The Japanese taste for lengthy face-to-face discussion and painstaking consensus building figures centrally here. Such practices not only have the sometimes intended, sometimes inadvertent effect of excluding outsiders, they take time, so that the German staff wait in limbo for decisions to be made and goals set by their Japanese superiors. Learning the not-so- German virtue (as one German manager characterized it) of patience was deemed absolutely imperative for success in a Japanese-owned company. Not only did it take longer to make decisions within the subsidiary, but the need to check with the parent company on many matters of substance caused further delay.