Educating Global Leaders: Berlitz Global CEO Yukako Uchinaga

Over the course of her three decades at IBM Japan Yukako Uchinaga rose from a systems engineer to a seat on the Board of Directors at one of the world’s most recognizable brands. Now as the Global CEO of Berlitz International, she explains her vision for how her company can provide the proper tools to nurture globalization-savvy business leaders.

What role has language learning played in helping you advance your own career? I worked for IBM for 37 years – quite a long tenure. During my time there I had the position of head of research and development for first Japan and then all of Asia, so my background is very technical-oriented, towards IT solutions and IT products.
During this time I had to learn a lot about how to negotiate and cooperate with people from different cultures and different backgrounds.

If I could not speak English, I would not have been able to reach the position that I held at IBM. I think English is an essential language to have command of in a global business environment.

To speak one common language is very important to improve communications. For example, at the time when I joined IBM in 1971 my English was not good. My background was physics, so I would rather talk about physics.
I lasted three or four years without speaking any English. But suddenly I got an American boss, who spoke only English, no Japanese,Uchinagaso I was forced to speak English to communicate. If I could not speak English I couldn’t communicate with my boss. Eventually I learned a lot and was gradually able to put it together and communicate well to do business in English. I think that English is very important. Of course it is not everything, but to communicate with global customers is a very important first step.

What are the main advantages that Berlitz can offer business people, compared to other language learning programs? The language service industry is undergoing rapid commoditization. There are many options and competition is driving the price down. In that environment, Berlitz is recognized as high value, high price. What are our customers’ requirements? About seven percent of our customers qualify as what we call “serious learners” – customers with specific, serious objectives. This includes the Toyota executive that wants to move manufacturing to China, or a company from the USA that wants to attempt a merger or an acquisition of a business in Brazil or Russia. They have clear objectives to learn the language. For these customers, just learning the language is not good enough to meet their goal. Their goal is business success in a different environment. They would like to have the leadership capability to put together teams of people from different backgrounds and different cultures. These customers’ ultimate goal is to become global business leaders.

For these customers, whose goal is to become a global business leader or a global business talent, we can provide them with the total solution. Starting with language, we add some cross-culture training – how to adapt to a different culture, how to absorb difference into their comportment, and also how to communicate influence within the local culture.

So that is why we are now shifting from being just a language services company to being a global leadership training company. We are now starting with the language, adding cross-culture training, and adding some business training, in order to develop the customer’s skills and capabilities, to help them become a global talent.

Berlitz International operates in more than 60 countries. What is it about the business that allows it to work in so many different cultural and business environments? We respect local uniqueness, and also have very strong global foundations – this combination is important for helping us adapt well to business environments all over the world. As an organization we are also very diverse, employing native speakers of over 50 languages, and able to offer language learning services to our customers in so many languages. We are accepting of difference, which helps us to achieve balance.

In what countries do you anticipate the most growth for Berlitz International over the next five to ten years? Of course, China. When I first joined the company, my first priority was to look at the strategy, business and management structure in Japan, North and South America and Europe. Many people have advised me that China will not take the same road as countries such as Japan – but will leapfrog everyone. So we are now introducing not only language, but also culture training, global leadership training, ELS, study abroad services – for all of these programs, we want to focus on developing the Chinese market.

In China we see so many talented people that can have a different caliber of success by going after the global market, and we have great programs and resources to help these people. For example, we have now articulated a five step program to use our language and cultural training courses to become a global leader. The first two steps involve a lot of cultural training, while the later steps focus more on business skills. We are now trying to combine the traditional MBA training with more cultural approaches.

In what ways can Berlitz’ language learning programs add cultural competence, persuasive power and human networking skill value for rising corporate leaders? What is the difference between a local leader and a global leader? I think the difference is that the global leader must manage diversity. So we recognize how to manage diversity and inclusion – you have to understand the culture, you have to understand the language, you have to have the vision and analytical and team building skills.

I think the most important part of the global leader is that they must have their own identity – must understand their own history and art.

Perhaps the most important advantage that a global leader can have is a strong personal global network. So beyond the technical skills necessary to become a global leader, it is essential for people to develop their own identities and invest time and energy in building relationships. With this in mind, we have integrated a series of business language training seminars into our offerings.

We would like to form partnerships and alliances with various businesses to be able to service the wide range of educational needs that our students have as they work to achieve global leadership capacity.
First step is language and cross cultural training, and then the next step is to practice for using the language in specific practical business environments – like meetings, negotiations, or presentations.

What is it like to be “one of the 50 most powerful international businesswomen” (according to Fortune magazine)? That was more than ten years ago. I don’t know why they chose me as one of the most powerful international businesswomen worldwide. I think they were surprised when I got the position as a board member for IBM Japan, and IBM was known to be very difficult place for women to advance. Especially surprising for them, perhaps, was that I rose to such high-level positions from inside the company, rather than being recruited from outside.

Women in traditional Japanese companies, like foreigners, are always outsiders. They are too often left out of the core of the business, because people don’t know how to deal with them. There is no specific intention to exclude, but the just don’t know how to include women. The male business culture in Japan is a very strong monoculture – they don’t need to talk too much to each other, everyone is assumed to understand what everyone else wants, there is a lot of ambiguity and speaking in too much detail about things can make people uncomfortable.

So I think that this Fortune magazine article was meaningful for a lot of women in Japan, who were encouraged to see the success that I had achieved. That was one of the reasons I started J-Win, which is a program to help develop women managers and business owners. Since the Fortune magazine article, many other women have risen to become board members at Japan’s largest companies. It was just one article, but it was very meaningful for Japanese businesswomen.