No One is Indispensable
The success of any business rarely depends on any key manager or executive. It is only the mistaken belief in the indispensability of an executive that masks and suppresses the talent of others. Your leadership bench is often hiding in plain sight.
Adapt the Company to Your Style
The most successful expat CEOs in Japan I know never adapt their leadership style to their company’s culture. They adapt their company’s culture to their leadership style, and there is no reason you cannot do the same in your company in Japan.
Three Success Factors for Robust Strategy
All strategic plans are perfect on paper in a theoretical static world. However, no strategic plan ever survives confrontation with the ever-changing realities of business and your perception of them. A robust strategy is one that can adapt rapidly to change in the environment as well as to change in your understanding of that environment. […]
Cultivating Boldness
The scarcest resource in a business today is not talent, money, or technical ability, but rather independent thought and the courage to act on it.
CSR is No Indulgence
I find it disturbing when business leaders choose to use CSR to compensate for ethically questionable business.
Principles Reign Supreme Over Values
A company I know has a stated value of innovation that it parades out in front employees on a regular basis, but rarely, if ever, do any staff or managers innovate anything—including staff in research and development!
Increase Your Attrition
Many companies are struggling to find the qualified people they need, so they resort to retaining the people they have whether qualified or not. They fight to eliminate or at least reduce rates of attrition when it is increased attrition that can do the business the most good. Retention of the best is all that […]
Retain Just the Best
You want to retain just the best in your organization. Why? Retention, per se, is no business objective. It is retaining the best that counts, even in the tightest of labor markets.
Don’t be a Japanologist
Japan-fatigue is real and can be fatal to your success and career. Don’t try to explain how Japan is different to executives in your head office. While such conversations are great for dinner parties, talks with students, and war stories with friends, unless executives in your head office are interested in Japanology as a hobby, […]
Your Own Worst Enemy
Businesses can be their own worst enemies when business process supplants business thinking. The CEO of a large industrial American company in Japan told me of difficulties he faces in buying from a division of a large Japanese industrial company, not because of a lack of will to sell on their part, but rather unnecessary and […]
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