In 2018, I visited Tokyo.
I participated in a delegation with Persol Holdings, one of the largest staffing and recruitment corporations in Japan.
Japan is suffering from a major decline in birthrates. Because there aren’t enough babies being born, there aren’t enough workers in the economy.
Labor Shortage! Sound familiar?
Persol, therefore, plays a critical role in the future of the Japanese economy.
Companies that can’t staff their teams will pay top dollar to recruit talent from a shrinking workforce.
But how to find those people?
Very difficult task.
My group arrived to a glittering skyscraper in downtown Tokyo - the largest Metropolis on earth.
The team brought us onto the main work-floor, where more than one hundred junior level employees were packed into desks like sardines - answering phones and pushing papers.
As we sat, slightly shocked by the old-school corporate conditions in front of us, the Persol team briefed us on the Japanese economy.
The problem in Japan?
People don’t change jobs.
The typical Japanese employee picks one company and stays there for the duration of their career.
The employee gets job security and the corporation gets ultimate loyalty.
This arrangement worked for a long time: when there were plenty of younger workers in the economy.
But unfortunately all, that is going away.
With the shortage of workers, Japanese companies are being forced to abandon the old model and adopt either automation or radically new models of employment.
Persol was faced with an impossible task:
Convince the Japanese people to leave their jobs.
They were well aware that the old model of work makes no sense in today’s day and age.
In certain areas of the economy, a lifelong company employee is understaffed, underutilized, and wasting time.
On the other hand, that employee’s skillset would be valuable at another company that is desperately in need and can’t fill the role.
But since that employee won’t change jobs, the role goes unfilled and the skillset goes to waste.
It is a deeply rooted cultural problem that needs to change in a hurry.
But inertia is a powerful force, and in a place like Japan:
The odds are stacked against them.
So let’s circle back and ask the question:
Why the heck did Persol want to talk to us, a group of 20 something millennials from San Francisco ?
The answer is simple: We were doing radically different things with our careers and they wanted to know more.
-We changed jobs nonstop and pursued more flexible working arrangements (contracts, consulting gigs)
-We resisted the need for a boss.
-We worked fewer hours and tried to get our work in the shortest amount of time - as opposed to the 80 hour Japanese work week.
-We prioritized skill development outside of the workplace - especially learning online.
-We started companies and launched projects.
-We prioritized agility over security.
All of this was an anathema to the traditional Japanese career.
Even though Persol would never be able to bring San Francisco work culture to Japan, they knew that they needed to learn from us.
Their argument?
“San Francisco is 10 years ahead of Japan, and what you are doing is what young people in Japan will be doing in the future.”
Thus, whatever you are doing, we have to learn from you.
Sometimes it takes the perspective of another culture to fully understand how your careers works.
The trends of the Japanese economy reflect similar things happening in the United States.
The lessons:
The days of staying at one company for your entire career are ending.
The ability to jump from job to job, contract to contract, is an advantage.
The labor shortage not going away and is a permanent feature of both the Japanese and the American economies.
Cultural inertia and resistance to change are serious problems in Japan and the United States.
All of our economic problems have solutions, but they require an enormous amount of experimentation and adaptation in order to address them.
In deeply conservative Japan, I learned to more fully appreciate the experimental nature of California work culture.
The future of the economy can seem intimidating.
But if we are willing to be more flexible, more adaptable, more willing to run experiments and think like entrepreneurs -
We will learn that there are more opportunities than ever and we will survive and thrive in the years to come.