To respond to what
@famous artist pipkun was saying on stream before I had to leave for dinner (a little after bossman's idol meeting):
I think that you are correct that AnyKuro had legally defensible grounds for terminating her, but there is a wide ocean between what you can get away with legally and what constitutes actual good business practices. What happened was a monumental failure of management in general, but particularly of
talent management.
When you have a system where talents are expected to put up their own money to do projects, which you have the ability to kill at any point, good practice would be to a) be fully aware of all projects that are in the works and b) remain involved in the critical decision-making phases of the process like storyboarding and perms-gathering so that if there is an issue that would sink the project it can be addressed at the earliest possible point, or the talent can stop the bleeding if it can't be cured. Waiting until the project is fully complete and about to go live, after the talent is 100% invested, to check whether appropriate perms were gotten is
gross incompetence and disrespectful to your talent.
I'm emphasizing "talent" in this, rather than simply "employee" or "contractor." Talents have qualities that are rare and often not joined with other ideal qualities, and their output is often inextricably tied to their person and not transferrable to potential replacements, which requires more delicate handling than a paper-pusher because you're not going to get an exact replacement if they leave for whatever reason. AnyKuro chose to operate in an industry where their primary producers are menhera hikki-neets; being able to deal effectively with bpd (either borderline or bipolar, I'm not sure which was actually meant by Doki) women isn't a big ask, it's a baseline qualification for participating in the market, as Fishman ended up learning and successfully adapting to by
hiring someone who could actually do it.
They way Niji appears to handle communication with their talents, both from what we can glean from statements from current and former talent, and from Niji's own public statements, is complete shit and adds stress to talents with less-than-stable mentalities. Not responding until the very last minute (if at all) and only providing cursory responses without explanation of the reasoning is bad communication that is going to leave your talents confused and angry, especially if you also punish talents for trying to communicate with management (e.g, one of the reasons for Zaion's termination being her DMing a manager). Is it any wonder they might avoid communicating with management if that's the result?
I don't think they can hide behind the castle walls of "解せない日本企業", either. They chose to enter the international market, they need to be aware of the communication expectations of international talent. Frankly, I doubt their communication skills would be considered acceptable at any decently-run Japanese company.
open.talentio.com
