How I built a Joy Dojo in the land where Kaizen was born.
A 8-year journey to transform our culture of the company.
Around 2013, we experienced many problems within our company, and I felt we were at rock bottom both in our corporate culture and employee satisfaction.
I decided to launch a variety of initiatives, and while it took time and effort, we achieved dramatic improvement to our company’s culture, blessed with wonderful members running excellent teams.
In the midst of this effort, I met Joy, Inc. in August 2017.
“Joy, Inc.” is a book written by Richard Sheridan, the Founder and CEO of Menlo Innovations. It’s a book about wisdom and management techniques that aims to bring joy to the workplace, also involving your customers in creating better products/services and growing the business together.
I was so impressed by this book that I decided to transform my company exactly the way he did his! I vowed to pursue this goal to greatly improve the culture of my company, even though we live in a very different country and language, here in Japan.
Obviously, the transformation was not easy. I faced many challenges, largely being based in the Japanese culture, where the mere concept of Joy in the workplace is often considered unproductive.
I’d like to share my journey of discovering the answer to this challenge. We built our unique Joy Dojo, combining the Joy, Inc. concept with Kaizen spirit, which originates in Japan. I’m hoping this displays as a valuable experience for your Joy, Inc journey.
