Lucky or Insane?Posted on 2008/11/04 15:29:34 (November 2008). [Tuesday 4th November 2008]
Both probably. I was both lucky and insane when I started working seriously with Japan, almost 8 years ago.
Now I see things in a different way, I feel things in a different way, and incidentally I am doing new experiences.
One of them has been the situation that I found myself cast into this afternoon. It was me, our agent and my supervisor at the shop of a client of ours. Since I have just started the new job it's quite hard for me to have a clear idea of the new business, the numbers, the orders, the clients themselves.
Well my boss today completely overturned the rules to which I aided for a long time in dealing business here. He got upset at a request of this client that is clearly a minor player for us (but in my head he's still A client)... In the end we walked out of the door, possibly not to return anymore. No rude words or screaming took place, but the tension was clearly going around the place, and in the end we had to play fireman on the flames of anger to quench the whole thing in a decent manner.
So far, even in front to stupid claims (though this time I think that the client had grounds to complain), we have always tried to accommodate the requests of the client with the position of the company. After all future business is always something that you need and I am not really keen in throwing it away. In Japan it takes a lot of time and explanations to get the quality issue working, sometimes I even discussed about quality matters for months.
In this case it all ended up with a dry "no" and we left.
In a way it's good that he had such a strong position, because I am offloaded of all responsibilities, and maybe we can salvage the relationship. On the other side the whole thing was a bit "weird" and me and the agent felt quite uneasy about the whole story. Maybe I am behaving too much "Japanese", my strength becomes my weakness?
In the evening another client told us that that guy is loosing support from a lot of distributors because he's too strict with quality issues, so in a way he corroborated my boss's action. But still I feel something is wrong underneath, and I cannot stop thinking that maybe there are deeper feelings to what he did (he doesn't like Japan very much).
Oh well, today I have learnt that I can be an asshole with a client and get away with it! Interesting...
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