---
title: Your first five hires in Japan shape the next fifty
description: A baboon troop lost its aggressive males; a decade later every male had changed and the calm culture remained. Your first five hires set the baseline.
image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/covers-2026-11/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty-cover-en-2026-10-m.png
---

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en?hsLang=en)

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Launching in Japan

In this article

1. [A troop of baboons](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s1)
2. [Replacing people does not replace culture](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s2)
3. [What the first five actually set](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s3)
4. [How to choose the first five](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s4)

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3. [Launching in Japan](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/tag/launching-in-japan)

# The first five people in your Japan entity shape the next fifty

Every male was replaced, and the calm troop stayed calm

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)5 min read

Contents4

1. [A troop of baboons](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s1)
2. [Replacing people does not replace culture](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s2)
3. [What the first five actually set](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s3)
4. [How to choose the first five](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/first-five-people-shape-the-next-fifty#s4)

Year three. The Japan entity has fifty people. HQ notices that nobody brings bad news to meetings, customer complaints pass through three layers before reaching anyone accountable, and staying until nine is normal while output is not visible. HQ replaces the country head. Six months later, the new head has also stopped bringing bad news.

The head was never the problem. The office's rules were set long before year three, by the first few people in the room.

## A troop of baboons

The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has followed one troop of baboons in Kenya since 1978. In the mid-1980s, tuberculosis arrived via a tourist lodge's garbage dump and killed about half the troop's males. The dead were disproportionately the aggressive ones, because they were the ones who had fought their way onto the dump and eaten the infected meat. What remained were the males who fought less.

The interesting part comes later. Male baboons leave their birth troop at adolescence. By the mid-1990s, not one of the survivors was left. Every male in the troop had come from somewhere else. Yet the troop was still different. More grooming, a looser hierarchy, lower stress markers in low-ranking males than in neighbouring troops. Newly arrived males took on the troop's behaviour within months. The 2004 paper in PLoS Biology calls this a culture and tests how it transmits: how the resident females treated incoming males determined what the newcomers learned.

Every male was replaced, and the calm troop stayed calm

One baboon troop in Kenya, 1978 to 2004. Sapolsky and Share, PLoS Biology 2004 (abstract only). One troop, observational, not an experiment

1. 1978Observation beginsone troop in Kenya
2. Mid-1980sTB kills about half the malesmostly the aggressive ones
3. Late 1980sThe troop is unusually calmmore grooming, a looser hierarchy
4. Mid-1990sNone of the original males leftevery male is a newcomer
5. 2004The culture persistsnewcomers adapt within months, shaped by how the resident females treat them

Culture lives between people, not in them. The one cheap window to set it is the first five hires.

Figure 1. After TB killed about half the males in a Kenyan baboon troop, mostly the aggressive ones, the troop stayed calm into the mid-1990s even though every male had been replaced by a newcomer, so a group’s norms outlast the individuals who set them and are cheapest to shape while the group is small.

I've only read the abstract, not the full paper. And this is one troop and one accidental event, watched over a long time. It isn't an experiment. So treat it as a metaphor. Still, the metaphor gets one thing right. A group's behavioural baseline doesn't live in any one member. It lives between them, which is why it survives when every member is replaced.

## Replacing people does not replace culture

Back to the fifty-person office. Replacing the country head is replacing one male. When he arrives, forty-nine people already know how meetings run here, what happens to bad news, and what time you can leave without looking bad. He either adapts or fights forty-nine people. Most adapt, and I don't think that's weakness. Almost anyone would.

The troop's culture changed because half the troop changed at once. A company can't do that, and shouldn't try. So a company gets one cheap window to set culture. It's at the beginning, when there are very few people.

## What the first five actually set

The values on the wall matter less than you'd hope. What matters is five concrete things, each of which a new hire sees and copies in week one.

How bad news travels. When the first hire reports to HQ, does the problem come before the progress or after? The second hire watches. By the fifth, it is how we do things here. [Does bad news travel fast](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/psychological-safety-bad-news?hsLang=en) describes the mechanism. In a new entity, the first five people's behaviour writes it.

How you speak to customers and vendors. The first salesperson's tone with distributors, the first operations hire's tone with contractors. Everyone after copies it.

What time you leave. Learned fastest, changed hardest. If one of the first five habitually leaves at nine, the tenth hire will not dare leave at seven.

Distance from HQ. Whether the first five treat HQ as a boss or a peer decides whether, in year three, the office is an execution unit or a business. Most of the problems in [Don't run a startup entity like head office](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/dont-run-a-startup-entity-like-head-office?hsLang=en) start here.

Who decides. The first five form a decision habit among themselves. One person calls it, or they confer, or they wait for HQ. Whichever it is, it scales to fifty unchanged.

## How to choose the first five

Skill matters. But for the first five, the skill bar can be a little lower than for the tenth hire, and the behaviour bar has to be much higher. The tenth hire's behaviour gets corrected. The first five's gets copied. [Score the role before the person](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/score-the-role-before-the-person?hsLang=en) needs one extra line here. For any role among the first five, score its behavioural weight separately.

In interviews, don't ask how they think about team culture. Ask when they last gave their boss bad news at their previous company, and how they did it. What people did tells you more than what they intend.

For the first ninety days, watch behaviour more than results. You can't see the first five's results in ninety days anyway. Their behaviour you can see completely. If someone's habits drift from the baseline you want, correct it or replace them right away. It will never be cheaper. Wait until hire fifteen and you are correcting fourteen people who have already learned.

One uncomfortable closing note. If the entity is already at fifty and the culture is already not what you wanted, replacing the head will do almost nothing. That leaves two options. Replace enough people at once, which is brutally expensive. Or start a separate small team and let it grow from scratch. The baboons used the first option, and not by choice.

References

- [Sapolsky, R. M. & Share, L. J. (2004). A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission. PLoS Biology 2(4): e106](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020106)

Author

[Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)

Launching in Japan, starting with people and systems. I write about building organizations, sales teams and technology organizations in Japan, in English, Japanese and Chinese.

[Profile](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en)[Contact](https://nobusato.jp/en/contact?hsLang=en)

## Read next

1. 01[Don't staff the Japan entity to exactly enough](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/dont-staff-the-japan-entity-to-exactly-enough?hsLang=en)5 min
   
   In a simulation, ant colonies with idle workers outlasted those at full tilt. Replacing one person in Japan takes six ...
2. 02[Why month three is the hardest for a new team](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/why-month-three-is-the-hardest?hsLang=en)6 min
   
   Tuckman's storming has a date in a Japan entity: month three, when HQ expats and local hires first decide together. ...
3. 03[Set the rules in the first ninety days, or don't bother](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/set-the-rules-in-the-first-ninety-days?hsLang=en)6 min
   
   In a 750-person experiment, seeing a rule-follower changed nothing; seeing someone on your side break one raised ...

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