50: Jim Weisser, CEO & Co-founder, SignTime K.K.

Jim Weisser shares his leadership journey in the Japanese IT sector after arriving in Japan to initially teach English to becoming a leader of many internet businesses since the mid-90s. After realizing his IT skills were in high demand in Japan during the mid-90s pre-internet era, he began developing further expertise in the area by working for an internet service provider and then working for Enron to help establish their broadband business. From 2000 to 2006, Mr. Weisser founded three companies. The third company he established, PBXL KK was an SaaS based company focused on cloud calling. The company was acquired by BroadSoft in November 2015, which was later acquired by Cisco. Mr. Weisser is currently the CEO & co-founder of SignTime, an electronic contract service provider.

At SignTime Mr. Weisser aims to make the contract process in Japan much more manageable for companies with the use of technology. They have taken on a Silicon Valley style agile work process while implementing Japanese level of quality control insurance. He finds that his team members are surprised by his company’s culture where mistakes are taken as a lesson to make future improvements. SignTime has landed successful deals with Japanese multinational corporations by promoting their fast-paced responsiveness in which they provide same day responses to compete against larger companies.

As a young leader starting from his early to late 30s, Mr. Weisser recalls the mistakes he had made and the valuable lessons learned from them. He recalls: “I didn’t listen very well…and [being educated] in an engineering environment…I have no problems [with] someone saying, Jim, you're an idiot. This is why…And it took me a long time to realize most people were very uncomfortable in that kind of an environment.”

From past experiences and mistakes, Mr. Weisser has learned to value diverse experiences and opinions. He is mindful of holding conversations with his team, asking questions and laying the groundwork by getting external input instead of running solely with his ideas. Mr. Weisser values establishing interpersonal relationships with his staff and identifying people’s passion and interests to motivate them and understand how they want to be treated. In learning more about his team, he says he is able to better understand his customers as well. Mr. Weisser also admits his mistakes publicly which he finds actually builds trust with his Japanese employees. He is also careful on not micromanaging and mainly focuses on communicating the vision of the company and other leadership components such as financial operations, but delegates the rest to his team.

To newcomers in Japan, Mr. Weisser advises to be a great listener and constantly share information to the point of overcommunicating. Secondly, he advises to hire people based on what they have achieved rather than putting too much emphasis on their English language skills. Thirdly, he advises to give people a sense of ownership when trying to make a change to make the process more productive and engaging. He notes: “If you can show that you're an effective advocate for the people here to headquarters, then you end up being a hero locally…having other people pushing the rock with you makes it a lot easier.”