The one-person Japan office
spends its mornings on research

When an overseas company establishes a foothold in Japan, it usually starts with a single representative. Head office is behind them; on the ground they are effectively alone. Talking to people in that position, I hear the same sentence repeatedly.

"The morning is gone before I have done anything except read the news."

One Japan representative of an overseas energy company described spending around two and a half hours a day collecting industry developments from their home market, neighbouring markets and the West. They had spent a month refining a prompt, and every morning they paste it in, gather, summarise, and extract the material for proposals. Alone, every working day.

Why the task cannot be dropped

The reason is structural. Head office does not know the Japanese situation, and there is nobody other than the resident representative who can gather the information.

When a colleague at home asks what is happening in Japan, the only person who can answer is them. So the collecting continues. And it is not a task that completes: left for a week, the proposals lose their edge.

Meanwhile the job the role exists for — negotiation and relationship building — is downstream of all this. Research is the preparation, not the work.

What automates and what does not

Collection and summarisation suit automation well. In the case I looked at in detail, roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the daily routine was a plausible candidate.

Aiming at full automation is not necessary, and pursuing it tends to fail. Give the collecting and formatting to the machine; keep the judgement and the negotiating for the person. That division is the realistic one, and it is also the one that survives contact with a real week's work.

Where to start

Before choosing a tool, write down where the hours actually go. Not an estimate — a week of honest logging. Most solo representatives are surprised by the result, and the surprise is what makes the case internally.

Then hand over the most mechanical item on that list first, and only that one. A first step that adds an input will not survive; a first step that deletes forty minutes from tomorrow morning does not need enforcing. The rest can follow once the first one is holding.

In short

The effectively-solo Japan office is a shape shared by a large number of overseas companies. Losing hours a day to information gathering is a consequence of the structure, not of the individual's capability.

Articulate where the time goes, delegate the part that can be handled mechanically, and the hours return to the negotiation and the relationships the position was created for.