Sigh. Another facile "ooh, different language/cultures are so very different" story, coating a nugget of truth in a thick layer of bullshit. Having lived in the US, Japan and Singapore, rest assured that in any of these, a washing machine (or car or mobile phone or...) that falls apart in a week is considered low quality, regardless of how new (Korea), shiny (Japan) or expensive (China) it looks. Sure, each of those three cultures has those preferences for appearance and you'll need to take that into account for design and marketing, but material quality (Jp. 品質 hinshitsu, Ch. 品质 pinzhi) still means exactly that everywhere: how well it's built to spec, how long it lasts, etc.
Also, I am completely not buying that story about somebody refusing a dented shipping container just because it's dented. Think about it for a second: if somebody offered you a shipping container full of goods, and said giant metal box looked like it had fallen from a crane, would you buy it? Hell no, at least not without inspecting every piece inside for damage and a hefty discount for my troubles.
> "“This is why you can’t just take your brilliant American business idea and go make it happen in China, India, or Indonesia." I don't see much of difference in definition of quality when it is described as in "Japan" and "U.S" . I don't get this , what is difference between "it is perfect" and "it's well built and it will last".
I am not buying this piece either and because I am born and brought up in India , I know better how quality is defined in India and it's different from what author is trying to justify.
You're demonstrating the very point the author is trying to make, which is this: don't assume you know what a word means in a particular, foreign, culture - because they have different meanings depending on where you live.
This thirdhand piece of information comes courtesy of something my mother read in the autobiography (?) of a Japanese woman who came to the US some time in the past.
Supposedly, in the course of cleaning her new home, she pulled the piano away from the wall and was shocked to find that that part of it meant to sit flush with the wall looked completely different (different wood, say) than the rest of it. To her, the piano should be viewable from any angle and any direction, no matter how it was intended to be installed in the home. To the American manufacturer, the appearance of the piano was of course highly significant -- but only the appearance of the parts you could see.
That's probably why Steve Jobs cared so much about how the inside of computers looked. He was obsessed with it. He probably read some Japanese book when he was in his youth and his culture became radically different in some way. Much more Japanese.
What if I came to America and tried to start a company that helped people stay at home and get drunk alone...blah blah blah
Sivers responds: Touché
Touché? What if I came to America and tried to start a...liquor store? Where you can buy a bottle of vodka at 90 percent off, compared to clubs? Totally novel, right? Unthinkable.
Obviously, if the Singapore retail experience described in this article is correct, any entrepreneur there is going to look for ways to change that. Besides, a huge amount of product from amazon is boring stuff like nappies and soap and ground coffee. People don't buy those things during a social event.
Touché? What if I came to America and tried to start a...liquor store? Where you can buy a bottle of vodka at 90 percent off, compared to clubs? Totally novel, right? Unthinkable.
Most people buy at liquor stores to take to a social event. That reinforces the story's point, not contradicts it.
Liquor stores don't compete with clubs on price, they compete with each other and other sources of take-away alcohol.
However earnest, such efforts always end up being a narrow perspective which when successful becomes even more dangerous as then the one persons stereotype becomes an 'accepted fact' (case in point the Indian head nod references, What!)
The only way to do this would be to avoid being your culture centric and wherever you go start with respect for that culture and then open your eyes, ears and mind as the first step
During business visits to Europe, I have had Indian colleagues who cringed up their faces short of vomiting at the sight of a rare beef steak and have had European colleagues come and track down that 'cow on the road photo shoot' as their first biz agenda.
Now that is not the right start and it does not need a book to tell you that you have to respect others way of life.
Knowing different cultures are.. you know.. different is pretty pointless without being able to point to specific examples of just how alien they can be to one another.
I - for one - didn't know that quality in Korea meant "newness".
> I - for one - didn't know that quality in Korea meant "newness".
Yeah, me neither, and I'm Korean.
* Well, it can be a sound advice to say "when you want to sell a product in Korea, emphasize it's new." But that's just plain old marketing strategy and sounds boring. (When selling books to English users, play on cultural relativism?)
I also didn't know everyone in japan would think that perfection = quality. That really is a revelation to me. And if you ask everyone in Korea, they'll tell you new = quality. They are kind of related culturally, yet they are radically different.
I actually asked a Korean man the same question maybe 20 years ago, and he told me that he thought quality product meant "well crafted." Maybe because he was americanized in some way by watching American movies, etc.?
Consider that I always buy laptops "refurbished". Dell's definition of a refurbished laptop includes "someone else ordered this, and we built it, but then they canceled the order and we never shipped it". The discount you get for buying one of these, relative to a "new" (different how?) one, is substantial.
> I actually asked a Korean man the same question maybe 20 years ago, and he told me that he thought quality product meant "well crafted." Maybe because he was americanized in some way by watching American movies, etc.?
Occam's razor would suggest that he said that because that's what "quality" means, and the article was written by a blowhard.
I also didn't know everyone in japan would think that perfection = quality.
Me neither. Japanese aesthetics has a distinct place for rough, imperfect items which are referred to with terms like shibui and wabi-sabi. Such items have flaws, often deliberately introduced, which give them "character" so may in some circumstances be preferred over the "perfect" item.
And if you ask a Six Sigma drone, even here in Murka, "quality" means little variation from piece to piece.
"Quality" is one of those things like "value" that doesn't refer to a specific thing, but must always be reckoned against human desires. Like, gold doesn't have "intrinsic value". It has value to us because it's rare and shiny, and humans like shiny things. And it's the same thing with quality: things are quality because people like them and consider them useful, reliable, pretty, or whatever. So this article boils down to a bunch of broad cultural stereotypes (Koreans like new things, Japanese like refined things, etc.) without much meaning.
It's user-contributed reports about what it's like to live in cities and countries around the world. I'd love to hear some feedback if anyone else is interested in this sort of thing!
Love the idea and the site. Now to be notified of new posts? No FB Page.. no Twitter.. doesn't even seem to have good ol' RSS feed (not that I'd really use it, though I probably should switch back to that from that damned social media).
Look I'm not going to set a reminder to regularly check back what new stories you got -- do you really want only "once a year by chance" visitors? Get that subscription funnel going. And yeah don't try to get membership signups for just that one feature, not gonna happen. Might sign up and contribute even at my own leisure at some distant future date, but right now --- offer some feed or other to even keep us passive lurkers out there fed ;)
It's a great idea!
Not crazy about the busy background, but that might be an age thing. More importantly for me, having the "anonymous" label for posts is a bit of a distraction. Are the user names revealed only while logged in? If so, I'd hide that field from the unregistered masses, it doesn't inspire trust.
Right now if a user is registered and logged in when they post it shows "username's reflections" rather than "anonymous' reflections", but I suppose that's there's no signal just noise with that word, so I should probably remove it. Good call!
I change my mind every other day whether I should give up on trying to have a super bold design and just strip it down or if I should stick with the polarizing stuff haha. It's my first web design that I've tried to give a more unique look rather than a Google-esque function before form type treatment.
It's particularly cool that "quality" is the word dissected in this article.
Robert Pirsig wrote a whole book[1] about Quality: specifically the unique characteristic that it doesn't completely resides in an object itself, nor does it reside completely within the subject experiencing the thing.
The "culture shock" series is pretty good too, aimed more at people who actually move to the country.
The difficulties with books like this are 1> they age quickly 2> they are hard to generalise (books of the same length for the Netherlands and India will have wildly different levels of resolution) and of course the authors will be different.
This wood egg approach seems like a reasonable way to deal with the latter.
I've lived in five countries the only general statement I can make is that people are the same everywhere, and completely different as well.
Article is VERY accurate. Japanese, especially, hate imperfection and believe that everything should be perfect, without any asymmetry or irregularity.
It's a bit more nuanced than that… Fukinsei (asymmetry or irregularity) is considered one of the core principals of arts like bonsai or ikebana. Compare a Japanese zen garden to a perfectly symmetrical english-style hedge garden.
So while I would agree that there is high value placed on things being 'perfect', I would disagree that Japanese culture sees symmetry as the ultimate expression of perfection… I would say they see 'asymmetrical yet balanced' as perfection.
A hardware company I used to work for had a sister company in Japan. We'd send over our product and they'd run it through another set of production tests before sending it on to customers. If something wasn't right, no matter how trivial, they'd troubleshoot the issue (including pulling the thing apart) leave big stickers pointing to the issue, and send it back with a report.
How trivial can they get? One item came back with 'dirt on screen', with an arrow-sticker pointing at it. The tech here picked it up and touched the dirt with his finger... and it fell off. Nothing else was wrong with the unit. For this, the unit had a return-trip journey across an ocean...
Totally. Reminds me of Apple. Man, those fools were perfectionists. And they were bureaucrats too. Same thing happened. Dirt on screen? Just send it back. Let them deal with the clean up. Bureaucracy at its finest.
Well, the article says that almost everyone in Japan will say that quality = perfection. But wabi-sabi is definitely the aesthetic of imperfection. Maybe that is something older people and the ancient japanese people believe in?
wabi-sabi doesn't even really need to have anything to do with quality.
> How these books were made
I wrote 200 questions to be asked of each country.
I hired multiple researchers in each country to answer each question. One local, one foreigner, one other. I wanted the book to be more than one person’s point of view.
I hired a writer to turn the multiple different answers into one combined answer, and add another layer of expertise.
I hired an editor to proofread and improve the final text.`
> Each year we hire 3 researchers (at least one local and one foreigner who live in {country}), a native English-speaking in-country writer, and an editor, to bring you insights from multiple perspectives.
So I guess he edits the answers from the researchers (who don't seem to be co-authors, since there's only two authors on the books).
On their face these WoodEgg books look very attractive. I having been toying with the idea of setting up a company elsewhere than Australia, and would be very interested in an in-depth survey.
I read the Singapore version out of curiosity because I stay here. Most of the stuff can be researched online. But you'd probably have to spend much more time doing that research and can't verify the results easily. And this is for a city that already has quite a lot of information online. Worth purchasing, I would say.
It's conflating language and expectations. Quality means the same in the US as in EU or China or in Japan, we just don't expect the same level or properties depending on the environment. Quality sushi in Japan is not the same level of expectation as quality sushi in Brazil. A quality car in Sweden won't be judged on the same criteria in Zimbabwe.
But on the topic of different meanings, my favourite example is in Greek, you as "Τι κάνετε" "What are you doing" literally but it translates as "How are you?". These things go always translate directly, and if you are speaking with a nonnative it's likely that these things will occur.
Yes. I've lived abroad for years. Apart from local colloquialisms, English words commonly used in the industry convey basically what one would think they would convey. This blog post is exaggerating things a little to make a point. The "thongs" play on words is a funny one, though.
Also, I am completely not buying that story about somebody refusing a dented shipping container just because it's dented. Think about it for a second: if somebody offered you a shipping container full of goods, and said giant metal box looked like it had fallen from a crane, would you buy it? Hell no, at least not without inspecting every piece inside for damage and a hefty discount for my troubles.