The Difference
Many years ago, my former boss Kathy Murphy always wanted to show off her cultural experience of working as a VP sales in a Japanese company. She had more than 10 years background working at a Japanese Corporation in the US.
Kathy’s first comment was, “The difference between a Chinese company and a Japanese company is”, she continues, “In a Chinese company, you work to death; in a Japanese company, you work to death but you get paid for”.
Kathy’s second comment was, “ The difference between a US company and a Japanese company is,” she raised her voice, “US companies lie to their employees, while Japanese companies do not”.
This became so true when we heard our company was about to shut down. In our corporate meeting in Chicago, our management told us from all over the country that those were “rumors”, and everything is ‘fine’ – even though our company stock was down to few dollars per share on NYSE. We wanted the management to tell us the truth, because we would not be able to find a similar job similar pay within 2, 3 months; but we were not given the truth at all. When we were asked to join the corporate conference call meeting one day, they announced “this is the last week” for all of us. People were upset but what could we do ?
Kathy’s 3rd comment was, “The difference between the US government and the Japanese government is,” she firmly says, “our government lies to its people, while the Japanese government does not”. This is why our media, with our American mindset, wanted to find out if the Japanese government was lying to their people about the Fukushima Nuclear Plant crisis, well, we see the Japanese people did not collaborate the US media, because they trusted their own government, while we do not.