Yank at Nissan Bridges Culture Gap
Gerald P. Hirshberg has learned something very important from the Japanese: patience. It is a lesson that he picked up while overseeing the first U.S.-designed vehicles for Nissan Motor Corp. of Japan.
For the American director of design at San Diego-based Nissan Design International, the lesson has paid off: His design staff has been able to see their auto designs come to fruition with little change from concept to development. The first of six new Nissan car lines, designed by the Americans, is a pickup truck scheduled for a U.S. debut next February.
Hirshberg shared his insights about working for a Japanese company at a recent conference about Pacific Rim trade sponsored by the State Legislative Leaders Foundation of Boston and the University of California. He also discussed the difference between Japanese and American tastes in design.
Five years ago, Hirshberg left his job as an executive designer at General Motors to help establish Nissan Design. The design center is the brainchild of Takashi Ishihara, chairman of Nissan in Japan, who believes that the Japanese have mastered the technology of building cars but not the design. Ishihara believes that nonverbal expression, such as design, differs from culture to culture, according to Hirshberg.
“The Japanese march to their own aesthetics, we to ours,” Hirshberg says. “Anybody worried that all the world’s cars will look alike has nothing to worry about.”
The goal was to establish a design center located away from the traditional seat of Nissan power at Atsuki, Japan. The idea was to “open up (Japanese) methodology to foreigners and ask (Nissan’s) internal team to learn a different way of thinking,” Hirshberg says.
No Language Problem
Hirshberg says the Japanese are perceived as orderly, rational, nonverbal, formal, predictable, homogeneous, consistent, efficient, respectful of tradition and makers of dense, litter- and crime-free cities.
In contrast, he says, Americans are perceived as disorderly, intuitive, verbal, informal, unpredictable, heterogeneous, creative, disrespectful of tradition and makers of dense, crime-ridden cities.
Both cultures are energetic and pragmatic, but their major differences account for the contrasts in how they approach business.
“Language is not the problem,” says Hirshberg, but problems do arise if Americans working for Japanese companies bring with them certain cultural assumptions. For example, the Japanese tend to communicate indirectly. Hirshberg’s interview process with Nissan took a year while he was still at GM. After six months, he says, there were fewer English translators at each interview.
“At one interval, one of the interviewers who had not gotten closer than three feet to me before, walked across the room, sat down next to me and started talking about his family. I knew that was an acknowledgement of intimacy,” Hirshberg recalls. That was the moment he realized that he had been accepted into the Nissan organization.
When he cracked his first joke at a presentation before Japanese executives, no one laughed. But they later complimented Hirshberg on his presentation.
Hirshberg says that working for the Japanese “was a different kind of experience for me” but that “they didn’t expect me to be Japanese.”
Learning to work with the Japanese in designing a car has been a lesson, too. Hirshberg says the Japanese have a “painstaking willingness to engage in arduous negotiations, which Americans don’t have the patience for.”
When Nissan’s American designers were recently working on a design, they wanted a clear understanding of the suspension system to be used because it would affect the placement of wheels and “have a strong influence on the proportion of the car.”
Appeared Brash
The inquiry was sent to Nissan in Atsuki. Hirshberg says the reply was a demand to know “why were we concerned with that specific interest when they were still analyzing the market and still conceptualizing the car?”
“From their perspective, we were brash in moving ahead so rapidly,” Hirshberg explains. “Both of us were going about our jobs in a way normal for us,” but the result was a minor misunderstanding.
The Japanese, in contrast, reach decisions through a protracted consensus-building process in the course of which they achieve a “thorough grounding of what their competitors are doing and what’s been done in the past.”
Once the decision is made, however, “everybody is in line and the product advances without a hitch to completion,” Hirshberg says. “Once we understood the differences, we were less frustrated.”
When it comes to design, the Japanese are different too. “A lot of this stuff (in design) is nonverbal; therefore it is difficult to deal with in a managerial sense,” Hirshberg says. “It has to do with sensitizing to different tastes. It’s like getting used to Japanese food and American food. Even though you grow to like them both, you still come home to the tastes you grew up with.”
Hirshberg says the Japanese now are more attuned to architectural planes, edges and forms, so their cars tend to be boxy and complicated in design and detail. “No square inch is left unattended.”
In contrast, American and European cars have simple, clean, soft forms with largely clean surfaces and corner accents--in short, understated design. But Hirshberg says that, when he used the term “understated” in describing the design, a Japanese colleague reminded him that, in Japanese, “understated” had the connotation of dullness. So Hirshberg says he now calls Western design “restrained, with sophistication.”
Of his experience of working for a Japanese firm, Hirshberg says: “The most important things I’ve learned in the last five years can’t be said. I read with great frustration and horror all the paperbacks about a culture that primarily speaks by gestures, non-action, silences, where you’re sitting, how long meetings last and what is not said.”
