It has been a long time since I did not update my blog. I take the occasion of spending some summer holidays in Europe to share some story which happened in a Gaishikei recently.
Consider it as a mini-Netflix series.
You can refer to previous posts to understand the basics of a Gaishikei (or multinational company in Japan).
I decided to choose The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as a reference to this western spaghetti movie as it illustrated well the topic.
The illustrations have been generated by AI.
So, let’s start with the setting.
European company in Japan. Few decades presence in Japan with about >100 employees.
The Japanese entity is reporting to APAC Vice President, based in Singapore.
In the 80s, 90s, still the APAC regional HQ was in Japan, but then it moved to Shanghai, then with the geopolitics, the 3/11 earthquake in Japan, more expats in Japan flew to Singapore and now, at least for this company, the regional HQ is in Singapore.
We will talk about a division of this company, a commercial division, independent and reporting directly to the APAC organization and not to Japanese organization. (except some dotted-line)
The division was doing well, the VP at this time was a Chinese national based in Shanghai. Our division (I use the word “our” because I was part of it) was looking at territories from India to Australia/New-Zealand, so all broad APAC.
The atmosphere was good, we had a vice president keen to understand the business of each territory, spending time to visit us, conducting business reviews, having discussions, deep-diving, interacting with the colleagues.
Then in April 2022, he took the decision to leave the company. No questions asked. Still now I do not know the real reason. Maybe the pandemic and its toll was some direct or indirect reason. I do not know.
So that was the situation.
We were belonging to a quite large European company, traded on the stock market and with a full-fledged HR department global/regional/local teaching us the importance of preparing succession plans in the organizations.
But… there was no succession plan for our VP, and thus there would be no transition…
All APAC region was left without leadership.
Finally global headquarter assigned one of their vice president to take charge of the region. But based in Europe, the contact was different.
But then the position was open and they had to find a replacement for the APAC vice president.
We will learn more about it in the next episode.
No spoiler, but we will talk about the real “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” side of a Gaishikei.
So now, buckle your seatbelt, we will be deep-diving.
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