How Rakuten’s Shift to English Transformed Its Culture

In 2010, Japan’s largest e-commerce platform Rakuten was rapidly expanding into global markets when CEO Hiroshi Mikitani made a surprising announcement: Rakuten’s internal language would be changing to English.

That meant that all meetings, emails, and other communications would have to be conducted in English. The company’s employees had two years to become proficient in the language or be demoted.

In this episode, Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley discusses her case, “Language and Globalization: ‘Englishnization’ at Rakuten,” and explains why Mikitani introduced this new mandate and what results it achieved.

You’ll also learn about the early challenges that accompanied this enormous change, including loss of productivity and employee skepticism, as well as how the shift to English shaped Rakuten’s long-term working culture.

Key episode topics include: strategy, global strategy, globalization, cross-cultural management, language, communication, leadership, transformation, organizational culture.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

· Listen to the original HBR Cold Call episode: Language and Globalization: The Mandate to Speak English at Rakuten (2017)

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