Informative Speech - Greg Johnson

All right, hello everyone. Thank y'all for being here today. My name is, as you know, Greg Johnson, and I want to talk to all of you about something today that doesn't get a lot of attention here at this point: our alliance, and that's going to be workplace cultural differences in business across different continents, even within the same industry. So what we're going to go ahead and do today is we're going to look at one company that I have chosen in a field I'm familiar with, finance, to another company, excuse me, to another industry in a different country, and I've also chosen Japan. So first thing we want to do is we want to understand what is finance. Finance is the study of the system of money, investments, and other financial instruments. This can be their public, private, or corporate entities. Basically, anything to do with money, how it behaves, the people that manage it, and then the folks that take your money, for instance, and use that to make greater returns on your investment. That's what we're going to be focusing on today.

So the company that I chose in the United States is going to be a broker that I again have experience with: TD Ameritrade. There's a full-service broker with over 9,000 employees and 1.2 trillion dollars in assets under management. What that means is that they have 1.2 trillion dollars from not only their own funds but funds of depositors or customers, clients who put their money in trusting them to manage that for them and then return a dividend. Established in 1971, they've been growing exponentially, with about doubling every year and a half in employee growth. They recently acquired a company called Scottrade, which has been a big bump in those numbers. Now, this right here, this quote on the top, 'A work environment that empowers,' is taken directly from their website, their recruitment website, if you're looking to work within their career. Now, before we go any further, I want to go ahead and explain what business culture is, or what culture in the workplace is. And that's going to be a set of ideas or beliefs that governs how one acts when presented with an opportunity or inaction, and then how you respond to that action. So going into that, we have 'a work environment that empowers.' Now, this plays on a couple key things for TD Ameritrade when you're looking at them, and it's going to be the individual. People want to work for this company because they think that it will make them better off as an individual, as a person within that company, which is a huge, huge trait that American business filters have. Now, again, this is just from their website, so they're trying to sell to you, the potential employees. So let's look at the bottom two quotes right there. They're from Glassdoor, which is a comparison website that reviews companies that you want to work for before you go ahead and take a look at them. And these were the top two traits that TD Ameritrade has: good work-life balance and flexibility, and good benefits, 401k, health insurance, paid time off, stuff like that. So focusing on this again, we go with work-life balance. This is a little bit different actually from traditional American culture because Americans, among a couple other countries, work the most hours of anyone in the entire world. But TD Ameritrade kind of goes against the grain on that one. Everyone understands what traditional American culture is. Now, this again is focused on the individual. Someone who wants to work for this company wants to benefit themselves. But most this means that the company, TD Ameritrade, must align their goals with the goals of the employee for both of them to kind of improve themselves.

So with that in mind, we're going to look at the working culture of Japan. Now, Japan in a lot of ways is very opposite of this. Approval seeking, meaning that the employee or subordinate doesn't do anything for themselves without first seeking the approval of a superior. Here in America, we like to take initiative to do things. We like to show that we know what we're talking about, innovating. In Japan, this is a little less popular. In fact, it's probably more frowned upon, as there's a high power distance in Japan, meaning that there's a lot of space between positions. So if you're a subordinate, you don't do anything that your superior doesn't know about or you're not directly assigned to do. Focus on the group, again opposite of what we do here in the United States. They derive their self-worth, their honor, their focus from the success of their organization or their company, whereas here in America we might sit down with some folks and be like, 'Hey, I did this, that, and the other,' whereas in Japan they'll say, 'Hey, I work for this company and they're known for this, that, and the other.' And then lastly, this meaning here in America, even in the finance industry, we tend to go a little bit more business casual. You know, jeans, a polo, slacks and a polo, or what I'm wearing right now, a button-down shirt. They do the typically more neutral colors. So in summary, we go side by side. So TD Ameritrade, again not necessarily an example of all of American work culture, but good work-life balance, they work less hours and typically have more time off to focus on their family, whereas in Japan they have longer hours and fewer breaks, more formal in Japan. Let's warm up here. And then individualistic here for the United States. Again, we focus on ourselves, we try to rise ourselves up, a very short-term focus, return mentality, whereas Japan focuses on the group, that's a long-term mentality. In the United States, a self-starter if you want to get ahead. In Japan, you seek the approval of experience. Now, I do want to say that this record was pulled from an article from Business Insider right there, and then lastly that is research data from a Japanese scholar whose name I am not going to try to pronounce. Anyway, thank you all so much. I do hope this gives you a little bit more insight on some of the differences in culture just among this one industry, finance, but also as it relates to the larger business environment.