Notes

Tim Keeley: Facilitator in Japan Intercultural Consulting

Founded in 1994, Tokyo Japan Intercultural Consulting is an international training and consulting firm focusing on Japanese business and cross-cultural communication. Using their improved communication and working relationships in multicultural environments helps clients worldwide to increase their profitability and employee engagement. They primarily work with Japanese companies and multinational firms who have Japanese customers. Some of their prominent clients include Honda, Sony, and Toyota.

They provide incomparable services such as cultural training seminars, management and interpersonal skills training seminars, teambuilding programs, human resource management consulting, and executive coaching services.

Furthermore, Japan Intercultural Consulting might have a facilitator near you since they have offices and consultants located around the world. One of their finest facilitators in Japan is Timothy Dean Keeley.

Tim Keeley is a multilingual expert on international management and leadership. He enjoys studying at least one new language each year and loves to explore cultures and languages. He knows several languages such as Afrikaans, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Malay, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese. He is currently working on Catalan, Farsi, Hebrew, Hindi, Setswana, Xhosa, and Zulu. He also understands all the other Slavic, and Nordic languages.

Tim was born in the United States, but he has lived, studied and worked abroad most of his life. He studied one year at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia at 1976 and six months at a United Nations research program in Geneva, Switzerland during the process of obtaining his BA in Business Administration and International Relations at University of Florida.

After receiving his BA, Tim studied in Japan and Poland, and then returned to the United States to earn his Masters in International Business Studies at University of South Carolina. He worked for Westvaco, an American paper company, as a market development manager at their Tokyo office for one year while he was completing his master's degree.

When Tim finally earned his master's degree, he was employed by General Electric (GE) in June 1988 to work as a corporate marketing manager focusing on Japanese automotive companies. He left GE in April 1991 to begin his academic career. He is currently a professor of international management at Kyushu Sangyo University in Fukuoka, Japan. He went on a sabbatical in 1996 to complete his PhD in International Human Resource Management and Cross-Cultural Management at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

He became an adjunct professor at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand for 12 years. He teaches negotiation to graduate students and Asian business management to undergraduate students.

He also taught negotiation in Tulane University's EMBA program in Shanghai and Taipei for three years. On the other hand, he taught human resource strategies at Temple University's EMBA program in Tokyo for also three years. He is often involved in corporate education at major Japanese and US multinationals, focusing on cross-cultural management, leadership, and human resource management.

In addition, Tim has published books such as "International Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms: Their Greatest Challenge", and "Culture and Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms: Working for Japanese Companies in Thailand", which is written in Thai.

"International Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms: Their Greatest Challenge" covers one of the utmost challenges facing Japanese multinationals as they continue to expand foreign direct investment: how to integrate local managers into the management process of overseas subsidiaries, along with the parent companies themselves. In the majority of Japanese subsidiaries, management control has remained in the hands of Japanese managers at extremely high cost, but now Japanese firms are considering integrating local nationals in the management process of their companies, a process that may produce significant competitive advantage.

"Culture and Human Resource Management in Japanese Firms: Working for Japanese Companies in Thailand" examines the significant role of culture in human resource management; Japanese culture, management and organizational behavior; communication and decision-making in Japanese companies, characteristics of the development of Japanese MNCs and FDI; centralism of decision-making, control systems (output-oriented vs. cultural-oriented), subsidiary autonomy; staffing patterns at Japanese subsidiaries; results of Tim's study on showing the degree of participation in decision-making of local managers in Japanese overseas subsidiaries; comparison and contrast of Japanese and Thai values, assumptions, beliefs and expectations using the outcome of a study he did in Thailand; and how Japanese and Thai managers perceive one another.