The Delphi Roar: June 1st, 2025
Dear Members and Advisers,
We had a wonderful Drinks on Tuesday and I must say, they are always more fun when more women attend. Before you roll your eyes at this ridiculous comment, let me try to explain!
The May cocktails had just a small number of women, but they add disproportionately to the enjoyment of the event.
As we were waiting for the lift at the Andaz at the end of the evening, I asked some guests if they had noticed the same thing, and why they thought it was the case.
One guest said it was a classic DEI issue - variety creates interest. Good answer! I partly agree, but I think it’s specifically women that help raise energy levels - much more so than having a wide mix of industries or titles, for example, although that helps.
For me, the Cocktails' almost 3 hours went by in a flash. I can honestly say I had a great time, although that was partly because a lovely group of Delphi members attended, including Kaori Ikeda and Markus Winter and Kenichi Sadaka, as well as a swarm of “junior Delphites” from the Whatsapp group.
Another guest commented that the usual business networking events are joyless, because they are 99% men, all about work, all about selling and nobody really is learning anything or listening.They are hell-bent to “meet their objective” and “make a sale”.
But when men meet women, they are different: they talk about their families, kids, hobbies, etc. This creates a human edge to the event which makes them less of a “marathon”, less of “grind” and simply more about enjoyable human interaction.
Having very rarely attended a women - only event, I wonder if they face similar issues?
We also had some young people, which also disproportionately adds to the ambience. Young people of either sex are fun to talk to - they have that innate vigour and naive belief that everything will keep getting better…! This helps us revisit our own youth and want to offer advice to direct that energy in the “right” direction, and make sure they don’t come to harm. But I would still say that young men can often be excessively intense, competitive and ambitious about work, which I find much less in women.
As I mentioned, men see life in a different way when talking to women.
And in the same way, older people are great to hang out with as well, because they have done everything, and are far more objective and less intense about things. They help calm us down and put things into perspective.
In any case, I am happy to say that the cocktails are going well - do feel free to drop in! We had at least 30 guests of which a good number were country managers/CEOs, including Yuzu Kyodai, La Prairie, Triumph, Uber Eats, Gregory and Keen - so you won’t feel lonely!
Seen in the Network
Upcoming Events
June 2025 Cocktails
Join us for our monthly cocktail party at the luxurious Andaz Hotel Toranomon Hills!
CMs x AI x Hiring = ?
Delphi breakfast with Faye Walshe on how AI is transforming recruitment, leadership, and strategy. Candid talk, no slides.
Foreigners in Japanese Work Culture
Exploring whether Japanese companies truly welcome foreign talent, as more professionals like Florian Kohlbacher shift to Japanese firms.
Date: TBD
First-time Country Managers
A discussion for new country managers on mindset, bias, anxiety, and what truly matters in your crucial first year.
Date: TBD
Heard in the Network
“I totally agree with DEI and any other diversity acronym you want to throw at me. BUT, as a senior manager, I want to make the decisions, not have the people I need to hire pushed down my throat by HR. On the political level (as in the balance of power within a company), this is a power-grab by HR. It makes them more and more powerful. That’s why I am happy it’s being rolled back as an “ideology”.”
“The more regulation, in my opinion, the worse it is for managers. They stop taking responsibility, and stop being accountable - all the decisions are mandated by compliance and HR anyway.”
“In terms of corporate security, cyber attacks from North Korea are over-rated. 70% of the damage is caused by insiders - staff being violent to each other, medical emergencies when staff is working late and no-one knows about it, and in one famous case, when couples started having sex in the “cool rooms” we had set up in a “hub” in India. We did warn them about having unisex rooms, but nobody listened!”
“There are good reasons to ask women to stay at home and bear children, maintain families, educate their kids, feed their husbands etc. And I do mean women, not men, since (just in case you had not noticed) women play a special role in the continuation of our species). But in my native France, when someone tried to launch a discussion on women being paid by the state to stay home and start families, they were ridiculed, because they were from the right-wing party.”
“As a manager, I hate WFH. I run a team. I love my team (as it were), as human beings. When they were in the office, I scrutinized them closely for any sign of stress or upset - it was my job to help. When they went home, I had no clue what was going on!”
“Now, we are in a ridiculous quandary-we downsized our office to save space, so getting space at the office has become a logistical challenge. We had to invent an app, which we now use to plan our attendance at the office. It’s become really complex juggling so many people in such a small space.”
“When managers don’t want to manage we move them sideways as “specialists”. That works in some industries, eg in finance, where top specialist sales people make more than the CEO. But in some organizations, specialists are “capped” at a certain level and viewed as “failures”. This is not good, IMO.”
“The issue about 55-something managers today is that they were hired during the bubble collapse (in the 1990s), the so-called “frozen generation” on lower pay than their predecessors, and in a very rough environment. They got no on-the-job training, because all the “useless” secretaries were replaced be email, and managers suddenly had to do loads of their own admin. These people are bitter, and they don’t want to make things easier for their successors, either.”
“Every CEO needs a confidant. I had a chief of staff, female, who was with me for 25 years. Naturally, there were all kinds of stupid rumours we were having an affair. But psychologically, she gave me a lot of comfort. Every CEO needs at least one close colleague, to whom he can say anything. ”
“The important thing with motivating staff is to react immediately to the surveys on “employee satisfaction” you send out, otherwise they lose faith in you. And the young ones leave.”
“In Japan, I recently had the situation where I, as a foreign consultant, was lucky enough to make friends with the daughter of a Japanese billionaire. She was happy to become my client, but when I mentioned her to my Japanese colleagues, they were appalled - they even refused to meet her for lunch! Her father had been sent to jail briefly, years ago, and she was completely “non grata”. The offence was supposedly insider-dealing, although everyone suspected it was the Old Guard just keeping aggressive interlopers in line.”
“I am a 40-something Japanese manager and I showed up at a foreign pharma firm for a job interview. I was met by a young woman, in her 30s, wearing ¥200,000 Hermes shoes. She was 10 minutes late. I had to sit a 2-hour written test. When I asked for some water, she told me to go down 30 floors to the lobby, and get water from the drinks machine. I was very shocked, needless to say.”
“Work from Home raises productivity for 3 months, and then it goes back to the same as the office - and then it falls off a cliff. Your home is not your office. I know it’s an obvious point, but surprisingly few companies seem to understand this. The key point about WFH is that it’s BORING and de-motivating.”
“I am a woman and the first two years after giving birth (I had maternity leave) were the worst of my life. I got quite depressed. The office, and the “group” it represents, are very important to me socially. Kids were not enough, even though I have been told women are biologically programmed to feel “needed”.”
“A manager’s job is to manage - not to do the work of his subordinates, when the subordinates are not doing a good job. We grade our managers on pure management, because when the leverage effect comes in, when teams are motivated to work well, they can achieve 20x the efforts of a single manager, however talented he is. Give me a talented sales MANAGER of a sales PERSON, any day. He can get “leverage” the team to great effect.”
“The job of the CEO, I sometimes think, it’s just brutal. You are like the final screw that keeps up the Eiffel Tower. It’s too lonely - and prone to metal fatigue! Maybe the role needs to be changed to something more team-centric?”
“Like everybody else, I believe, we are facing a huge issue with hemorrhaging our youngest staff, who are the lifeblood and future of the company. They don’t want to work under grumpy middle-managers, especially when those middle managers are often locked in mortal combat with each other. The youngsters don’t want to be forced to join a particular clique, or take sides.”
“I was getting frustrated with my middle managers, so I wrote a check-list and sat down with them one by one. The list made very clear what I think is important and their reaction to it also made it clear whether they should stay or go.”
“One of my colleagues collapsed from the stress of running a large firm. When I visited him in hospital, he told me that for months he had been under huge stress but had no one to share his pain with. He was an introvert but everyone just thought he was arrogant.”
“Like all “harmonious” societies, Japan’s harmony is enforced rigidly. One reason people transgress less, is the the cost of a transgression is much higher than in the West, especially in the US. In the US, it seems to that even if you are serial killer, as long as you appear on Oprah and say you’re sorry, redemption is possible.”
“It’s interesting and controversial, but what keeps Japan Japanese is its domestic elite. The are the ones who forbid their children not only to marry foreigners, but also outside their social circle. If I look at the UK elite, it’s highly fractured, and so full of outsiders so can’t even recognize the inside/outside border anymore. But you can in Japan. Middle Class Japanese don’t care - they are happy to watch Netflix, eat McDonalds, date a crazy foreigner - and are pretty suspicious of their ruling class. But the Japanese ruling class is a tightly-connected family, full of conflict about money and power, but essentially with the same values. Big business and politics are tightly connected through marriage of each others’ offspring - like the Hapsburgs! These shifts in lineage politics are as significant as the supposedly “democratic” elections, but are usually ignored by Western political scientists, who don’t realize how feudal Japan still is.”
Reflections on Japanese Culture
Ah culture - it’s all the same, right? Wherever you are. We often hear that, and we often feel pressure to agree that humans are all the same, and that NY or London is like Tokyo.
But then something happens, which really surprises us, and makes us realize that people, beyond the basic emotions and appetites, react in very different ways.
On Monday, I was jogging down my street in Shinjuku when I suddenly tripped on the elevated lip of a manhole cover. I went flying head over heels, right in front of a young father walking with his daughter on the pavement. I landed heavily and gashed my arm.
The man walked straight past me, and did not even look in my direction. He did not rush to my side, check I was OK - all things which would have set a nice example of human compassion to his daughter - and which I believe would have happened in any Western city if a middle-man crashes down right at your feet.
I pulled myself up and sarcastically shouted at his departing back: “I’m fine, thanks for asking!”
