Hiroshi
Mikitani, the founder of Rakuten Inc., has a bold approach to making
his company competitive in international markets. He's making employees
conduct all of their communications--meetings, emails, verbal
conversations--in the English language:
At the time of
the 2010 announcement, only about 10 percent of Rakuten’s 6,000
Japanese employees could function in English, according to a case study
by the Harvard Business School. Rakuten operated in just two foreign
countries — it has since expanded into 10 more — and most of its
business came from Japan. Critics argued that Rakuten’s employees,
forced to hold meetings and write memos in English, would simply become
less articulate, less efficient and far less happy.
At times, the
two-year transition from Japanese to English — dubbed by the company as
“Englishization” — has been as awkward as the term itself. Workers were
told they would face demotions if they didn’t reach target test scores,
and a handful of employees quit, Mikitani said. Other workers, quoted
without the use of their names in the 2011 Harvard case study, saw it as
an “exercise in perpetual humiliation” or as a “layoff tool.” [...]
At
Rakuten, workers scrambled to improve their language skills by the July
1 target date, after which all major internal documents and meetings
were to be in English. About 75 percent of Rakuten’s employees are based
in Japan, the company says, and its foreign employees face the same
language requirements.
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