53: David Wouters, President, InterSearch Japan & ex Corporate Liaison Manager, Coca-Cola Japan

<p>David Wouters is the President of InterSearch Japan, an executive search and human resources consultancy company, and the former Corporate Liaison Manager of Coca-Cola Japan. Mr. Wouters first arrived in Japan in 1969 to work for Coca-Cola as the Marketing Manager after working in the US and Southeast Asia for a number of years.</p> <p>Mr. Wouters developed a Coke systemized training program in Japan to train employees on both the American and Japanese side to be able to better sell and market the product in Japan. In comparing Japanese and American way of sales and marketing, Mr. Wouters points out the Japanese are more relationship based whereas the US had a rigourous system and specific set of objectives. In order to join these two different cultures, Mr. Wouters encouraged open communication by having many meetings and looking at case studies. Mr. Wouters explains: “I found the best way to teach a program like that was [to] find out what they wanted and get to their thinking and then utilize their thinking with the other side’s thinking through meetings, organizations, sales programs that we developed.” He also later brought in the independent bottling companies to the meetings as well to ensure Coca-Cola and the bottlers worked well together. Mr. Wouters adds: “We had to make it a join effort. Wasn’t easy at the time [but eventually] I got a lot of cooperation from both sides because they both wanted to be strong.” During Mr. Wouter’s time, Coca-Cola also began a recruiting program that hired young Japanese graduates who had studied overseas by visiting universities. Out of the pool of these graduates, one eventually became the company president.</p> <p>As part of forming good relations between diverse range of employees, Mr. Wouters also encouraged playing leisure activities together, such as golfing. He claims: “if you make the people that are working with you happy, that's one of the secrets of training. If you strictly authorize or direct, you're going to have a problem. I had to make both sides want