On Monday, March 1, 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani stepped to the podium at the Tokyo headquarters of his company, Rakuten. At forty-four, Mikitani was the billionaire celebrity CEO of Japan’s largest online retailer and was renowned for making daring business decisions, made all the more controversial in Japan, where conformity and tra- dition are esteemed. Fourteen years earlier, he had left an enviable career at the Industrial Bank of Japan to launch Rakuten with a small founding team. By 2010, his company was a household name and Internet destination of choice for the majority of Japanese online shoppers. Mikitani was often dubbed the Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos of Japan for his prescience in seeing the changes technology would bring to commerce and for the acumen he had demonstrated in Ra- kuten’s meteoric rise.
Mikitani adjusted the microphone. These weekly companywide meetings, called Asakai, were attended by over seven thousand Japanese employees—crowded into an enormous auditorium, often weaving around the corner and into an overflow room—and by a loyal contingent of Rakuten’s three thousand overseas employees who watched via video. Most of the managers watching remotely understood little Japanese, but they liked watching their charismatic CEO in action. Later, they would receive translated summaries of his speech.
On this particular day, Mikitani had an announcement that departed from the usual format. He spoke from the podium in English. “For the first time in the entire history of Rakuten,” he said, “we held today’s executive meeting in English. Many executives struggled quite a bit, but we managed to get through the entire agenda.” As the audience strained to listen he announced that “our goal is to catch up with the global market. To step up to this challenge we must try to change our language gradually from Japanese to English. This is going to be a long-term effort for us. Starting this month, my own speech will simply be in English.” Mikitani went on to explain why he believed it was critical for Rakuten in particular and the country of Japan in general to acquire proficiency in English.
Language, he insisted, was the bottleneck that precluded the organization from leveraging valuable business knowledge that had accrued within the Japanese headquarters and existing subsidiaries. A common language was the only way to extend knowledge sharing across the organization’s existing global operations, as well as those that would be newly and rapidly established in order to efficiently achieve business results. He reminded his employees that Rakuten aspired to deploy operations in twenty-seven countries and raise the overseas portion of their revenue to 70 percent within ten years. An important market for the e-commerce global growth strategy was the U.S. market, in line with companies like Amazon and eBay, where English proficiency would clearly be necessary. The Tokyo office was then steadily hiring engineers from India and China who spoke English, but not Japanese. Mikitani said what was perhaps most difficult for his workforce to hear: he wanted to continue expanding his talent pool and sought to hire non-Japanese workers for the Tokyo office as well as elsewhere in the company.
Finally, there was the shrinking Japanese GDP. Mikitani told his audience: “By 2050, Japanese GDP as a portion of global GDP will shrink from 12 percent in 2006 to 3 percent.” Fast and direct communication—without the cumbersome time delays that trans- lation incurred—was the only way to integrate his business across multiple nations and insert his company effectively in non-Japanese markets. He reminded his workforce that “our goal is not becoming number one in Japan but becoming the number one Internet services company in the world. As we consider the future potential growth of the Japanese market and our company, global implementation is not a nice-to-have but a must-do.” And he promised that changing the language employees spoke would affect more than just communica- tion. It would revolutionize how Rakuten workers saw themselves and interacted with the rest of the world.
Mikitani saved the bombshell of his speech for last. By April 1, 2012, two years from the first all-English meeting, Rakuten employees would be required to score above 650 on the 990-point Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) or face the consequences. If his audience did not understand the precise wording they would soon feel its impact. Mikitani promised: “We will demote people who really do not try hard. We will monitor their progress and their test scores, and I will get reports from all the managers about employee progress.” Soon after, he instructed division heads to provide monthly reports on the average TOEIC scores of their employees relative to the desired target.
By the next morning, Japanese language cafeteria menus were replaced with their English equivalents. English replaced Japanese floor directories in Rakuten elevators. Even the corporate executives were stunned. Mikitani had not consulted with them before announcing his decision because he had assumed they would resist the idea of a full-on English conversion. Instead, by announcing the mandate directly to the entire company, he made the policy immediate and irreversible. In Mikitani’s mind, the future of Rakuten and Japan depended on what he called “Englishnization” and was too crucial to postpone. He had invented the term to embody what he called an unprecedented, radical idea for a Japanese company. One of Rakuten’s most critical principles, “Speed!! Speed!! Speed!!” was in action. Englishnization had begun full force.
Excerpted from The Language of Global Success by Tsedal Neeley. Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.