#87 - The Dichotomy of East vs. Western Business Mentalities

The key question I have been trying to answer is: 

Why is there such a difference between quality of work in Japan versus in the United States?

And quite frankly, it’s baffling. The best example of this is in the gaming industry. Where you have these major bloated corporations playing against these smaller condensed Japanese based companies. The best example of course is Microsoft versus Nintendo. 

Microsoft is this GINORMOUS COMPANY, with AI, and SERVERS, and XBOX GAMING, and all sorts of other stuff. Yet, their gaming company is struggling. They’ve failed to capture or realize what makes a good gaming company. 

Nintendo is the oppositie. Instead of chasing trends and of course quick profits, they go after timelessness and offer products and services that are great experiences. 

The difference in quality is night and day. 

And not only that, with the recent advent of Microsoft Gaming Cloud caps. The company is now restricting people to only so many hours per month. Stating that costs of maintaining servers has become too much. 

Why does this always happen? It seems like the West always go all out, they never see anything through, and then they back pedal back because their decisions are wasteful and/or too wreckless. It seems like everyone over here is just a bunch of mindless competitive dogs going after things, without any rhyme or reason as to why. This also translates into the culture where constantly new trends, fads, and things that don’t matter in the long terms come in and out of the public sphere. And quite frankly it’s exhausting. Change, as much as it can be correlated with improvement, is exhausting. 

So where did we go wrong? And what is the core issue here? I think it’s our mental models that we have about the systems in place. You see here in the West, Nature is considered a separate thing and since we are industrialized and modern, we don’t want to have to do anything with it.Yes, there always seems to have been this duality between the human space and the nature space. 

Except Japan, especially the Elite solved this problem a long time ago. Instead of there being conflict between our living quarters and the natural world. They bridged it. They made it a part of their homes, their cultures, and their environment. 

In other words, they made Gardens to fulfill their need of being out in Nature, without actually steeping into the woods. 

And this had an enormous impact on them. On their society. On their culture. And just about everything else. This eventually trickled into the way their social structure and business structures run. They don’t run their companies like we do, they run them like Gardens. And in that model there’s always a Master Gardener, and then there’s apprentices below this person that assist the Master Gardener with different tasks. And then from there it continues on and on down the line. Not only that, but they design their ecosystems as gardens as well. And it’s fascinating, treating everything according to Garden principles.

This makes their ecosystems and models, not just made up inventions with no underlying principles that are true. They are in fact, tested and confirmed by Nature, as having validity and being true. Thus, forming or making your entire ecosystem based off of principles that work in Nature, that are timeless, that are tried and true, creates a lot better and a lot longer lasting ecosystems. 

For example, take a look at the problem of amount. Most people, CEO’s, Superintendents, Business Owners, and anybody wanted to choose an “amount” when creating something struggle with this question:

“Well how much do we start with first?”

Well personally, I really like the rule of three. And it wasn’t until I started reading more about Japanese Gardening, that it turns out, that 3’s actually happen a lot in nature. Alot! You will see 3’s as the foundation for a lot of different trees, herbs, plants, and of course even leaves. And this is also why 3’s are used in triangles. Once you start going out into Nature more and seeing other Gardens, triangles exist a lot because they form the absolute base or structure geometrically. This interestingly is also why people sit the way they do whenever they are meditating. The form or structure in which you sit actually creates a triangle with your body! Which is an amazing coincidence. It brings a whole other meaning to the terms “center” or “centering” since you are creating the absolute geometry of reality with just your body. 

Anyways, and that’s that. I wanted, in this quick post, talk about what I’m interested in, at the moment, and discuss some interesting observations I have about how ecosystems work in the West versus the East. With Japan being the best example of this.