching early next year, ‘Please Mr Gould give us more details’ they said, I paused and said to one of the most senior people from one of the world’s largest car companies ‘If I tell you, I’ll then have to kill you’, I insisted Toru interpret it correctly, there was a stony silence and then a huge amount of laughter – what a relief!... I’m not sure if the Americans would have got it if I had said it there.

Have a great weekend, catch up next week.