Nagoya

This will be a slightly longer post as I am going to try and recap a weeks' worth of events into a single post.

This last week due to work I had to go to Nagoya. This was a formal business trip and I was expected to be there from Sunday to Wednesday initially and then it slid to Thursday (staying an extra day to support leadership that was in town).

The hotel was a standard business hotel and as always, such things are generally solid 3 star hotels with some level of air conditioning, a cheap restaurant with a bar, and from the 1990s or earlier. My hotel was no exception, but on the lower end of air conditioning support. Nagoya coincidentally was experiencing a heat wave, with temperatures as high as 40 degrees Celsius. My room would go no cooler than 26 degrees Celsius, which made it challenging to sleep at night some days.

Regardless, armed with my business suit and overpowered laptop, I set out to go talk to my employer in a series of work meetings. We had traveled to meet them, with some members of my team coming all the way from the USA. This is an expensive and costly trip for us and they (the local team members) treated it with much respect. They prepared materials to respond to us, prepared questions for us and engaged us that showed that they had taken time and thought into our visit.

On the other hand, I felt that our visit was insufficient; and that we had not prepared properly. We had a single slide deck that basically was an organizational introduction and nothing more. We shared some things that we were working on but the goals and objectives of our meetings were unclear. This meant that we went to meetings more to listen and learn about our local counterparts, whereas they had prepared to receive a presentation from us. After all, we were the ones visiting them. When you have two sides that have come to a meeting and both expect the other to talk, you have an issue. You get silence and you will need to fill the time with something.

This meant that overall, I felt that the trip was unproductive. I may be a little slighted as I got in early, was left hanging for dinner and did not feel that included or involved in the planning or materials for the trip. Rather I felt that I was something a third wheel. Let me list some things I observed that I think need to be improved for future trips:

• Coordination with the Japan staff, multiple people were trying to do schedules, and the local staff did not know what was authoritative or not.
• Unplanned meetings. Local staff asked to meet at least twice, and it was a surprise for us; including one trip where the person had come into town explicitly for our trip. Someone (unknown who) had told local staff to make the trip.
• Expenses, the trip was more of a shopping vacation it seems for the visitors.
• No clear goals for each meeting.
• No clear who takes notes.
• No planned follow up outside of thank you notes.

That's just the short list but I do not feel that this trip made the relationship between the two sides stronger. It was even potentially dangerous at times as the senior leaders in the room would get on their phone and actively ignore the discussion. This means that the topic in the room was so little interest that they didn't care to pay attention to it for someone that had traveled thousands of miles.

It's the sort of thing you should care about if you care about your relationship with the customer. I just do not know if the US staff will care.

Nagoya is an interesting place though; there is a popular restaurant chain there known as Yama-chan. That restaurant serves tabesaki, which is a type of Japanese fried chicken with some spices on it. It's remarkably good and worth trying if you are ever there.