Koei Canada is uncomfortably Japanese
Today's Wall Street Journal includes a story by Phred Dvorak on the subject of corporate culture and the ways in which companies that straddle multiple continents must decide how much of their home company's culture to bring into non-native markets where they also conduct operations.
The meat of the article is about Koei's insistence that Canadian employees follow Japanese rituals in the workplace, from a thrice-weekly "Good Morning" call-and-response chant with the boss, to a tendency to ask female employees "to serve tea to top executives' guests," to an annual cleaning ritual in which everyone must scrub office equipment clean, regardless of his or her rank.
Game companies mentioned in the article include Koei, Sega, Konami, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Microsoft.
