Lights off, hold the elevator - Japan Inc's answer to the rising yen

Half the lights in the office corridors have also been removed.

I remember this happening in a prestigious company that I was working for in the mid-1990s. Some of my Japanese co-workers predicted that this was a foretaste of bad things to come and started looking for other work. I innocently believed management when they said that everything was hunky dory.

Guess who was the only person in his section not to have a job to run to, when the company went bankrupt the following year?

Lowering the air conditioning and removing lights? This saves pennies while causing a serious deterioration of the working conditions for workers, and then their efficiency and productivity will decline.

In my own small way I do help in penny pinching without being ordered to. I see to it that all toilet seats' heater are off. Imagine in the mid of summer and someone who had the urge to pee or worse poo turn on the seat heater and at times at maximum. What a waste of money! In a previous company I worked for whenever I can(That is whenever I wasn't asked by the Peruvian leader to off earlier.) I used to go to the comfort room just to be sure that the exhaust fan was off. At times on Monday mornings as I was the first to use the toilet, I used to find that the fan was on. Presumably, since the previous week. Some leaders overlook this but it all adds up.

These penny pinching moves, especially at the expense of employee discomfort, almost always tell you a company is sinking. For large companies like the ones in this article, turning off a few lights will be mostly inconsequential to the bottom line. But worse, they show a company that is focused on cutting petty costs rather than growing real profits, where they should be focused.

Very simple math behind this. If you have a million dollar company, maybe 10% of that is fat that can be cut. Once you've done that, you have to start cutting away the muscle (which in business would be the R&D, the sales force, marketing, product quality, morale, etc.). So you save 100K before the company starts to consume itself. Even if the company disappears, the most that can be saved in a million dollar company is a million dollars.

Conversely, a million dollar company always has the potential to make more profit, on which there is theoretically no limit. A million dollar company can either seek to make 10 million more in profit, or seek to save 100,000 by turning off the air-con. If they choose the latter, they are finished.

MIndless masochism. Just another wa-building exercise.

Intelligent people would be regularly monitoring and analyzing their energy consumption thru data, using it to pinpoint inefficiencies and make cuts there. Deliberately making employees physically uncomfortable by turning down the air-con is a great way of killing productivity and morale.

Not much of an article. Disconnected anecdotes.

penny wise and pound foolish

My air is on 18. Chilly though.

In today's The Japan News nespaper, there is a news about JCorporations sitting on three hundred trillion on extra money.Lol

turning down the air-con is a great way of killing productivity and morale.

This is Japan, were productivity and morale have been dead since 1990 or so. When it takes 12 hours for a worker to do a job which would take 8 hours in Europe (France not included) or America, and when workers have to face the drudgery of 40 years of work they aren't interested in, with no hope of promotion outside the normal seniority-based Japanese system, productivity and morale are superfluous.

The answer to all of Japan Inc's problems are simple, simply switch to performance-based promotion systems, and try competing in the world market place instead of relying on government red tape, currency manipulation, and price fixing.

Funny to see those "record profits" vanish, isn't it? And funny to see those "mountains of cash companies are sitting on" starting to dry up. You wondered why they weren't spending it, now you know.

And now that we have the news that there was a trade "surplus" in July (though both imports and exports were down), the extra holdings in foreign currency will of course drive up the value of the yen. Abe and Kuroda are likely already warming up the printing presses as a response.

@sangetsu, you make it sound like we are indentured slaves.

Lowering the air conditioning and removing lights? This saves pennies while causing a serious deterioration of the working conditions for workers...

Exactly! At some point with heat (and humidity) you lose more on productivity than you save in electricity costs. In Japan it isn't always about economic efficiency, but rather a culture of control.

If the company I was working at started pulling these nickle n dime moves, I'd be seriously looking for a new job before the mass panic starts...

@sangetsu, you make it sound like we are indentured slaves.

Aren't you? But perhaps "serf" is a better word than "slave." If you are a typical Japanese salaryman working full time at a large company, how easy is it to leave? And even if you do dare to leave, and are fortunate enough to find another large company who hires disloyal employees like yourself, what difference would it make? You would end up doing the same kind of work for the same amount pay, working the same number of hours. You still get the 5 days of vacation per year, and have to follow the same seniority system which overlooks performance and rewards endurance and mediocrity.

Japan's large companies are not slave drivers, but they engineer the current working system which makes employees entirely dependent upon them. They intentionally hire young people with irrelevant degrees and absolutely no experience for this reason, and shun hiring older, more experienced people for the same reason.

But anyone who works for someone else has a master. That doesn't make you a slave, but when you have a master, you are not entirely free. You are free to go if you like, but you will likely end up working for another master. I disliked being a wage-slave, and stopped being such years ago; I became my own master. Japan would be a better place if more people did the same.

“If working hard made you rich,"

It all depends on how much intelligence you use with your labor. Rich people work smart and hard, in that order. Simply working hard is not the way to riches, as the proverb points out. Unlike donkeys, human beings have he ability to make choices. These choices decide the amount of success or failure you will attain.

I like the Japanese word 手先 it aptly describes the millions of workers here.....

Very typical Japan, best think they can come up with is to ganbaru the crap!! Not work smarter, not work efficiently, not sorting things out, just ganbaru the crap, it worked in the 70s, it will work again!!

But on a funny note, I worked in a company in which the CEO developed an aerodynamics simulation for the office to make sure AC can be set at 28 degree and everybody feels it! He instructed admins to put circulator fan in spots suggested by the simulation, it actually worked and felt pretty amazing! Also another problem with many Japanese offices, airflow sucks.

Even with fans moving air around, I can NOT think straight at 28c and don't think most people used to working in cooler climates. No amount of time in my life has ever changed that. Add moving around the office and carrying heavy computer components and everyone I work with ends up soaked from head to toe in sweat. Yeah, that's good for workers. I have to drink almost four litres of water each day at work just to keep the headaches away and that leaves me as sweat for I might need to take one leak during the day. Who pays for all that water?

"The answer to all of Japan Inc's problems are simple, simply switch to performance-based promotion systems, and try competing in the world market place instead of relying on government red tape, currency manipulation, and price fixing. "

The 1980's just called - they want their stereotypes back.

How the times have changed. How did the situation get so wrong for a country that was known as Kanemochi Nippon (Rich Japan) , a country that more than seventy percent of the working population prided themselves as middle class I guess the brain washing isn't working any longer.

Japanese corporations seem to forget that they had 4 years to milk profits when the yen was weak (since 2012). If they hoarded all that money without sharing it with employees then that's their fault. Don't cry for pity when you done nothing to help the people that work for you. Increasing wages would have been an insurance policy to have small consumption at home but now it's zero consumption at home and abroad. How stupid can you be!

The 1980's just called - they want their stereotypes back.

I remember meeting Steve Jobs several times in the early 80's (Apple was in the same building where I used to work back then), and he was not the only businessman whom I was lucky enough to meet. Jobs was nothing if not competitive; he hired the best he could afford, and expected them to perform. And when they did, he recognized it, and rewarded that success accordingly. He also recognized failure, and would not tolerate it. He did not increase market share by shutting out competitors, colluding with other large companies, or greasing the hands of politicians to award his company special favors, he succeeded by offering better products which people wanted to buy.

He was not like the CEO of a large Japanese company, like the one in which a lowly engineer invented the blue LED, and was rewarded for a multi-billon dollar product with a paltry 10,000 yen bonus. This engineer did what he should have, sued the hell out of the company, left Japan, and went to work for an American company which recognized his talent, and paid him what he deserved. And when he went on to win the Nobel Prize for his invention some years later, he was appreciated all the more. He visited Japan long enough for photos with the other prize winners, and then caught the next flight back to California.

Japanese companies hate to compete, period. Rather than take on other manufacturers head-to-head, they "lobby" for favorable trade deals, they have their government manipulate it's currency so competitors cannot undersell them. And even in the domestic market they hate to compete. They use the same strategies to keep foreigners out the domestic market. Worse yet, they refuse to compete against each other in Japan, and they get together to fix minimum prices for goods and services.

Strong economies are competitive economies, and from the 60's to the 80's Japan was competitive, but not from a business perspective. In the 90's other economies rose, which were fiercely competitive, and Japan has not been able to fight back. And things have gone downhill ever since.

I have a certain amount of pity for Japan. The business practices here are so outmoded and outdated that Japan is inexorably on a slow slide into the abyss. No price competition, lack of innovation, massive over regulation and the superior ware ware wa mindset just stifle all that is possible......

This article has to be one of the most ridiculous Abe/Toyota weak-yen puff pieces yet.

Let's do a thought experiment: what if it were 120 yen to the dollar, as Abe, Kuroda, and the Toyota board of directors want?

Energy prices would be 20% higher -- and we would see even more morale-destroying penny pinching than we do now!

Is this what we're supposed to take away from this article? If the yen is strong, export companies profits aren't high enough so the employees have to suffer. If the yen is weak, we can't afford to splurge on energy, so... the employees have to suffer.

In what scenario do the workers get to have well-lit, well-cooled, convenient, pleasant places to work?

just get abe to fire off another arrow, that will stop the strong yen.