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 professional world today.
“I am, after all, a product of my late mother’s curses,” said Masae Yamanaka, 59, vice president at Panasonic Connect, a group company under Panasonic Holdings that boasts a turnover of ¥1.1 trillion ($7.68 billion).
Yamanaka’s mother preached to her daughters the need “to be financially independent.” The family's financial situation prevented Yamanaka's mother from advancing to college. After marriage to Yamanaka's father, who operated his own business, the lack of financial independence remained a chip on her mother’s shoulder, Yamanaka suspected, even though it was the norm for married women to stay at home at the time.
The mother also taught her daughters to be realists. Yamanaka recalled being a child and watching a documentary with her mother about children suffering from famine in Africa. While the atrocity made her eyes well up, “My mother snapped that my tears would not change a thing in the world, that without actions, emotion meant nothing,” Yamanaka said.
This remark made a lasting impression on the young girl and pushed her thoughts toward action. It formed into the backbone of her approach to sales in her professional life; she faithfully translated her plans into actions while never making commitments she could not stick to.
Convinced that she must always be self-reliant, Yamanaka made work a sacred and central theme in her life. She also has a 10-year-old son she had at the age of 49. Her devotion has paid off handsomely – after a formative two-decade sales career at IBM Japan, where she established herself as a star performer, Yamanaka steadily climbed the career ladder through Microsoft Japan, Lixil — a Japanese home equipment manufacturer with ¥1.5 trillion turnover — and now Panasonic Connect, where she serves as a managing executive officer.
Two themes emerge through her 36-year career.
The first is related to core expertise. Yamanaka’s success demonstrates the importance of shaping and sticking to what you do best. Her core remains the systemic business-to-business (B2B) sales approach that she crafted and refined through practice at IBM Japan, where she spent the first 22 years of her career.
The second theme, perhaps less intentional than the first, relates to her perennial quest for the best environment in which to flourish, signaling a new career model, particularly for Japanese white-collar workers. Two factors drive Yamanaka: the confidence she built around her core skills — “I can perform anywhere as long as there are B2B sales” — and her fear of stagnation in professional growth, which speaks to her more loudly than any sense of comfort or familiarity.
As labor mobility increases in Japan, traditionally known for its lifetime employment system, Yamanaka's career story signifies a triumph for both herself and her employers: A long, exciting career with multiple employers, and for her employers, the handsome reward arising from introducing diversity into key leadership positions. Her mother’s curses turned out to be a blessing.
Reinventing corporate sales
When Yamanaka entered IBM Japan in 1987 with a degree in literature from Keio University, it was not due to foresight into the future growth of the IT industry but rather thanks to her desire for long tenure.
“To choose an employer where I could be happy working for years, I looked for a gender-equal culture with no gender pay gap. Foreign companies sounded like a good idea, and IBM Japan was the top pick for female college recruits at the time,” said Yamanaka.
IBM Japan, a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, was established in 1937 and was already a giant in the local IT industry by the late 1980s. Yamanaka’s cohort counted approximately 1,600 fresh graduates, among which 350 were women. The equal employment opportunity law had just taken effect a year before, allowing young women with higher education to enter the workforce with high hopes for a career on equal footing with men.
However, it was still a dark era for professional women, even at IBM Japan.
“After 3 or 4 years, the 11 women in my cohort assigned to the sales department had dwindled to just one — myself,” said Yamanaka.
The sales tactics were macho and old-fashioned: “You drank to win work.” Committed to sticking it out — her mother’s teachings ringing in her head — Yamanaka refused to give up. She “hated it but somehow survived the first couple of years,” and then the penny dropped. “I decided to use my brain for my sales approach,” she said. She tried alternatives to drinking.
Eventually, she set her eyes on the account plan, the annual projection of account activities, and the resulting account profit and loss statement put forward by the account team. She found that barely half of the activities promised were actually carried out. So for her account plan, Yamanaka vowed to take action — “I broke the annual account plan down into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily level to-dos, so execution is enforced.”
In front of clients, she ensured accountability by presenting the monthly plan directly to the client’s person in charge, for example the vice president of information systems.
“I’d ask them if we were meeting their expectations," she said. "Once our monthly meetings became a routine, they would open up more, and I would get more intelligence than my competitors. The quality of work obviously improved.”
Her performance did not go unnoticed by IBM Japan management. “I was in my 20s when they gave me a chance to present my new method to the board,” she recalled. The culmination of her efforts was a three-year contract worth ¥10 billion from a major new client in retail, for which Yamanaka oversaw sales — the “most challenging project” of her IBM career. Based on her various accomplishments, she was awarded the top IBM Japan sales award at the age of 39. To this day, Yamanaka remains the only female sales professional to have received this honor.
A younger multinational
When an executive search firm reached out to Yamanaka in 2009 for an introduction to Yasuyuki Higuchi, who had served as CEO of Microsoft Japan since 2008 after a career in IT at Hewlett-Packard Japan and others, Yamanaka, then 45, was at the top of her game at IBM Japan. She was certainly not looking to change employers.
Higuchi also recalled that Yamanaka “had no intention of leaving” when they first met and that “she clearly loved IBM, which is known for its lifers.”
But Yamanaka was a perfect fit for the transformation of Microsoft Japan that Higuchi had in mind from a business-to-consumer (B2C) company to a B2B company. To grow the B2B business, “I was looking for someone with an affinity for Japanese companies,” he said. In his eyes, IBM Japan had the right mixture of non-Japanese and Japanese culture: committed to achieving results, yet respectful.
Unexpectedly for Yamanaka, the meeting with Higuchi led to two revelations; that there were other possibilities for her outside of IBM Japan; and that, perhaps more importantly, she was getting too comfortable with her then-employer.
“I knew from experience that only through tough assignments did people grow as professionals,” she said, “but things were getting too cozy for me back then (at IBM Japan). I knew I had to change something.”
Compared to IBM Japan, Microsoft Japan was “even less Japanese,” said Yamanaka. It was “younger,” to begin with. Layoffs due to position closures were normal at Microsoft Japan, while IBM Japan tried to honor the social contract of employment and retain staff. Her assignment as general manager for the Distribution and Services Industry Division meant she would lead a team that knew nothing about her past at IBM Japan.
“People were skeptical (of me) at first,” said Yamanaka. She proved herself by winning clients, however. “I was comfortable speaking with chief information officers.”
The division, the second smallest of six in 2009 when Yamanaka joined, grew its sales by double digits annually to become the second largest in five years.
“She was able to align the value proposition of Microsoft Japan with the vision of the client,” said Higuchi, “which was a departure from a product-oriented sales approach.”
What made Yamanaka resonate with the C-suite of the client companies, Higuchi said, was her “positive power” on top of her fluency in applications and solutions. “Things must get tough, being in direct sales as a woman, but Yamanaka has the mental strength to laugh it off.”
Japanese company, global transformation
By 2014, “I was starting to feel as if I was ready to move on from the world of multinationals (such as Microsoft Japan),” said Yamanaka. “Japan is but a sales office. At the end of the day, transactional revenue counts more than addressing clients’ issues holistically. This meant I couldn’t fully capitalize on all my knowledge in solutions such as customer relationship management or business process re-engineering.”
An opportunity with Lixil, a Japanese company in the process of globalizing, offered a breakthrough.
In 2014, an executive search firm introduced Yamanaka to Yoshiaki Fujimori, then-CEO of Lixil. Fujimori was already a renowned senior executive in Japan, belonging to a new breed of “professional management” like Higuchi. After starting his career at Nissho Iwai, now Sojitz, a major trading conglomerate, he honed his career at General Electric, ending up as CEO of GE Japan in 2008.
When introduced to Yamanaka, Fujimori already had a few years of experience since entering his role as Lixil CEO in 2011. Prior to his onboarding, Lixil was a mostly domestic, family-owned business with strong network of domestic distributors. Fujimori’s vision was to globalize the company for discontinuous growth in overseas markets using acquisitions as a tool. Large-scale purchases such as those of American Standard (2013) and Grohe (2014) took place during Fujimori’s tenure.
“Yamanaka was a perfect match, with the three leadership traits I wanted at Lixil at the time,” Fujimori said. Firstly, he was looking for a change agent who could paint a big picture, communicate and execute. Then, he wanted a leader with a stretch-goal mindset and a sense of accountability. Finally, he or she had to have a “global mindset,” which Fujimori explained as embracing diversity and meritocracy.
"I was transforming a company that used to be 99% domestic to one earning a third of its revenue from outside Japan,” he said.
That Yamanaka was a woman in sales was significant.
“Her appointment would have symbolic power to change the company,” Fujimori said. While it is relatively easy to find female executives to lead corporate functions such as communications, human resources or investor relations, “it is hard to find (senior) women in sales."
"Her success is extra-special,” said Fujimori. "It was a big-deal assignment.”
At Lixil, Yamanaka enjoyed a sense of freedom to make her own decisions that had been inaccessible at her prior companies. After IBM and Microsoft Japan, she was confident that her sales model was versatile. As the executive officer in charge of sales for special demands for major housebuilders, typically facing general contractors in rural areas, which is “the utmost symbol of a male-dominated society,” according to Fujimori, Yamanaka introduced systemic changes including salesforce automation, which led to a jump in bookings.
Ultimately, her tenure at Lixil lasted less than three years, as Yamanaka found that the management style changed after Fujimori and his close allies in the management stepped down in 2016. Yamanaka soon started looking for a new environment in which she could flourish.
Deliberation
Never down for long, Yamanaka was ready to sign an offer letter with a large, multinational medical equipment company when Higuchi contacted her. In 2017, he had returned to Panasonic to lead Panasonic Connected Solutions Company, one of four companies within Panasonic group at the time, as CEO. It meant a homecoming after 25 years for Higuchi, who worked for a succession of multinationals after a 12-year post-college career starting in 1980 with Panasonic.
“I suggested that we talk if she was leaving (Lixil),” Higuchi said, “and I didn’t invite her (to Panasonic) as a result of my ego. I genuinely thought it would be a better choice for her.” He understood that Yamanaka wanted a long and stable tenure. Traditionally a hardware company, Panasonic was shifting its B2B business direction to solution-based with its tip of the spear, Panasonic Connected Solutions Company, to be reconstructed as Panasonic Connect. The specialized operating company would be established in 2022 under Panasonic Holdings, consolidating other B2B businesses within the Panasonic group. Higuchi knew it would be a multiyear journey in the trenches and he needed a trustworthy partner such as Yamanaka.
However, transfusing outside mid— to senior-level talent into a homogeneous organization is a gamble with its risks.
“Strong medicine must be taken in moderation,” Higuchi said. Rock the boat, but do not break it.
He understood it was hard for external hires such as Yamanaka to fully function without his endorsement. “It is a balancing act between letting the hired guns be as aggressive as they are and controlling the reception on the ground,” he said. He was aware that his role meant he had to “get in the middle” in the case of escalations.
'I help some, you help some'
The biological clock presents a challenge for working women serious on building a professional career. The prime time for starting a family — late 20s to 30s — overlaps with career acceleration. Yamanaka, who had her baby boy at 49 while at Microsoft Japan after years of infertility treatment, had some practical advice.
“I’d say, if the possibility (of giving birth) is not zero, women should freeze their eggs early,” she said. “You could be over 40 when you've finally decided you want kids.”
Yamanaka uses every method of support available for child care, from sitters and nursery schools to soliciting help from fellow mothers. Raising a child while working is more than another exercise in project management — eventually, it impacted her state of mind, Yamanaka said. “I have become more considerate for others now I see that what goes around comes around — I help some, you help some.”
Working mothers in senior positions are key poster children for Japan, encouraging more women to stay in the workforce to stabilize, if not reverse, the falling fertility rate, which currently stands at a precarious 1.26 in 2022. Curiously, Yamanaka has downplayed this. “We never advertised the working mother bit,” said Fujimori, even though Yamanaka's first and only child was still an infant while she worked under him at Lixil. “I think she took (working motherhood) as something quite normal.”
Still, Higuchi described Yamanaka as a role model for female workers. “Sometimes they argue that she is in a different league (and therefore unrelatable),” he said. “But I try to tell them that she has been through a lot to become who she is today. It is not as if she had some superhuman abilities.”
Yamanaka's motherhood, according to Higuchi, is an antithesis to the oft-heard murmur about successful women, that their ascent was only possible because they were childless and single.
Yamanaka’s mother led her daughters to continue working and commit to actions. Yamanaka's loyalty to that mantra led to a rising career built over three and a half decades in sales in tech. But even without her mother’s “curses” as she calls them, her drive for personal growth is innate and genuine, and has flourished in the form of a successful career constantly fueled by the mandate for self-reliance.
“When I won the sales award at IBM Japan in 2003, my mother was as happy as if I had achieved her life dream in her stead,” said Yamanaka. Were her mother alive today, what Yamanaka has since further achieved would likely make her very proud indeed.
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