Around the world - Tough talking pays in Germany

Frankfurt: Germans are not known for their sense of humour – sorry Hans and Helmut but it’s true. They don’t for some reason appreciate the subtleties of comedy the way the French do with their farces, or the British with their complex dry wit. Having said that, show them a movie or a TV programme with people falling out of windows, slipping on banana skins and the like and they’ll chuckle their heads off.

What this shows is that like their cars and appliances Germans like the simple and the obvious – their machine tools are not designed to look pretty, they do a job; BMWs and Volkswagens are essentially basic. You want more, you want to be sophisticated – you pay extra for it.

All the more surprising then that plain thinking, solidly built, logically inclined geschaftsfuhrers have been lining up in their droves to be insulted – by a foreigner and pay good money for it as well.

Not only is he a foreigner, he isn’t even European and he is taking German industry to task by telling them they are not doing a good job.

“Best of luck to him,” you may say, “rather him than me”. But the fact is that this non-European (he’s Japanese) is booked solid for something like the next ten zillion years. Why? Because German managers actually like being told they’re no good.

Tominanga has got one hell of a reputation for putting down the great and good of German industry. At a recent seminar he is on record as saying to a company president, “You are the sun in this company”. The president, thinking this a compliment preens himself – not for long. Tominanga followed this up with a quick one-two to the ego: “I mean the sun in winter,” he said, “you seldom show yourself, a disaster as a manager!”

Recently at a company meeting to decide how to make the organisation run better, he asked employees, “please raise your hands and show me how many of you have been here 10, 15, 20 years.” He then thanked them and said: “All of you who raised their hands should quit, then this company will improve.”

Tominanga says that he learned his German from a girlfriend – it is not on record what kind of profession she is in, but if she taught him all he knows it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Suffice to say this feisty operator has been able to tread on the sensitivities of German managers where few other consultants have dared to go. But before we all consider packing our bags and heading for the land of wirtschaftswunder, where we can get rich and famous for being rude to senior executives, there is – as always – a downside.

According to reports, Tominanga has found that his direct approach doesn’t go down with everyone and he has been known to receive the odd threatening phone call and it has been reported that he has been forced to leave several companies, having been driven out by the workers: not a reputation many consultants would like to have.

But then again the Japanese are an altogether tougher proposition than most of us Westies. Indeed, if you think Tominanga plays hardball with his clients at least he hasn’t gone as far as some of his countrymen – who turned the boss’s death into a marketing event.

Not to my knowledge widely reported in the west, a Japanese businessman – rather than giving his life to his work – gave his dead body.

Here’s how it started. As you may know the big business in Japanese hotels is formal weddings. Families splurge huge amounts (US$25,000 is very middle-class affair) on a hotel wedding which lasts approximately 30-45 minutes. And this is the reception. Stand in the function room area of any downtown Tokyo hotel on a Saturday and you will see wedding parties going in one door, eating a full western three-course meal in half-an-hour, and exiting by another door,while the hotel staff set up the decor and food for the next arrivals.

You can liken the process to lining up at the crematorium, cortege behind cortege. And that I think is when some smart Tokyo hotelier thought up the idea that what you could do for weddings, you could do equally as well for funeral parties. But how to advertise?

Simple, borrow the boss’s body when he unexpectedly pops off!

That is exactly what staff at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo did. According to a report in the Far Eastern Economic Review, when their chairman passed away they (and I quote) “gussied up the hotel’s ballroom, invited thousands of guests and carried in the boss’s photo for his last official function: to promote hotel-based funerals”.

What happened then made marketing history. Other hotels jumped on the bandwagon, creating what one local observer dubbed the “doom boom”. Now every major hotel in Japan has an on-staff funeral consultant, bidding for the highly lucrative shaso (celebrity funeral) market, which is worth millions of yen each year.

Just goes to show you how innovative and loyal, even after the end, a Japanese executive can be. It also serves to remind consultants everywhere that there is no end to business possibilities. We are only limited by our imaginations and hopefully a certain amount of good taste.

Mike Johnson is president of Johnson & Associates, a corporate communications firm in Brussels and author of Managing in the Next Millennium.