Miyuki Suzuki sets example for Japan Inc. with grace and ‘spine of steel’

This series explores topics surrounding women who began their careers in Japan following the implementation of equal opportunities employment legislation in the mid-1980s. With many now reaching the age of retirement, it is hoped their stories can provide insight and lessons for women in Japan’s working world today.

Petite, soft-spoken and well dressed in a trim fuchsia jacket over a black dress one winter afternoon, at first glance Miyuki Suzuki exuded the aura of yamato nadeshiko, the quintessential embodiment of the elegance and grace of traditional Japanese women.

But beneath that appearance was one of the most successful Japanese women to have carved out a career in the demanding world of multinational corporations. Suzuki, 61, who retired from Cisco last year as the technology giant’s Asia-Pacific operations president, has held three regional CEO positions within the Japan operations of multinational companies including LexisNexis and Jetstar Airways. She currently sits on the boards of the Fortune 500 data storage solutions company Western Digital, the insurance company MetLife Japan, as well as that of Jera Co., a ¥3 trillion energy company.

Fully bilingual in English and Japanese, Suzuki has had a diverse career spanning over four decades across both industries and continents. Her career success is built on the intermingling of experiences in her background — being Japanese by birth and having had a Western education — and taking an unconventional and prescient approach to management in Japan.

“My father had no ambition that I’d carve out a career,” says Suzuki. There was no hint of bitterness; he was from a different era. Sometimes a lack of expectation from others can be a blessing in life.

Suzuki was raised in Australia and the U.K. by her Japanese parents from the age of 5, with her father working for a large Japanese trading company. Had she been a boy, she is certain that she would have been sent back to Japan in her teenage years to follow in her father’s footsteps: enter a prestigious Japanese university and join a trading company — most likely her father’s.

Instead, escaping the gravitational pull toward Tokyo, Suzuki graduated from Oxford with a degree in history. Out of university, Suzuki joined Reuters in 1982, where she remained for 15 years. She was part of expanding the firm’s coverage of double-byte Asian languages — allowing them to reach readers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan — and she was dispatched to global postings in the Middle East and Canada. Her last position was managing director, South East Asia.

In contrast to the typical Japanese businessman working their way up the corporate ladder at one company — for life — Suzuki was able to exert control and autonomy over her career and enjoy working in a variety of industries.

She honed her distinctive leadership style as she roamed freely from an e-commerce startup to a Japanese telecommunication company, back to a budget airline startup and then to a large multinational.

“In most cases, I was not looking for a change,” she says. When the right opportunities knocked on the door, however, she got excited about the possibility of “creating a new, meaningful solution.”

In retrospect, Suzuki broadly categorizes her career chapters into three phases: turnaround, startup, and localizing global the value proposition for multinationals.

Her first turnaround experience was with Japan Telecom. Leading their consumer business from 2002, she managed to reverse the financial hemorrhaging that had been impacting their portfolio. The exercise proved to be an important step for her leadership style.

“I was very individualistic until I was about 40,” says Suzuki. When she found herself up against a wall, trying to come up with drastic measures to revive the consumer business of a telecommunication infrastructure company, “the penny dropped,” she says. “I am never the smartest person in the room.”

Twenty years ago, she had the foresight to practice what is now preached by today’s management textbooks. Instead of outsmarting their staff, leaders must recognize the specific talent of individuals, create the right team and motivate them with a compelling vision. However, for a high achiever, taking their hands off the wheel is a challenge — it requires letting go of one’s ego. But only then can the team’s collective performance exceed the leader’s limitations.

Suzuki gathered 30 employees with the highest potential from her division, divided them into three cross-functional teams and asked them to think creatively to resurrect the failing consumer business.

There was no such thing as a stupid idea. Three leaders who reported directly to Suzuki sifted through the concepts and put the best ideas back into the business. As a result, the company was able to restructure its operations, such as selling its consumer digital data technology assets to a competitor, and leasing the assets back from them to service end-customers.

Speed and agility — wasting no time between conceptualization and execution — is something Suzuki developed from her entrepreneurial experience. At the advent of the boom in internet transactions in the 1990s, she set up the Asia-Pacific operations for a European e-commerce startup and built an e-payments venture based in Singapore. Her knack for entrepreneurialism drew her to the challenge of building a business from scratch with Jetstar Japan, a low-cost carrier launched by Qantas Group, where she served as president and CEO in the first half of the 2010s.

Irving Tan, formerly Cisco’s president for the Asia-Pacific region, recalls changing his Haneda Airport-departing flight to meet Suzuki at Narita Airport while she was with Jetstar to interview her for the position of president at Cisco Japan. After her predecessor left, Tan, then president of Asia-Pacific, Japan and China (APJC), temporarily filled in for the role.

“We had a really good chat,” he recalls. “All the other short-listed candidates were male with more ICT (information and communication technology) experience on their resumes. But I liked her diversity of experience and entrepreneurial spirit. We needed that more than a competent multinational manager type.” Tan was so convinced of the fit that he told Cisco’s global CEO at the time, John Chambers, that “if it doesn’t work out, you can fire me.”

Tan needed a new, preferably Japanese, leader to double down on the transformation he had ignited in Japan. Underlining the change was a cultural reboot — an attempt to be as open as the rest of Cisco and to weaken the hierarchical culture typical of conventional Japanese leadership.

In fact, Cisco’s frustrations mirrored those of many multinationals in Japan at the time. Despite the overall Japan market being one-third the size of the U.S. market, multinational business operations in Japan tended to struggle in the face of strong local competition. Sales were stagnant, and local management often gave excuses but not solutions.

In Japan, the global culture of a multinational often fails to permeate beyond the veneer of politeness. Therefore, the ideal regional president for Japan must meet three requirements — deliver performance, offer a clear analysis of the market and be an agent for cultural change.

These requirements perfectly fit Suzuki’s strengths. The regional president being Japanese by birth was an easier pill to swallow for the local staff, but she was also equipped with a global mindset and a Western management philosophy. This combination made it possible to turn around both performance and culture. Finally, the global headquarters had someone in Japan whom they could work with.

Suzuki more than met expectations in the three years she led Cisco Japan. Growth boomed into the double digits, whereas before her arrival Cisco Japan had grown below the level of the country’s gross domestic product growth rate — which was not a lot.

Under her watch, Cisco’s Japan operations became the best performer within the Asia-Pacific region. At the heart of her strategy was clear-eyed realism.

“Cisco is a huge global player but is small in Japan,” she said, explaining that the usual U.S.-centric service model, such as routing helpdesk inquiries to the United States in English, would not be enough in Japan.

Suzuki recounts introducing an unconventional strategy to ride on the back of local giants such as NTT and Ricoh. For example, she is proud of integrating Cisco’s technology, such as its Wi-Fi cybersecurity, into Ricoh’s multifunction printers which catered to small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. The Ricoh strategy gave access to local SMEs that had been out of Cisco Japan’s reach, while Ricoh provided maintenance and support.

To her team at Cisco, Suzuki brought empowerment — a relatively novel concept to many Japanese, but one she had practiced at Japan Telecom — and boosted the sense of ownership among the rank and file. Replicating her strategy at Japan Telecom, she challenged intergenerational teams of five to seven people to come up with ideas to rejuvenate the business — “a masterstroke,” in Tan’s words.“She took (Cisco Japan) to places I had never expected.”

Cisco Japan was ranked first in Great Place to Work’s table in 2018 in the large business (more than 1,000 employees) division for the first time.

The flattened hierarchy created a culture of psychological safety. One beneficiary of this sense of safety was Michiko Kamata, managing director of the APJC Small Business Growth Office, who was already a seasoned marketing director at Cisco Japan when Suzuki succeeded Tan. After many years at the same company and ready for a career change, “I was not in the mood to impress (Suzuki),” Kamata recalls.

In a one-on-one meeting in Suzuki’s early days, Kamata candidly shared with her a laundry list of issues she thought were wrong with the company. Kamata cared little if it was a politically unwise move.

To her surprise, Suzuki sincerely thanked her for her candidness. “It opened my eyes,” says Kamata, “that you can be a leader with little regard for politics.”

Indeed, Suzuki turned out to be radically different from the Japanese leaders Kamata was accustomed to. Suzuki firmly said “no” to weekend golf and late-night drinking to prioritize time with her family.

Was there grumbling from the old guard? Yes, says Kamata, but she explains that Suzuki “drew a clear line in the sand and divided the roles.” Within the realm of global compliance codes, entertainment is fine for the sales executives who believe in its benefits. On the other hand, Suzuki herself focused on setting the Japan unit on a growth path with better alignment with the global Cisco organization.

“The level of global attention on Japan saw a sea change,” says Kamata. Upon arrival, Suzuki quickly scheduled quarterly business reviews with corporate headquarters, including global visits.

At Cisco, Japan was back on the map — and more. Suzuki secured more global funding and made sure to invite the local middle executives, including Kamata, to global meetings to enhance their visibility. Witnessing the uplift of Japan’s status, “the grumbling old guard soon quieted,” Kamata says.

When Tan was promoted to the global chief operating officer position at Cisco in 2018, Suzuki succeeded him as president of APJC and relocated to Singapore amid the complicated and increasingly strained relationship between the United States and China.

While the role was less operational and more managerial than her last one, Tan commends her ability to connect with different cultures. “Asia is so complex because of the different levels of maturity,” said Tan, but Suzuki ably managed both her APJC team as well as dealings with global management.

Kamata emphasizes that Suzuki’s appointment opened a path for North Asian and female leaders.

Often, leadership at Asia-Pacific operations in multinational companies is heavily weighted toward native English speakers such as Australians, Indians and Singaporeans, and Cisco at the time was no exception. But Suzuki forced a paradigm shift.

“There is now a strong expectation from global to sustain the leadership pipeline (after Suzuki) from North Asia — in other words China, Korea and Japan,” says Kamata. Correspondingly, she notes an encouraging mindset shift within the younger generation in Japan. “Women started raising their hands to work in Singapore (where the APJC headquarters are located),” she said.

Is her success an exception because of her overseas upbringing, or can it be emulated by average working women who are born, raised and educated in Japan? Suzuki believes that women in Japan can achieve what she has, but there will be some unlearning to do if they are to get there.

“Women are taught to demean themselves,” she observes. “(When considering senior positions) men feel entitled, whereas women must be forced to apply. Japanese women particularly have this glass-half-empty attitude.”

On the positive side, she recognizes that women have an advantage. “Women tend to speak (better) English, which is such a weapon,” Suzuki says, stressing that the key for women is to market themselves and be vocal about their ambitions.

Tricks help, too, she says. “Women naturally choose to sit in the back of the room. I was taught early on to take one of the center seats.” Speaking with precision and in a low voice can also be effective.

When it comes to Japanese companies, they also “miss a huge number of practical things,” says Suzuki. If you are serious about promoting competent talent, regardless of gender or background, she argues that companies must take risks — go outside of their comfort zone for recruiting and mandate having at least one female candidate for every major leadership role.

In her eyes, womenomics, one of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies, “didn’t have bite,” due to its lack of accountability tracking. Companies must set diversity targets, drive metrics and tie them to management bonuses. Undoubtedly, there would be temporary discomfort, but only through “positive discrimination,” she concludes, can corporate Japan beat the diversity lull it has fallen into.

Suzuki’s career is a tale of a nail sticking out so smartly that it avoids getting hammered down, even in the conformity-based society that defines Japan.

For ambitious women, this is increasingly a sensible approach. Japan is changing — mounting frustration about stagnation and increased labor fluidity tip the scale in favor of a new approach to addressing problems.

While an Oxford education is optional, knowing and cultivating your strengths is critical for women to carve out a personal niche. Suzuki’s trajectory shows that the right opportunity will come along if you know your core strengths, and there is no shame in taking that opportunity. Nowadays, such a fluid career approach is less eyebrow-raising in Japan.

“I used to say, ‘Don’t mess with Miyuki,’” Tan says, jokingly. “Behind the gentle demeanor, she has a spine of steel.”

This explains the yamato nadeshiko aura of Suzuki. While it is true that yamato nadeshiko implies a traditional gracefulness, it also suggests a mental strength beneath the elegant exterior.

Japan can certainly benefit from having more yamato nadeshiko in the center of society. If Suzuki is a “reverse import” from Britain, Japan Inc. must encourage many native nadeshiko in the pipeline to step up. Not because they are women, but because they are competent.

Nobuko Kobayashi is a partner with EY Strategy and Consulting Co., Ltd., Strategy and Transactions — EY-Parthenon. The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization nor its member companies.