Planning Staff@Andersen Consulting Japan
After graduating from Oregon Institute of Technology, I returned to Japan with a recommendation letter for me from a manager of the Andersen Consulting headquarter in Chicago to its Japanese branch.
Soon after the three month intensive training at the training center located near Chicago, I was sent to a system integration project in Hong Kong. I spent 4 months coping with the very last engineering task in my career, while learning Cantonese. An experience of working among multinational project members was good to have.
Released from the project, I requested for a transfer to a managerial section, Planning, that monitored the whole operation of the Andersen Consulting Japan. I composed quarterly performance reports for the Japanese partners (i.e. the owners of the organization) to make their decisions.
The job experience has made me familiar to all the internal operations, through the budget management work. The job also provided me with frequent opportunities of discussion with a native English-speaking manager of Asia & Pacific District. I could witness and learn much about the dynamism of both global strategy and local management engaging each other.
The bubble economy in Japan was finally coming to its end. And the mainframe system building was becoming rapidly obsolete. The organization was forced to adapt to the environment change. I was really fortunate that I could be a part of organizational reform planning before I became 30 years old and decided to leave the job. I had to do so, as the job transfers to inexperienced jobs at the age of 30 or more were believed extremely difficult.