On Track With the Japanese:an Interactive Workbook for Effective Negotiating and Trust Building with the Japanese

About the Book

On Track with the Japanese: Rapid Learning System Workbook provides a powerful interactive took for understanding the issues of building trust that often inhibit and plague effective communication and negotiation with Japanese. If you are confounded by your Japanese partners, this workbook will provide the understanding of a Japanese road map to creating trust and moving the relationship through four trust building stages. The workbook creates a fluency with core concept such as face, obligation, self presentation and many others. Exercises in each stage build on the last and the workbook traces the process of moving through stages and provides opportunities to test one's position and skills thereby developing the attitudes and techniques necessary for working and negotiating successfully with the Japanese.

About the Author

Patricia Gercik spent the first twenty years of her life in Japan, where her family had been doing business in Japan since the 1920s. She worked as a travel guide and as a facilitator on Japanese TV devoted to explaining Japan to the West and vice versa. She then came to America and earned a BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a MA degree from Tufts University. From 1966 to 1985, Gercik taught a variety of history and culture courses in leading private schools in the Boston area including Buckingham Browne and Nichols, Beaver Country day School, Manter Hall School, Thayer Academy, and the Cambridge School of Weston, developing and teaching new curricular materials in such areas as Russian, Japanese and European history and culture. Since 1885, Gercik has led the MIT Japan Program. As Managing Director of the Program, the largest center of applied Japanese studies in the U.S. In this Program, her main activities include developing and teaching courses and special programs that prepare MIT students, faculty and corporate executives, to do research and/or business with Japan. The MIT-Japan Program has trained and placed more than 900 MIT students in Japanese research centers and management jobs in Japan. In addition, Gercik has developed a network of more than 25 leading US companies that support the Program and she provides training to their key managers preparing for assignments in Japan. Using her unique bi-cultural perspective, she has led workshops on Japanese culture and negotiation practice at companies such as NEC, General Electric, Kodak, Genzyme Corporation, Ford, IBM, Motorola, and others. In particular, these sessions focus on strategy and building trust with their Japanese subsidiaries, suppliers and customers. In addition, she has led training sessions for Army Research Labs, the Pentagon, and the Air Force on building successful joint research projects. Her dedication to international education was recently recognized by the Japan Society of Boston that presented the John E. Thayer III Award to Gercik for her significant contribution to the advancement of understanding between Japan and the United States. Most recently, Gercik was awarded 2010 Excellence Award for Bring Out the Best: everyday leadership throughout MIT. Currently, Gercik is the Managing Director of the MIT Japan Program, the largest center of applied Japanese studies in the U.S. She is also the Associate Director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives Program that develops partnerships between MIT and companies and key institutes in Europe and Asia. Gercik's best selling book, On Track with the Japanese, is a collection of case studies illustrating her staged model for negotiating with the Japanese. Gercik has authored two CD ROMs on negotiating with the Japanese, entitled On Track: A Case of Alex and On Track with the Japanese: A Core Value Approach to Strategic Negotiation as well as a companion workbook, On Track with the Japanese Workbook. Gercik was also actively involved in co-authoring, with a team of other writer, such materials as The Opium Trail, published by Concerned Asian Scholars, and the well-known Our Bodies, Ourselves, published by the Boston Women's Health Collective.