How Rakuten’s Shift to English Transformed Its Culture
· 20 min · Episode 70
Episode 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.
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• Listen to the original HBR Cold Call episode: Language and Globalization: The Mandate to Speak English at Rakuten (2017) • Find more episodes of Cold Call • Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org.
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