Increasing productivity is a challenge faced by many organizations today, particularly Japanese ones. To create a more dynamic, agile, and productive corporate culture, it is necessary to replace old habits with new ones that are more efficient and effective.
Making such changes is not easy, and often it’s difficult to know where to begin. Our concept of the 8 Habits provides a useful way of thinking about potential areas of improvement, and a way to choose where to start on the path to making beneficial changes. The 8 Habits are:
- Be Lazy! (Expend the least amount of effort needed to achieve the desired result)
- Comfort with risks and mistakes
- Comfort with uncertainty
- Servant leadership
- Self-sufficient teams
- Trust in employees
- Individual confidence
- Balance of power
These 8 Habits are the mindset most needed by Japanese companies in order to transform their corporate culture. The Habits apply to both individual behaviors as well as the way that teams and the organization overall operate.
We offer workshops in which introduce the 8 Habits and guide participants through applying them to their jobs. When conducting the workshop for a team, we facilitate the creation of group action plans for how to adopt the Habits within the team.
Discussion of the 8 Habits, and creation of action plans to address them, can serve as a wake-up call to the organization and to individuals, galvanizing them to transform the way that they work and to adopt more-productive approaches.
The 8 Habits are an excellent starting point for any organization in making improvements to the corporate culture and the way work gets done. They are also particularly useful to organizations that are adopting Agile software development, because the Habits represent the organizational environment that is needed in order to make Agile successful. Holding an 8 Habits workshop in parallel to rolling out Agile helps an organization adopt Agile’s practices, and the necessary mindset, more quickly and deeply.
