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. […]
No One Has a Five-Year Strategy
No one has a five-year strategy, or even a three-year strategy much less a twenty-year strategic plan. How much do you think Blackberry’s five-year strategy meant the day that Apple announced the iPhone? Business conditions are too unpredictable for most strategic plans to mean anything even beyond six months, and even that might be too […]
Entrepreneurial Spirit of the Employed
A CEO client of mine has been asking his senior executives to be more “entrepreneurial” in their approach to the business, and he is certainly not the first one to do so.
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.
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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