102: James Yamanaka, Area Director, North Asia Area, British American Tobacco

<p>James Yamanaka is currently the President of BAT Japan. Mr. Yamanaka has had a truly global career, he started out at Deloitte in Consulting, then moved on to work in the Telecom industry and then started at BAT and his career has mostly been at BAT. Mr. Yamanaka is a 4th generation Japanese American; he grew up in California, started his education in the US but ended up going to Business school in London. 22 years ago, Mr. Yamanaka was working with BAT as a client in the Middle East and transitioned to working at BAT 18 years ago. His time at BAT has taken him across the world and he has worked in London, Germany, Sri Lanka, back to London and then to Denmark and now Japan. Mr. Yamanaka grew up in a heavily Japanese area called Torrance in the state of California in the U.S. When Mr. Yamanaka found out about his posting to Japan, he felt both worried and excited. He was excited to be closer to his Japanese roots and to find out where his ancestors came from. Although, Mr. Yamanaka is ethnically Japanese he hadn’t lived or worked in Japan prior to his posting with BAT.</p> <p> </p> <p>Mr. Yamanaka talks about improving engagement with his staff. He tries to achieve good engagement by trying to talk to his employees across the organization and goes 2 or 3 tiers below in rank and asks for feedback maybe about 4 times a week from his staff members. He follows a list and makes sure the organization is on the right track and doing the right thing, and secondly, he tries to ensure through these meetings that they are not missing anything vital. Sometimes, he also sits in into other teams’ meetings and listens in. Mr. Yamanaka emphasizes that they treat BAT as an outlier company and as a company that has over 20 nationalities in their staff, BAT prides itself in being in a unique position compared to other multinational companies. Many other companies tend to be very heavily Japanese with a few expatriate staff at the higher levels. BAT has a large foreigner population, not all are expats and has a lot of foreign sta