Last week I presented some of the most provocative ideas from my book, Rapid Culture Change, at my CEO Roundtable here in Tokyo. The talk opens with a trick: I read out a list of dysfunctions that sound unmistakably Japanese — and then I tell the room they actually describe a French utility. It's designed to get a room full of experienced Japan hands to catch themselves mid-assumption.

What followed was forty-five minutes of pushback, war stories, and at least one direct challenge to the title of my own book. Here's what the room actually wrestled with.

The talk itself rests on one premise: culture isn't your nationality, your headcount, or your industry. It's shared beliefs that shape norms of behavior — and you can't see belief, only behavior. So the diagnostic is simple: what gets rewarded, what gets penalized, and what gets treated with indifference.

Three tactics carried the talk. Tactic one: impose behavior change first. You can't compel someone to believe something, but you can require them to do something — and nothing changes belief faster than real success. Tactic two: establish principles, eschew values. "Boldness" as a value is a poster on a wall. A real principle is testable and impossible to ignore. And tactic three: adhere ruthlessly to your own company culture. Cultural sensitivity is passive — you adapt to fit in. Cultural sense-making is active — you act on what you actually believe is right.

The closing line for the room was simple: you either make your culture, or the culture of others makes you.

Then the room pushed back — and that's where it got interesting. Five threads dominated.

First: is "rapid" even the right word for Japan? The pushback came fast — Japan is understood to move slowly. My answer leaned on history, not opinion. Fifty years took Japan from a closed feudal state to defeating the Russian navy at Port Arthur. Less than twenty years after being flattened at the end of World War Two, it had the world's second-largest economy and the fastest train on earth. That's not a slow country. The sharper distinction someone in the room raised: Japanese R&D tends to be engineer-driven rather than marketing-driven — which changes the shape of innovation, not its existence.

Second: two speeds, one outcome. The French are quick to decide but poor at sustaining it. The Japanese are slow to decide, but once decided, they execute with total follow-through. What looks like hesitation is often just a different definition of what counts as a decision.

Third: is the "extra loop" Japan requires real friction, or a convenient excuse? The room split the difference — it's not that everything here needs different treatment, but how change gets advocated for is a genuine feature of Japanese business culture. And risk should calibrate the process, not the culture.

Fourth — and maybe the most useful distinction of the night: nemawashi is not buy-in. You can and should still do the quiet groundwork of informing people and hearing objections — without needing their enthusiastic agreement to move forward. Leaders conflate consultation with consensus, and stall changes that never required consensus in the first place.

Fifth: even inside a giant company, the leader is the culture. Across seven CEOs, Nissan's product and engineering culture visibly shifted with each change in leadership. Size didn't insulate the company from the person at the top — it just made the shift slower to see.

Strip away the specifics, and the room arrived — the hard way — at something close to the talk's own thesis: Japan isn't slow, and it isn't an exception that needs a different playbook. But it does have its own texture for how decisions get made, and a leader who ignores that texture entirely gets quiet resistance instead of results.

You either make your culture, or the culture of others makes you.