Winding Paths to Success

10Competence

Competence, the critical core skills you build your professional value proposition on, is often an elusive concept. Particularly with Japanese companies, which prefer to groom generalists than functional specialists—a philosophy aligned with the traditional lifetime employment system—few employees can succinctly define their competence. In Japan, you hardly need to define it—the train of your career will keep moving along with you sitting inside as a quiet passenger.

However, Masae Yamanaka, vice president at Panasonic Connect, enjoyed no such luxury. She started her career in sales at IBM Japan, a multinational technology company operating in Japan, but she found herself loathing the classic sales tactics of drinking heavily and entertaining exhaustively. Instead, she invented and refined her own scheme for logical selling, which became her hallmark and competence.

Competence comes to life most vividly when it is put to the test of repeatability—would it work equally well in other situations? Now onto her fourth employer, Yamanaka has proven her method to be brilliantly repeatable; her method works with any company, IT or manufacturing, multinational or Japanese, when applied in a business‐to‐business (B2B) sales context. Indeed, over the course of her career, Japanese companies also transformed themselves to embrace outside talent, as I analyze in my column, “C‐Suite: the Last Frontier for Foreigners Eyeing Japan Inc.” And tapping into the underused Japanese ...