​​No comfort zone for Swiss commerce chamber’s head

• Name: Thomas Brodbeck
• Title: President of the SCCIJ
• URL: https://sccij.jp/
• Hometown: Bonstetten, Switzerland
• Years in Japan: 5

Growing up in the small Swiss town of Bonstetten, on the outskirts of Zurich, Thomas Brodbeck — now the president of the Swiss Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan and head of technical services at the Swiss construction chemical company Sika Japan — was always concerned about nature. “That’s the great thing about growing up in a small country like Switzerland — you can live in a small town totally surrounded by nature but still be just 15 minutes’ drive to Zurich city center,” he said.

Concerned about products being misleadingly advertised as environmentally friendly and the prospect of greenwashing, Brodbeck completed a degree in business administration and economics with a thesis examining whether consumers are really willing to pay more for products with lower emissions of carbon dioxide. “Twenty years ago, all the products were marketed as ‘green,’” he said, “but from my perspective, most of them were not any different from what they were two years earlier. The term was overused, and people didn’t really care that it was. So today, of course, it’s totally different, but I wanted to investigate why.”

Brodbeck worked for Sika in the global automotive aftermarket, dealing with windshield replacements. “As the windscreen is a safety-relevant part, it’s connected to the functionality of the airbags to keep you safe inside the car, so there was a lot of training needed,” he said. “But I’d been at it for 10 years, and I wanted to grow and challenge myself, and so I needed to step out of my comfort zone.”

His opportunity arrived in 2019 when Sika offered him a role as a business development manager in Japan. Arriving just before the pandemic and knowing little about the country, he had just enough time to set up a network of contacts and friends and get settled before the office was shut down for two years. “Japan was never on my radar,” he said. “I think that was a good element, as I didn’t arrive with any opinions — I just thought it was a safe place to live and probably a good place to work — so there was less chance of being disappointed.”

Despite the challenge of working online, Brodbeck got off to a flying start, quickly getting promoted to head of technical service, where, working with a team, he oversaw the integration of five companies into one and watched as Sika Japan grew from 180 employees to over a thousand in the space of five years. “You can imagine there’s a lot of change management, bringing five companies together, so this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to support this kind of project.”

Wanting a new challenge and a chance to build his business and friend networks, Brodbeck joined the board of the Swiss Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan, found it was a great place to get valuable advice from Swiss working in Japan, and rose to become its president. “For me, being the president of the chamber gave me so much exposure to different industries, which was once again getting out of my comfort zone, leaving my bubble and learning something new.”

With the Swiss Chamber of Commerce mainly acting as a networking platform, Brodbeck sees it partly as giving local companies an opportunity to learn more about environmental and sustainability best practices from Europe, and Switzerland in particular, an issue that he has commonly faced in his role at Sika, as Japanese firms often need to comply with foreign environmental regulations when dealing with overseas markets. “We hold regular luncheons at the chamber where we try to bring in Japanese and Swiss speakers for certain topics,” he said. “We talk about science, innovation, environment, and we try to have an educational approach about these industries to share information on best practices, which hopefully make their way into some of the companies.”

Brodbeck considers the chamber’s monthly luncheons to be its most interesting events, citing a recent example where they invited a Keio University professor to give a presentation on mental health, and they paired it with a presentation from the Adecco recruiting firm on their nonprofit open-source international mental health approach. They also recently held an event with a Tokyo University professor and a Swiss Ph.D. student introducing their work on developing artificial brain cells and how they communicate. “It was a good insight on the collaboration, the innovation and the type of research where Japan and Switzerland can work together — and we offer a platform where we can share this information to our members.”

Brodbeck believes stepping out of his comfort zone and finding balance are the key to what keeps him inspired and motivated in life. “The key is to leave your comfort zone, try your best, bring in your expertise, but also respect the local culture to find the balance to do what makes you at the end happy and successful,” he said. “I was very scared to leave the small country town I came from, but looking back, I have no regrets at all. The first step is always the most difficult one.”

Brodbeck and his colleagues at the Swiss Chamber of Commerce will be kept busy over the next few months, with what Brodbeck assures us will be a ‘full pipeline of events.’ With the Switzerland Japan Economic Forum soon to be held in partnership with the Swiss Embassy, Brodbeck is anticipating that this year’s premier networking event will be centered on the topic of biodiversity, and they are expecting a high level of participation from C-level executives from across the spectrum. They will also be holding their “Swiss Young Professionals event,” billed as an opportunity to connect young Swiss change makers with established business professionals in an effort to bring them out of the student environment and give them a chance to build up their career and business networks.

For now, Brodbeck expects to be fully committed to the current project he is working on at Sika. “There’s still a long way to go, and so that’s my only horizon for now,” he said. However, as a former manager at a Swiss ski shop in the Alps for two seasons during college, he hopes to get some time out over winter to visit some Japanese ski resorts “for some of that great-quality snow.” He still remembers an important management lesson he learned from that ski shop experience: “You need a good story to tell, and you need to be honest.”