100: Noriko Silvester, President & Founder, Candlewick Co., Ltd.

Noriko Silvester is the President and Founder of Candlewick.
Candlewick is a Public Relations consulting firm that works with
clients in the Food, Beauty, Travel and Education space with a
strong focus on products that influence people’s wellbeing. They
support overseas clients with their transition into the Japanese
market, developing a strategy that considers differences in
consciousness, customs and business in their home market and
Japan. Mrs. Silvester started her career working as a secretary
working at an American Financial Institution in Japan. She later
realized that she wanted to get more involved in the business
side of things and moved her way into sales and then got into
Japanese cosmetics. She did marketing and sales for 8 years
before moving briefly to a pharmaceutical company that had moved
into Japan at the time, the company pulled out of Japan. She
later started working at a Swiss company as a Brand Manager and
they also pulled out of Japan. At this point, she started to feel
that someone else was dictating her life, so she decided to start
her own business. She founded Candlewick in 2004. She wanted her
company’s name to have some meaning. Candlewick was the name of
her husband’s grandmother’s home which was also close to
Candlewick Lake. She also added that the wick is the string at
the core of the candle that is necessary to light it, so it is
like the message that is core to a business functioning well.


 


Mrs. Silvester says that she finds that sharing knowledge and
sharing experience makes people more open and likely to share.
She also notes that the default Japanese tendency is to be less
proactive. She is currently trying to get people on her team to
be more proactive. She says providing people with experiential
learning automatically forces them to be more proactive. For
example, there is a foreign staff member on her team and most of
their clients are overseas clients, so her staff automatically
must be more proactive to work properly. The handling of mistakes
depends on the staff’s attitude, if the staff consult with upper
management and do everything within their power to do things
correctly and there is still a mistake, she says that upper
management takes responsibility of that, however, is someone is
very casual about making mistakes and not taking responsibility,
she can be very severe about that.


 


Mrs. Silvester’s advice to someone coming to Japan for a posting
to Japan who doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t know Japan she
would say to cover 4 areas:


Staying in the box is the default option. Staying comfortable
with the familiar is ingrained into Japanese culture

It is good to have a mentor, a leader who is heading an
organization would be helpful. A foreign mentor running a company
in Japan would be helpful to speak with and learn from.

Reading books about leadership in Japan to allow them to gain
some insights before coming to Japan. Mrs. Silvester says she
recently read a book with the title is "Making Rules, Breaking
Rules that she found insightful.

Experience and join the community. She says Japan has a long
history and things are ingrained in the culture and people have a
way of working. Learning and trying to understand this would be
very helpful. Learning Japanese would be helpful in the workplace
as well.