E-commerce giant Rakuten kicked its English policy into high gear last week, as English became the official language for the Japan-based company. Founder, chairman and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has promoted, or rather "forced," English to become the company's official language.
Though Rakuten is already the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world's top 10 Internet companies, Mr. Mikitani knows that English is an essential component of the company's future. To expand overseas with acquisitions, joint ventures and multilingual sales, Mr. Mikitani has pushed what the company calls "Englishnization," a policy designed not only to make the company more smoothly operational in the global marketplace, but also to encourage employees to think within an international framework.
No matter that "Englishnization" is not a real word; the idea is a good one. Whatever changes a company doing business internationally will go through in the future, employees will need to work in more than one language.