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good morning if you're wondering if it's terrifying to be up on a big stage like
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this in a big room like this I can tell you without hesitation or reservation
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the answer is yes my name is Mike Topa
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I'm the director of web development for a small firm called Hobson & Company I've been a web developer since the mid
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1990s and I enjoy helping teams explore agile and lean practices with the goals of improving quality communication and
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developer happiness and if you've worked with agile and lean practices you may be
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familiar with some concepts that come from Japan like Kanban or Kaizen both
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originate from the world of Japanese manufacturing and have since been applied around the world the software works Kaizen is about making constant
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small improvements and empowering individuals to discover and make those improvements
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Kanban was originally a system used to monitor assembly lines and in the world of software it's grown into a system to
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help teams prioritize work manage flow and uncover obstacles the term I want to
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introduce you to today is ohm Otonashi which describes Japanese customer service and hospitality the application
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of Kaizen and Kanban to software work is something that has evolved over time my
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goal in this presentation is to share some thoughts on how omote annachi might provide similar value for us to start
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exploring how we might adapt concerns adapt concepts from it to our work and evolve beneficial practices Kaizen and
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Kanban are concepts from management and Japanese manufacturing and so aren't really part of everyday life for most people in Japan in contrast omotenashi
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is very much part of everyday life in Japan isn't is a significant aspect of Japanese culture in Christelle takagawa
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presentation to the International Olympic Committee in 2013 she made home Otonashi the key theme of japan's
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successful bid to host the 2020 Olympics she highlighted Japanese hospitality is
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something that set Japan apart from the other contenders she began her speech by saying we will offer you a unique
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welcome in Japanese I can describe it in one unique word all Mota nah she now before I go on I
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should probably answer the question that might be on your mind at this point why is it American white guy on stage
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talking about Japanese customer service at a Ruby on Rails conference I'd like
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to answer that question by way of answering another question which is what do I think about when I think about
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Japan first I think about the time I spent in Japan with my family my wife
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Maria is a second generation Japanese American she's an academic and studies Japanese politics and economics
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she received research grants that brought us to Japan to live for six months in 2007 and again in 2014
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my oldest son went to yochien' there which is Japanese kindergarten she has
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relatives there and we've made almost a dozen other trips to Japan over the past 20 years I've been incredibly lucky to
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have the opportunity to travel extensively within Japan and I've made several good friends and our time there
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but having settled that since I'm an American my knowledge of Japanese culture has inherent limitations and I
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have no relevant professional expertise so I'm not here to sort of mansplain it to you instead I'm here to share what
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I've learned in my time there from my own experiences my wife Maria's experiences and from talking with
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friends I've made they're having an outsider's perspective also has value as has helped me gain a deeper awareness of
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my own culture and learn from its differences with Japanese culture so
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what are some of the other things I think about when I think about Japan I think about so many things when it first
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worked on my draft of this talked I filled it with slides about Japan's hi-tech modernity it's ancient history
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its cultural heritage it's wonderful food and even it's amazing manhole
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covers but for the sake of making sure there's actually some time left for our main topic I'll unfortunately have to
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skip all of that and limited myself to aspects of Japanese culture that relate to omotte annachi so with that in mind
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something I think about when I think about Japan is orderliness and societal respect I took this picture in 2004 back
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when payphones were still a thing this is my wife Maria using a payphone on a subway platform in Tokyo sometimes
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the most mundane things can tell you a lot about a society notice that all the wiring is not secured at all the power
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cord is exposed and plugged into an ordinary wall outlet the handset cord is
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about the same as what you'd see on C on a home phone this is because street
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crime and vandalism are rare in Japan compare that to an American payphone where the only accessible wire is the
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handset cord and it's wrapped in steel Toki is one of the biggest cities in the
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world how long do you think a payphone like this would last on a subway platform in a city like New York or LA
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also note how spotlessly clean everything is in case you can't see the picture that well the subway platform
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floor is immaculate and the chrome railings and wall tiles are all shiny
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which brings me to the next thing I think about when I think about Japan cleanliness
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for anyone who might not be able to read that it's a sign in a Japanese bathroom that says please urinate with precision
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and elegance things you may think of as
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inherently dirty like public restrooms or garbage trucks are just about always really really clean I think about
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politeness personal respect and friendliness everywhere I have traveled in Japan I've always been made to feel
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welcome this quote is from a friend of ours after she visited Japan for the first time and I can't think of a better
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way to describe the feeling she said I just wanted to hug everyone Japanese are
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known for being polite but they're not generally known for being friendly but they actually are especially if you venture outside of Tokyo is your make an
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effort to engage socially you may be surprised at the warmth of the interactions you'll have I think about
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professionalism and decency one of the things that struck me the most in Japan is that almost any full-time job will
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pay a living wage people are treated with respect regardless of their job and you can pretty much always expect
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professional quality service as an example the Shinkansen bullet trains
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these are the trains that go very fast and go all over Japan and can get you anywhere about as fast as an airplane
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these trains average 12 minutes between arriving at their last stop and then departing again five of those minutes
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are needed for passengers to get on and off which leaves seven minutes for cleaning the train now there's one
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person cleaning each train car those cars each have 100 seats so they
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have seven minutes to pick up the trash on the seats clean the floor wipe down the trays at every seat check for any
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lost items and since the seats rotate they also have to make sure to rotate them all to face the same direction for
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the new passengers doing a job like that well doing a job like that well in such
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a short amount of time requires having a standardized set of tasks that maximize efficiency and it requires executing
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those tasks with excellence day in and day out now here I am on stage at a software
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conference excited to tell you about how they clean trains in Japan it's an ordinary job but when done so well there
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to the level of an art form one that Harvard Business students want to study and this brings us to the idea of omote
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annachi Japanese customer service and hospitality a key motivator for why
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things like cleaning trains are taking so seriously in Japan is hospitality in the u.s. we think of hospitality is
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something we experience when visiting someone's home or maybe a hotel but in Japan it's also a key aspect of almost
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every business when you do something like get on a train it's very much considered similar to visiting someone's
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home in terms of how you should be made to feel welcome Bridgette Brennan who's
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a columnist for Forbes magazine put it well and describing her customer service experiences in Japan
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she said whoever I ventured in stores large and small I experienced what would
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be considered White Glove service back home delivered with the kind of warmth enthusiasm and salesmanship typically
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found in black and white movies omote annachi is the combination of two words
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in Japanese a Moute day which refers to the public face that we show the world and now she means without omote annachi
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means your actions are wholehearted sincere and without artifice whether
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people genuinely feel that way while say working as a cashier at a 7-eleven day in and day out is another question but
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the main point is that customers experience the service you provide as if it was always true Uniqlo is a clothing
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store chain that started in Japan and has since gone global to give you a sense of the quality of their service
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Yoona Clos CEO Tadashi and I said this one they opened their first store in Australia he said there is customer
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service and then there is Japanese customer service they spent a full year training
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the Australian staff to get them to the to a Japanese level of quality service imagine going through 12 months of
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training before taking a job at a place like the gap now if you've been to one
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of the Uniqlo stories that have opened in the US over the past few years your customer service experience may not have
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stood out as anything special the quoted my slide here is from 2014 this so this is just a guess on my part but I think
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Uniqlo must have found it cost prohibitive to do this level of training as they've rapidly expanded globally in recent
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years but to give you a more personal example when I was living in Tokyo with
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my family in 2007 I was responsible for our boys each day while my wife was working after dropping off my oldest son
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a kid in kindergarten I would usually find a place to explore in Tokyo with my one and a half year old son I found out
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about a department store that had a children's play area on its top floor so we headed there one day we were the
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first to arrive when they opened the doors in the morning and there were no other customers now in an American
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department store you might see the staff milling around still getting ready for the day you know this early in the morning but in Japan they are there and
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they are ready to serve you department stores in Japan also have more staff than in American stores as you would
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never want to risk keeping keep keeping a customer waiting now I had to head across the main floor to the elevator on
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the other side to go up to the play area and as I walked with my son in the stroller lined up in front of me on each
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side every 15 or 15 feet or so was a staff person and they would bow deeply
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to me as I passed by I had experiences before with individual staff people but never with so many like this and it made
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me feel like royalty it also made me feel a little bit bad because it wasn't actually Hooda bhai anything we just
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wanted to go play with Legos and Ultraman action figures in the play area similarly if you visit a boutique retail
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store like a nice clothing shop and make a purchase when you leave the person who helped you will follow you out the dope follow you out the door and bow deeply
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staying bad until you've reached the end of the block
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Westerners typically perceive this as a selfless devotion to the customer you get the impression the Japanese workers
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will do anything to please you since you are made to feel so well taken care of that's certainly how I perceived it at
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first but this perception is the result of our own Western cultural assumptions
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where we presume a hierarchical relationship that it's a service providers job to do what the customer
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wants that's not how customer service works in Japan as a customer you're expected to
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respect the professional judgment of your service provider and respect their expertise
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if you are a customer service provider in Japan and you have a customer asking for something that isn't supposed to be
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part of their experience that means things are starting to go wrong it means
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the customer has overstepped the bounds of their role it's your job as a service provider to steer them back onto the
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correct path not surprisingly this happens most frequently with foreign foreigners visiting Japan who naturally
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don't know anything about omotenashi situations like this put a Japanese customer service provider in an awkward
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position and they need to get things back on track as gently as possible but also firmly to illustrate this I'm gonna
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show you a brief clip of a TED talk from dr. Sheena Iyengar she's a professor at the Columbia Business School and as an
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expert on choice why people want choice how they choose and so forth at first I
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wanted to just paraphrase what she says here but I realized I really couldn't do it justice so here she is describing one
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of her first experiences when visiting Japan for the first time I knew even then that I would encounter cultural
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differences and misunderstandings but they popped up when I least expected it on my first day I went to a restaurant
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and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar after a pause the waiter said when
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does not put sugar in green tea I know I said I'm aware of this custom but I
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really like my tea suite in response he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation one does not put
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sugar in green tea I understand I said that the Japanese do not put sugar in
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their green tea but I'd like to put some sugar in my green Teenz
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surprised by my insistence oh the waiter had to took up the issue with the manager pretty soon a lengthy discussion
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ensued and finally the manager came over to me and said I am very sorry we do not
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have sugar well since I couldn't have my
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tea the way I wanted it I ordered a cup of coffee which the waiter brought brought over promptly resting on the
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saucer were two packets of sugar my failure to procure myself a cup of sweet
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green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding this was due to a fundamental difference
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in our ideas about choice for my American perspective when a paying
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customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences she has every right to have that request met the
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American way to quote Burger King is to have it your way because the Starbucks says happiness is in your choices but
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from the Japanese perspective it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better in this case the ignorant gaijin
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for making the wrong choice let's face it the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural
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standards and they were doing their best to help me save face so she says at the end there they wanted
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to help her save face this is a common reason why you may not get what you want in certain situations she didn't realize
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that from a Japanese perspective she's won unwittingly embarrassing herself by asking for sugar with her tea so they
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are trying to protect her from herself there can be other reasons for these kinds of situations as well which we can
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explore with a couple more stories here's one from my own experience where Japanese customer service professionalism collides with American
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notions of choice in 2014 we lived in a city in southern Japan called Fukuoka
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for six months and near our apartment was a pastry shop called Anderson's who is our favorite there was a favorite
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stop especially for my boys as you can see in the picture here you would get a tray and pick out your own pastries and
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go to the cashier to pay the cashier would also individually bag each of your pastries I'm very eco
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conscious and this would bother me I feel very wasteful to me to use so many bags so one time using my limited
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Japanese skills I mustered the courage to politely ask the cashier to use just one bag her response was to simply
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ignore me I felt confident she understood me as I've had many other kinds of simple customer service verbal
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exchanges without any trouble my Japanese wasn't good enough for me to feel comfortable pressing the matter further but on future visits I tried a
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few more times and they were always just ignore me so why were they doing this
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it's because they knew what might happen if they actually did what I asked I would go home and take my sugar doughnut
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out of the bag and give my wife for egg bread and it would have sugar all over it from the donut and she would think to
00:17:10.100
herself boy what a lousy job those people in anderson's did so in this
00:17:15.589
situation they're not just trying to protect me from myself they're trying to protect others from me as well and by extension maintain their
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own reputation here's a third and final example of a customer service situation
00:17:28.970
going a bit off the rails this is a story my wife Maria told me she was in a small tableware shop in Tokyo and it was
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admiring a handmade tea caddy which is for storing tea leaves unlike me her Japanese is excellent and is actually
00:17:41.990
good enough that native speakers often don't notice her American accent at first she was chatting amiably with the
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store owner and said that she would she would like to show the tea caddy to her friends back home in America at this
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point his demeanor completely changed he stiffened up and he said oh you're from
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America you're not going to put paper clips in it are you this isn't just
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about protecting her from herself or protecting others from her it's about protecting the product from her he would
00:18:12.770
prefer to not make the sale rather than see it used incorrectly this may seem a little extreme
00:18:18.200
so what's what's really going on here before I answer that question I have to provide some context for the next short
00:18:24.710
video I'm about to show you my wife Maria has recently got into a into a very ridiculous very fun and very
00:18:31.789
for where Japanese heavy metal band called maximum the hormone now when you
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watch videos on YouTube they automatically recommend other videos that their algorithms think you might like and so she came across a video by
00:18:43.340
Marty Friedman so who is Marty Friedman he's the former lead guitarist for the American heavy metal band Megadeth it
00:18:51.200
turns out he has lived in Japan for the last 16 years and has his own TV show there so I give you Marty Friedman
00:18:58.960
providing some advice for first-time visitors to Japan in an interview he did with the online magazine metal injection
00:19:05.349
and it turns out it's perfect for what I wanted to say about this experience Maria had while shopping for a tea caddy
00:19:12.820
that's one of my favorite things about Japan customer service is off the charts
00:19:18.649
just wherever you go whatever you try to buy what even from a convenience store fast-food chain high-end department
00:19:26.509
store the customer service is second to none they will really make your
00:19:31.720
experience great but one thing I want you to know is unlike America and sort
00:19:38.029
of like Europe special orders are not really going to happen this on the side
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or this with extra sauce or this with no sauce and pretty much take that out of
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your mind and you're gonna have a much more enjoyable experience the food is so incredible just go with it I mean how
00:19:56.690
many times do you go to Japan in your life I mean it's their way and if they try to do it your way it's not going to come
00:20:04.580
out right and they're not going to have the same pride that they would have in doing it their way and so if you get
00:20:11.419
refused please do not mistake that for unfriendliness please understand that
00:20:18.080
what they're doing is that's their way and they want to give it to you the best way they can and a lot of restaurants
00:20:24.379
don't allow you to take food away like doggy bag type of things that's mainly
00:20:30.980
because they don't know exactly how you're gonna deal with it afterwards and
00:20:35.990
they want you to have it in the best possible form so tying this back to
00:20:42.259
doctor Iyengar's tea and sugar story my pastry bag story and Maria's tea caddy story you can start to see the common
00:20:48.799
threads there's a very strong focus on providing service according to strict standards of excellence
00:20:54.249
the salesman Maria was dealing with definitely went a bit too far with his comment but it's an expression of his
00:21:00.350
worry about a customer not having the right experience with the product so there's a reason I'm focusing on these
00:21:07.100
stories about customers desires coming into conflict with the professional standards of Japanese customer service providers because that's where I think
00:21:13.730
the most interesting lessons are for us and there are three lessons I've thought of the first lesson is about how we as
00:21:21.080
developers do our work and how we work together as teams omlette annachi
00:21:26.659
entails a rigorous approach to achieving consistent excellence for everything from cleaning trains to hosting the
00:21:32.179
Olympics and with developing software we have standards and practices that allow
00:21:37.190
us to achieve excellence as well and you have them right and most of the places
00:21:45.320
I've worked over the years when I started on the job my team didn't have things like a definition of done or mutually agreed-upon ways to do things
00:21:52.100
like testing or pair programming or if we did have them they weren't followed with any real consistency I just
00:21:59.960
mentioned a definition of done if you're not familiar with this it's essentially a checklist of tasks you should complete
00:22:05.269
before saying that your work on a feature is done the checklist is something your team works together to create and it should evolve over time as
00:22:12.419
team's practices grow and evolve its purpose is to help provide your team with a shared understanding of what it
00:22:18.059
means to do quality work when you don't have a mutually agreed-upon way of
00:22:23.159
working in your team disagreements typically end up being resolved by someone asserting authority or by
00:22:28.470
whoever decided to push their position more aggressively or a situation may end up unresolved lingering to plague the
00:22:34.830
team again the next time it comes up over the years I've worked at major
00:22:40.619
universities medium-sized tech firms small venture funded startups consulting shops and nonprofits and at all of these
00:22:47.789
places I've experienced team environments like this where there are always some areas of significant dysfunction maybe I've just been unlucky
00:22:55.139
but I've heard many stories like this from friends over the years as well so my impression is that these situations
00:23:00.659
are more common than we might think this
00:23:08.369
has led me to believe that just like every family every organization is dysfunctional it's just a question of in
00:23:14.279
what way and to what degree and just like with families what you experience on a daily basis naturally comes to
00:23:20.940
define your perception of what's normal making it easy to become blind to the dysfunction and the costs over time of
00:23:27.210
that blindness can be high in terms of its effect on quality efficiency and team morale
00:23:32.359
this happens because people are unwilling to have hard conversations or they don't know how to have them or they
00:23:38.460
don't have the organizational support to have them in addition to that challenge
00:23:44.519
there's a whole other challenge as an industry we're still figuring out the best ways to do things so even when you
00:23:51.359
can bring your team together it's not always obvious what the right way for it is on any given day you can go online
00:23:57.119
and find people arguing about where their scum is great or should just die in a fire or weather application model
00:24:04.619
lists are bad design and we should all just switch to Microsoft s driven
00:24:09.899
development is dead the world of software development is like this because our industry is fairly young
00:24:15.869
compared to others this is both a blessing and a curse it's a curse because it makes it hard to figure out
00:24:22.139
how to proceed when you're hearing really smart and experienced people tell you really different things
00:24:27.420
about how to do your work but it's also a blessing because it means we have the opportunity to participate in the
00:24:33.720
conversation about where we're all headed to learn different ways of working and decide for ourselves what works best for us so I encourage you to
00:24:42.540
have conversations with your team that might be hard to work towards being on the same page for things like testing
00:24:48.000
strategies having a definition of done code reviews pair program pair programming and so forth having those
00:24:55.200
conversations first requires having an environment of trust and mutual respect sometimes you have to build up that
00:25:01.740
trust first but when you do I have found that having a mutually agreed-upon way of working is really empowering and
00:25:07.410
promotes team harmony quality and job satisfaction so everything I just said
00:25:14.430
is about teams the challenges are even greater when dealing with clients whether it's an internal client in your
00:25:20.520
organization or your consultant working with external clients the Japanese customer service stories I've shared
00:25:26.610
have all been one-time retail or food service interactions in our world we have ongoing relationships this is a
00:25:33.210
huge difference doing things like ignoring a customer's request as a way to solve a problem like the cashier at
00:25:38.520
the Anderson's pastry shop did with me that's really not an option for us and all the mistakes you can make working
00:25:45.630
with clients over the years I've made them the most common mistake is over-promising and under-delivering
00:25:53.180
unless you're lucky enough to have an especially enlightened management you will always face pressure to do more in
00:25:58.650
less time and I've done things like meekly saying yes to impossible deadlines and then I exhaust myself and
00:26:05.100
cut corners to try to make it happen and the end result is almost always damage damage to the code quality stress and
00:26:12.990
damage to your health and damage to the client relationship we're even after all that they still end up with some
00:26:18.720
combination of missed deadlines and buggy code to give you a sense of what I
00:26:24.300
mean this is a chart I made after I started as the director of the web team at the University of Pennsylvania School
00:26:29.460
of Medicine it's an effort allocation chart showing the number of people we would need to do the work expected of us
00:26:35.910
for the upcoming six months compared to how many people we actual we had the blue bars represent the staff
00:26:41.909
we had which were assigned to meet the needs of specific departments and small teams of mostly one or two people which
00:26:47.820
meant the scene team sizes were too small but that was a separate issue and the red bars represent the number of
00:26:53.669
people we would need to do the work that was actually expected of us until I got everyone together to make the estimates
00:27:00.090
that inform this chart we didn't really see the big picture of the situation we were in the team had never done estimating like
00:27:06.179
this before we used what's known as the swag estimating technique to generate
00:27:11.399
this chart if you're not familiar with the term stands for a sophisticated wild-ass guess so it's by no means
00:27:20.309
perfect but it's very valuable for priding a general sense of scope and scale when you're looking at a long time
00:27:25.409
horizon in many many projects almost all the demand and that tallest red bar was
00:27:31.529
coming from one department they had had a history of always getting what they wanted if we ever push back they would
00:27:37.379
escalate their demands politically through the school's administration to apply pressure prior to this we had no
00:27:43.679
means to really respond to this pressure other than to just give in and these
00:27:48.929
demands for projects also came of course with deadlines pressure which meant we would rush and not always do our best
00:27:54.720
work leading to more suffering for us in the long run with bugs unhappy clients and poor experiences for users this
00:28:04.049
marked the start of a very challenging but very worthwhile agile transition for the team we discussed and implemented
00:28:09.840
good engineering standards and practices and stuck with them and over time this allowed us to deliver more maintainable
00:28:15.330
and less buggy code giving our customers and users better experiences we also
00:28:22.019
adopted agile workflow and project management practices that allowed us to articulate and visualize the bigger
00:28:27.119
picture of what was going on with our projects together these changes gave us the ability to do something analogous to
00:28:33.179
what Japanese service providers do when faced with difficult situations we were both protecting the client from
00:28:39.149
themselves and protecting the product from the client importantly these changes also helped us develop the
00:28:45.929
ability to have productive conversations with the client about how we had been working together over the years and how
00:28:51.179
to find a better way forward and we even learned how to protect other clients from this client by developing
00:28:58.020
skills for estimating and making data and charts available about our work to all departments we were able to provide
00:29:03.330
transparency on where our time and effort was going which enabled other departments to to participate on a more
00:29:09.240
equal footing and the higher level political conversations that were determined our team's overall effort allocation so having standards and
00:29:18.990
practices is good but a huge part of what we do is creative problem-solving
00:29:24.230
every project we work on is a unique creation not quite the same as any other on a regular basis we were called upon
00:29:31.620
to be insightful and ingenuitive to solve new problems this is very different from the Japanese customer
00:29:37.470
service stories I've been telling you which are all about consistent adherence to standards and providing service in
00:29:42.780
the same way every time an American friend of mine who lived in Japan for
00:29:48.630
many years said this he said in Japan I consistently get very good service in the u.s. I've had the worst service but
00:29:56.670
I've also had the best so what is he getting at here at this point we know
00:30:02.160
about the high quality of Japanese service and if you're from the US or have spent any time here you know about
00:30:07.350
the terrible service that can happen but the best service he's talking about is when you're provided with creative
00:30:13.140
problem-solving when Marty Friedman was saying to try not to customize your order at a restaurant in Japan that's
00:30:19.680
not such a big deal if we're just in the realm of preferences but what if you have a food allergy when we were living
00:30:27.660
in Japan in 2014 we became friends with my Japanese tutor and her daughter had a food allergy he told me that going out
00:30:34.200
to eat in Japan was often a frustrating experience for them while staff were always very willing to provide
00:30:39.210
information about items on the menu to avoid trying to customize an order was difficult when they visited the US and
00:30:45.900
when we went to good restaurants with good staff she was thrilled that the service they provided waiters would
00:30:51.660
usually say something like oh it's no problem I'll talk to the chef we'll see what we can do we'll come up with something that's just for you there are
00:31:00.060
parallels here for the kind of work we do with software creative problem-solving is essential to the work
00:31:05.310
we do and we need to incorporate it into our standards of what it means to do quality work to give you an example creative
00:31:15.330
problem-solving can sometimes even call for pushing back on a client's requests and educating them on possibilities they
00:31:20.820
hadn't thought of when I was working in a consulting shop we had a client whose business was to make buildings more
00:31:26.480
energy-efficient they would retrofit buildings with new windows doors insulation and so forth they wanted us
00:31:32.850
to build an online calculator for them for prospective customers to provide information about their buildings and
00:31:38.130
then receive cost savings estimates there he knew how they wanted us to do the calculations but as we became
00:31:44.760
familiar with everything we had an idea for what we thought might be a better way to do it we asked if they had actual
00:31:50.789
cost savings data from previous customers and they said yes so we said great if you're willing to share that
00:31:56.250
data with us we can do some statistical analysis and use that to have the calculator provide more accurate
00:32:01.409
estimates they seemed intrigued but also a little apprehensive they said well you
00:32:06.720
know we we've always done it this way and they hadn't worked with us before and so they weren't sure how much to
00:32:12.809
trust us so they said no now at that point we could have just said fine and
00:32:17.880
just gone ahead with their approach and they would have been perfectly happy but instead we came back and offered to
00:32:23.340
develop and run an initial analysis and share the results with them and show it how it compared to their old way we said
00:32:29.460
that at that point they still wanted to do with their old way they would have to pay us for the time we spent on the analysis so they said yes and once they
00:32:37.529
saw what we did and we stepped them through it they really liked it and adopted our approach now there's a whole
00:32:44.940
talk I could give on interviewing clients and eliciting business requirements but my point with this example is to illustrate the value of
00:32:51.389
asking questions and creative problem-solving a key question is when
00:32:56.820
does a situation call for adherence to professional standards in order to avoid giving in to unrealistic demands and
00:33:02.159
when does it call for client education and creative problem-solving I believe
00:33:07.710
the answer is that many situations call for both you want to adhere to engineering standards to maintain
00:33:12.809
quality and morale and you want to offer alternative creative solutions to problems when necessary
00:33:18.929
this is the key point of my talk there's a lot we can learn from Otonashi four ways to think about having high
00:33:24.899
standards and achieving consistent professional excellence but given that the nature of our work is also about
00:33:30.389
creative problem-solving we also need to always be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things for example if a
00:33:37.739
deadline must be met and we don't have enough time to do the work well can we defer certain features until later or
00:33:43.619
can we start with simplified versions of certain features or are there other creative ideas we can explore that don't
00:33:48.869
require compromising quality or putting the team on a death march these are the
00:33:53.969
kinds of questions we need to be asking but how exactly do we go about having
00:33:59.940
these kinds of conversations with clients conversations that can often be difficult in the world of Japanese
00:34:07.259
customer service customers are expected to respect the professional judgment of their service provider and the world of
00:34:14.159
software development were educated on programming languages frameworks tools workflows but were not taught how to
00:34:21.000
behave we're not taught how to clearly articulate and diplomatically present
00:34:26.669
and defend our professional judgment a key part of the education of doctors and
00:34:32.579
lawyers is how to behave with their clients and co-workers doctors know how to handle themselves and the pressures
00:34:38.220
of an emergency room or how to persuade a patient to make more healthy choices by cultivating a perception of knowledge
00:34:45.089
and expertise for their professions doctors and lawyers are typically treated with great respect even when
00:34:50.399
they have things to say that their clients don't want to hear now I'm not suggesting we all have to go to school
00:34:55.619
for a million years like doctors and lawyers do and spend a million dollars in the process but what I am suggesting
00:35:01.650
is that if you want to be seen as a professional and treated like one that means pursuing technical excellence
00:35:07.760
providing creative problem-solving standing up for the quality of your work and always being courteous and
00:35:14.130
diplomatic body that means the end
00:35:30.180
my slides are available at the link here you find me on twitter at am Topa i'm gonna leave you with another short
00:35:36.270
little video this is a moment of Zen this is a an example of creative problem-solving and teamwork
00:35:42.710
these are my two boys when we were in Japan in 2007 and we were living in a
00:35:48.330
small apartment in Japan they call it a one LDK one means it has one bedroom L
00:35:54.480
means it has a living room D means it has a dining room which is also the living room and K means it has a kitchen
00:36:01.440
which is also the dining room which is also the living room so this is a small place we had set the boys up in the
00:36:08.730
bedroom my wife and I put a bed in the living dining kitchen room so this is the
00:36:14.730
morning my boys are having breakfast and my younger son decides he wants to have
00:36:20.280
access to my older sons drink but he doesn't want to have to bother moving that drink so together they
00:36:26.910
construct an extended straw and you see my wife in the in bed they're still
00:36:32.810
furtively trying to get some sleep