Yutaka Sano, general director at Mitsubishi Corp.’s representative office for the C.I.S. in Moscow, has been with the company in various posts around the world since 1968. An internationalist by nature, he has worked all over the world and enjoyed every minute of it.

The Leader: Could you please define the activities of the Mitsubishi Corporation in Moscow?

Mr. Sano: Mitsubishi Corp.’s Moscow office is a representative office of Mitsubishi Corp, Japan, mainly engaged in trading. The purchase side of it includes trading of natural resources. On the sales side, the biggest items at the moment are automobiles, plants and other machinery.

We are a solutions provider. If a client wants to buy good machinery for a factory, then we find it and we buy it for them. If a customer wants money for a project, we provide the credit. These are only two examples of our many activities.

I have always been in the administration side at Mitsubishi and am not an engineer. Among the seven groups at Mitsubishi, I entered the machinery group. Once placed in one of the seven Mitsubishi groups, an employee seldom transfers to another.

The Leader: Could you please describe your main responsibilities?

Mr. Sano: My main responsibility is to create a yearly business plan in the C.I.S. region and implement it in accordance with corporate approval and to supervise activity of regional offices in the C.I.S.

We have offices in Kiev, Almata, Tashkent, Baku, Tbilisi and Yujino-Sakhalinsk. Each of these offices has a branch office manager who reports to me. I instruct them on how to deal with day-to-day business, and we set annual quantitative and qualitative targets. I visit each of these offices every two or three months and I spend two to three days there.

The Leader: You have been with Mitsubishi for over 30 years. What keeps your interest in Mitsubishi alive?

Mr. Sano: The Mitsubishi Corporation has been an ideal vehicle for me to fulfill my desire to work all around the world. Since my youth, a great interest of mine has been engaging with foreign people and their cultures. I was particularly curious about different cultures and people, because I was raised in Japan until the age of 22. I made my first trip abroad prior to graduation, when I went to Europe by train via Moscow. It was fascinating, and I wanted to expand upon that experience.

The Leader: But have you never felt bored with the same corporate culture after so many years?

Mr. Sano: No, Mitsubishi is very versatile. Also, each time I change my place of work, the culture changes. For example, when I was transferred to London, I found the corporate culture there completely different from that in Tokyo. It was so different that it is difficult to put it into words.

The Leader: How do you deal with the challenge of working in a foreign country?

Mr. Sano: I usually accept whatever is going on. I am not surprised by differences in business culture, when there are any. I usually just stop and ask myself why it is different.

In a representative office, many people are working under a foreign culture, like that of Mitsubishi. The cultural gap between employer and employee is bound to affect the atmosphere. It is important for the employer to acknowledge the difference in culture. Maybe the staff will think that I am behaving strangely, without my knowing. I bear this in mind. As an employer, you need to train yourself to look at yourself from the point of view of another person.

The Leader: The Japanese have a reputation for loyalty. How important is loyalty to one company in Japan?

Mr. Sano: It is true that Japanese employees were very loyal to their companies until about ten years ago, when the after-effect of the bubble economy began to be felt.

Because of the crisis, companies were forced to streamline and restructure and this triggered an increase in unemployment. Japanese companies traditionally offered lifetime employment and very generous pension plans and salary fringe benefits for loyal staff. But once these circumstances were changed, employees’ loyalty changed drastically. Nowadays lifelong loyalty to a company is not a luxury that employers can enjoy easily.

But although the loyalty level of employees in Japan has decreased, it remains high by world standards.

The Leader: How would you define the Japanese model of management?

Mr. Sano: In my opinion, there is no such thing as a Japanese model of management. Every manager has a specific mission and should find the best strategy for each situation. I can’t see a homogenous trend in the management of each company in Japan.

The Leader: I have heard that Japanese managers tend to be more democratic than elsewhere and that decisions are made collectively. Is this true?

Mr. Sano: It is true that, traditionally, the Japanese have made many decisions collectively. But in the late ‘90s companies generally moved towards a top-down decision making process. I think that this is due to a change in commercial legislation. A "class action suit" was introduced, making it easier for shareholders to sue the directors of companies for their decisions, so the director became individually liable for decisions made, and it had to be easy to work out who was accountable for them.

The Leader: Could you please tell me about your own approach to decision-making?

Mr. Sano: Personally I prefer to make decisions myself. But of course you can’t be a tyrant, you have to listen to the varying opinions of others.

I have learned to work this way through my experience working in the United States, from the advice of the president of a subsidiary of a Mitsubishi company in America, who told me "you are here to make a decision. If you make the right decision, then you are lucky. If you make the wrong one, don’t hesitate to change it." Since then, I have felt that my mission is to make decisions. Maybe I’m not a typical Japanese manager; I have spent two-thirds of my career abroad.

The Leader: What kind of differences have you noticed in interpersonal relationships with businesspeople of different nationalities?

Mr. Sano: I could split the businesspeople I have met into three categories.

In the first, you can get intimate with a client easily, but only to a limited depth, and it’s difficult to get any deeper than that. I have found this to be the case in North and South America.

In the second, it is very difficult to get intimate with someone at first sight. You exchange business cards with them and go through all the formalities, but if you get on with them, then you can enjoy very profound relations. This is the case with the Japanese and the Russians.

In the third variant, it is difficult at both stages. I will leave it to your imagination as to which countries such businessmen tend to be from!

The Leader: Tell me about the culture shocks that you have received.

Mr. Sano: My first foreign assignment was in Qatar. It has an Islamic culture and I’m from a country with a Buddhist culture. That is the greatest culture shock that I have ever experienced. Then I went to Latin America, which has a predominantly Catholic culture.

For me, changes in culture are not such a big thing, my family and I enjoy watching them. My family is extremely adaptable. My wife is studying Russian on my behalf. She is my interpreter and my Ministry of Finance.