Culture

How Japan’s Rakuten plans to become a global ecommerce giant

Rakuten is one of Japan’s biggest tech companies, yet it’s still relatively unknown in Europe.

It began as an ecommerce marketplace but has since diversified into areas such as instant messaging and banking.

CEO Hiroshi Mikitani aims to raise Rakuten’s profile outside of Japan with expansion plans driven by further acquisitions.

How time tracking can improve productivity and morale

Time tracking is a fact of agency life. You do some work, you record your time. This is logical because you’re charging by the hour: tot up the hours done at the end of the month and you can send an invoice.

But time tracking is something that in-house marketers seem to have never got on with. Surely the only point of doing it is for management to monitor how long your tea breaks take?

If they introduce time tracking, what will the next step be? Rationing of biscuits? A maximum number of loo breaks? 

This idea misses something very important: for some activities tracking time is the only way of measuring and improving return on investment.

And at the end of the day, that’s what your boss (and his boss) care about.