Trascrizione del luncheon con Antony Strianese Tenuto al Tokyo American Club il

Partecipanti: Antony Strianese: ospite dell’evento.

Steven Bleistein: vicepresidente dello Independent Business Committee della Camera di Commercio Americana in Giappone. Enti promotori dell’evento: American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ).

Camera di Commercio Italiana in Giappone (ICCJ). Circostanze e descrizione

dell’evento:

Il luncheon è avvenuto al Tokyo American Club, mercoledì 15 novembre 2017 e consisteva in una discussione tra Antony Strianese e Steven Bleistein. Gli argomenti della discussione vertono principalmente intorno all’esperienza di Antony Strianese in Giappone in qualità di presidente e amministratore delegato di Barilla Japan.

(Inizio dell’evento.)

Steven Bleistein: What prompted you to come to Japan?

Antony Strianese: Well, it’s a very personal reason, I’d say. When I was a kid I was doing Judo for many, many years. And for me Japan was Jigorō Kanō’s249 _{homeland and the place to be.}

And then actually, it’s a little bit of joke, but before coming to Tokyo I was based in Singapore and overlooking at the market for Asia, Australia and Africa and I really was inspired by the challenges that this market would have offered to managers like me. It seemed to be a market impossible to crack to anyone and normally those are the type of challenges where I have fun.

S.B.: So, specifically “impossible to crack”. What was the biggest challenge for you in Japan?

A.S.: I rely a lot on networking and on all my friends. During my career I worked for other multinational companies and, so, the first thing I did was calling my friends in L’Oreal or Reckitt Benckiser, and everybody was telling me: “No, don’t go to Japan. Our company failed there, you are going to destroy your career”.

249 _{Maestro fondatore del judo.}

89 I was told that there were few companies that made it, but I always like to look at who managed to crack it rather than benchmark myself against the failures. Then I worked for Barilla.

I think we’ll talk a little bit about that. It is a family-owned company. We take things very seriously, in the sense that for us everything is a family deal and I feel that I have the right support to make it happen.

S.B.: When did you take over the role of CEO of Barilla Japan?

A.S.: Officially three years ago. Around October/November of three years ago, although I moved to Japan in April of the following year.

S.B.: So, that would be 2015, approximately?

A.S.: Yes, two and a half years ago.

S.B.: And when you arrived, what is that struck you the most about Japan?

A.S.: Well, the first thing was the most obvious, I guess: the fact that our company in Japan is a hundred percent about pasta, but on a global level we are fifty percent a pasta/sauce company and fifty percent a bakery company.

Anyway, what was shocking at the time was that Japan is the sixth largest pasta market of the world and, basically, we were nothing. I couldn’t figure out why it was like that, having Barilla been in the market for over thirty-five years at the time.

S.B.: So, generally, in other markets of the world what’s your penetration?

A.S.: We have a decent share mostly everywhere. In the top pasta markets we are number one: in Italy, US or France etcetera. If we are not number one, normally we are head-to-head with the local leaders; so being Japan such a quality-oriented market it was surprising, at least, to see that our brand was not yet able to deliver the values to this market.

S.B.: So, if I can ask you, when you arrived in Barilla Japan, what did you think of the business in terms of how it was running its relationship with the distributors?

90 A.S.: Well, the first thing is that I didn’t know anything about Japan, absolutely nothing about the business culture here. And of course, I think that the first impression that every gaijin manager gets when he arrives in Japan is that here everything is wrong, or something doesn’t work. I couldn’t really figure out which were the processes at the base of our organization; I couldn’t understand why my staff was spending their time in doing activities that I couldn’t imagine how functional to the business could be, or even the fact that, compared to any other country, building relations was so important and people was spending so much time in entertaining customers or building strong relations with them.

I think that the following months were basically just dedicated to really observe the situation. The first choice I think I made was not to change everything for the sake of it. So, I remember spending the first months of my experience in Japan just talking to people, learning, trying to understand how the business worked out in Japan, and trying to make my own idea on how to make things work.

S.B.: So, within an initial period as you were observing, what are some of the top observation that you made and top conclusions that you came to?

A.S.: There are quite a few. First of all, the essence is that, in my belief, it became clear that Japan was not really different from any other country, at least to what regards the type of work that we were supposed to do or a brand in Japan is supposed to do. At the and what really matters in the market is always the same: quality of product, respectful relations and honest relations with the business partners.

That was the essence of it, but I also recognize the fact that in certain terms Japan is unique and you know you have to respect the diversity of the culture, the diversity of the people and the way of working in this country. The effort I had to make at the time was to really select carefully which were the elements that I could not change of this culture, that they were working in Japan in their own way and that was the right way of doing things. And applying those elements to the elements of change that I wanted to bring in the country.

S.B.: So, what did you want to change?

A.S.: I have a personal management style which I believe is not unique, it is common to many other people. It is based on being extremely direct, honest and transparent. I truly believe that when you are able to be like that even in Japan, business would come up. There is a famous book that says: “The results will take care of themselves”. I firmly believe in that. The first impression about Japan,

91 at least into my eyes, is that there was not complete transparency in the way we were working. For me it was impossible to understand to which customer we were selling, how much we were selling, if we have taken some agreement or not. And so, being disconnected from the market was really something that I could not accept.

S.B.: These are really fundamental things you are talking about: which customers we have relationships with, how much are we selling, what are the agreements that we have with our customers. (Fa una pausa.) That was not transparent to you?

A.S.: No, there was a way of running the business that was controlled, let’s say completely, by our partners in Japan. I didn’t want to necessarily change everything I found in Japan, but I was really looking to have access to this information and to bring a contribution to the development of our company in Japan.

S.B.: Now, let me make sure that I understand this correctly. You had a distributor relationship in Japan and they had information and all these things, but they were not transparent to you.

A.S.: Right.

S.B.: So mostly what you were doing is you were just keeping them supplied with what they asked for?

A.S.: We were provided only a limited number of services that we could. So basically, what we were doing was providing the product, of course, delivering on time, and whenever was requested we were participating in entertaining customers or building relations with the customers. But of course, I feel that our company had much more to bring to these markets and we could possibly enjoy sharing those different elements of our business culture. At that time, it was not really possible. So that was the main area where I was trying to focus and bring a little bit of change.

S.B.: Without this type of access and this type of visibility, it makes it very hard to, first: control your business, second: improve it and maybe third: to help your distributor based on what you know from doing this type of business around the world.

92 A.S.: Correct.

There are some friends here through the guests and maybe some of them are also distributors. This is something that I really want to make clear as well: there is nothing wrong into having a partner or a distributor-partner. I think that this is still a model that in many circumstances is extremely valid in Japan and companies should seek these strategies to develop their brand. I go back to my original point, provided that the relation is fully a partnership based on honest sharing of information and transparency of relations.

S.B.: So, based on these observation, what did you decide to do?

A.S.: Well, again, the first thing I tried to do, in respect also of the long-standing relation that we had with this business partner, was to try to work with them. So, with a little bit of naive approach, not considering that I was thirty-five years old at the time and my counterpart would be a respectful Japanese man over seventies, I thought that I would speak directly to this person and I would explain directly to him what I was going to do.

S.B.: When you say your “counterpart”, you are talking about the CEO of the distributor company?

A.S.: At the very beginning it was not like that because, again, it’s Japan, we respect how things are here, but I was not considered on the same level of my counterpart company. The CEO would only speak with the owner of my company as a parity type of relation. And I had to talk with people that I, unfortunately, then realized that were not the real decision makers. And that actually, all the effort I was putting in trying to honestly, openly, transparently changing the business was not bringing anywhere, because those people were not able to really transfer the intensity or the strength of the changes that I wanted to bring.

S.B.: They were really intermediaries, but effectively they were gatekeepers.

A.S.: Again, I think they were playing their role within this typical Japanese structure, something that I still find in other business relations in Japan: they were trying to maintain a certain stability or status quo on how the things would work. So officially I was seen as too much of a changing agent that they were not expecting to come and probably at the same time they were also thinking that I was just

93 another one coming in, like many of us gaijin managers who shout for two-three years and then leave the country.

S.B.: So, they cannot last, basically.

A.S.: Fundamentally, yes.

S.B.: You were not viewed on part with the CEO, even though, if I understand correctly the distributor contact that you had was signed by both you and him.

A.S.: Yes, but to be honest I don’t want to put it in that way. That was how the business was organized before I came in. The established counterpart of the business was fine during previous situation of stability and no-change, but in the moment I decided that I wanted to bring dramatic change, they were not anymore the right counterpart for me.

I was trying to communicate effectively with the distributor company, but then actually I realized that it was not a matter of really who I was talking to: there wasn’t a common vision on where the company should have been in the next years.

S.B.: Right, ultimately you came to that conclusion, but what did you do?

A.S.: The steps go back to the way I deal with the business. I remember the first months spending time with them, trying to develop together a strategy that could work in Japan and make our brand grow. But the problem is that everyone is responsible of his own destiny, and with the business structure that we had at the moment, our destiny was actually controlled by them.

Honestly, I don’t think that there is anything wrong from their point of view, because they were sitting on a situation that was unchanged for over thirty years. They believed that their way of running the business was correct and probably that it was better to continue the same way.

S.B.: It was working for them, but it wasn’t working for you.

A.S.: Correct, or at least they didn’t have the same expectation we had for the future. The role that I see for Barilla in the future is a little bit broader than simply selling products to this country. I think that Japan is a fantastic country that loves Italian culture, our image as a country and as manufacturers is extremely high compared to the other countries. It’s a great opportunity for my

94 company, as well as for many other companies, to send a full set of values that we bring together. I want to develop something more than delivering products.

S.B.: We are going to get into that a little bit later.

After making progress with the people that you were dealing with inside the company, what did you do?

A.S.: I think that there is a changing moment, a precise day and a precise second when this happened. This was when I was… (Fa una pausa.) I was really stressed, you know, I was even questioning whether I was good for the job, whether if coming to Japan at all was a good decision. I think I was really at the turning point of whether I should quit, leave and give or to make a dramatic change. That dramatic change happened one day. I went directly to the top and that was really bad. I remember the consequences of that day, when I picked up the phone and I called directly the President to meet him. Ten seconds later I started getting calls from his office saying: “What the hell are you doing?!”; “Why are you calling our boss?!”; “We didn’t know anything” etcetera… (Ride.)

Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, the CEO met me and we had an extremely open conversation. That was fundamental because finally I understood what was the vision that that company had of our business and how they would have pictures the development of the company for the following years and sadly enough, I can say, they were so clearly, one hundred percent, against the way we were looking at business.

Even so, I never had a chance to speak so frankly and so openly about that, and that gave me the elements to do everything. It gave me the elements to speak to my management in a different way, to shape the organization in a different way and really building the process that brought us where we are now.

S.B.: After the meeting with the CEO of the distributor company you knew exactly where to start. You communicated your intentions and he communicated his.

If you don’t mind, can you kind of set the scene and talk about how that whole conversation went?

A.S.: It’s tricky because I don’t want to be misunderstood, but I think that picturing the scene helps, because probably some of us or some of you could one day experience that type of situation. I think it was a complex of some elements that sometimes can be found in the Japanese business culture, but are not common and I don’t recognize these are typical traits of the Japanese business culture.

95 S.B.: Why?

A.S.: Of course, the age played a big role. I was the little kid facing this super-senior guy that had approximately three times my accumulated experience in business; there was no point of mentioning that I’ve seen my company old pasta business growing in a certain way in twenty other different country, because at the end the expert of Japan was him.

I felt really the fact that I was talking, but he was not listening and he would take the opportunity to teach me a lesson on how to run the business in Japan. Unfortunately, I could not even grasp the intensity of the messages I was receiving, because the conversation was in Japanese through a translator. Unfortunately, I made this small mistake, that was bringing someone of my team that was good in English and Japanese, but not a professional translator. I could actually see the reality of the talking through the expression on their face and how red she was becoming, rather than exactly what was translated to me. Therefore, I kind of thought that what was translated to me was a little bit gentler and cleaned-up than what was actually said during the meeting.

S.B.: So, he was quite angry.

A.S.: Yes, but I didn’t take it personally. I thought that he was talking from the legitimate position of being the CEO of his company, by the way a pretty successful company, so chapeau. Even after that conversation I didn’t take it personally; I actually felt extremely relieved, because I came to the conclusion that it was a very simple business story. There are different strategies in the market. We had different strategies and a different vision on how to execute these strategies. It’s simple. It was just a relation that could not work anymore.

S.B.: At that point you knew exactly where you stood. You knew what they wanted and what you wanted. What did you decide to do from there?

A.S.: I want to say that this was twelve months since I was in Japan and until that time I didn’t even consider for one second to quit the relation, I was still thinking that it was possible to build a profitable, sustainable, joint business with a Japanese partner in the former way of running the business, but after that day I had to come up with a plain B. So, we started to work with my team on the options we had in the market, having in mind the long-term vision that we have for our company. I think that one of the elements that is fundamental when a company is through a process of higher or smaller intensity compared to what we did is that is very crucial that you set your vision in the very

96 beginning. Personally, on a very basic way, it was written like this red notebook here. (Indica un quaderno.) From time to time, you go back and read what you wanted to do, because then it’s tough; there are some moments when there are too many difficulties, it seems impossible and you are stuck into differences of every sorts. It’s always fundamental to come back to what you want to do, your vision and your long-time objective and try to re-find the root and the righter action towards that.