50: Jim Weisser, CEO & Co-founder, SignTime K.K.

Jim Weisser shares his leadership journey in the Japanese IT
sector after arriving in Japan to initially teach English to
becoming a leader of many internet businesses since the mid-90s.
After realizing his IT skills were in high demand in Japan during
the mid-90s pre-internet era, he began developing further
expertise in the area by working for an internet service provider
and then working for Enron to help establish their broadband
business. From 2000 to 2006, Mr. Weisser founded three companies.
The third company he established, PBXL KK was an SaaS based
company focused on cloud calling. The company was acquired by
BroadSoft in November 2015, which was later acquired by Cisco.
Mr. Weisser is currently the CEO & co-founder of SignTime, an
electronic contract service provider.


 


At SignTime Mr. Weisser aims to make the contract process in
Japan much more manageable for companies with the use of
technology. They have taken on a Silicon Valley style agile work
process while implementing Japanese level of quality control
insurance. He finds that his team members are surprised by his
company’s culture where mistakes are taken as a lesson to make
future improvements. SignTime has landed successful deals with
Japanese multinational corporations by promoting their fast-paced
responsiveness in which they provide same day responses to
compete against larger companies.


 


As a young leader starting from his early to late 30s, Mr.
Weisser recalls the mistakes he had made and the valuable lessons
learned from them. He recalls: “I didn’t listen very well…and
[being educated] in an engineering environment…I have no problems
[with] someone saying, Jim, you're an idiot. This is why…And it
took me a long time to realize most people were very
uncomfortable in that kind of an environment.”


 


From past experiences and mistakes, Mr. Weisser has learned to
value diverse experiences and opinions. He is mindful of holding
conversations with his team, asking questions and laying the
groundwork by getting external input instead of running solely
with his ideas. Mr. Weisser values establishing interpersonal
relationships with his staff and identifying people’s passion and
interests to motivate them and understand how they want to be
treated. In learning more about his team, he says he is able to
better understand his customers as well. Mr. Weisser also admits
his mistakes publicly which he finds actually builds trust with
his Japanese employees. He is also careful on not micromanaging
and mainly focuses on communicating the vision of the company and
other leadership components such as financial operations, but
delegates the rest to his team.


 


To newcomers in Japan, Mr. Weisser advises to be a great listener
and constantly share information to the point of
overcommunicating. Secondly, he advises to hire people based on
what they have achieved rather than putting too much emphasis on
their English language skills. Thirdly, he advises to give people
a sense of ownership when trying to make a change to make the
process more productive and engaging. He notes: “If you can show
that you're an effective advocate for the people here to
headquarters, then you end up being a hero locally…having other
people pushing the rock with you makes it a lot easier.”