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Japanese automobile manufacturer Suzuki just announced they are targeting Africa as their next major growth market. They’re calling it “the next India.” They entered India in 1983. At the time, the consensus said India was too poor, too complex, too far from the kind of premium market that serious companies were supposed to chase. The case for saying no was overwhelming. Suzuki said yes anyway. Forty years later, India is their most important market. It is their production hub. It is where 60% of their planned capital investment is going. And now they’re doing it again — this time in Africa. You might be thinking: interesting story, but I run […]

A technology company CEO I know recently told me a story I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. His company was facing a crisis. Supply chain constraints — driven in large part by the AI-fueled explosion in chip demand — had caused component prices to triple. In some cases, product simply wasn’t available at any price. The problem was that his company had signed contracts with customers. Fixed prices. Delivery timelines. Penalty clauses for non-delivery. And now the entire basis of those contracts had been invalidated by the market. Head office issued its missive: go to your customers and force through price increases. The contracts say what they say, […]

Last week I presented some of the most provocative ideas from my book, Rapid Culture Change, at my CEO Roundtable here in Tokyo. The talk opens with a trick: I read out a list of dysfunctions that sound unmistakably Japanese — and then I tell the room they actually describe a French utility. It’s designed to get a room full of experienced Japan hands to catch themselves mid-assumption. What followed was forty-five minutes of pushback, war stories, and at least one direct challenge to the title of my own book. Here’s what the room actually wrestled with…

Japan’s government just designated 17 priority sectors for long-term protected investment — AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, shipbuilding, defense, and more. The headlines call it a return to Japan Inc. But what Japan is actually doing — whether its policymakers fully realize it or not — is attempting to build strategic resilience into the national economy. Not growth. Not export dominance. Resilience. The capacity to absorb shocks that nobody predicted, keep functioning, and adapt. And it raises a question every business leader in Japan should be asking right now — not about government policy, but about their own organization. How resilient is your strategy, really? Here is the uncomfortable truth about […]

Amazon employees are running AI agents in the background. Not to get work done. But to inflate their token consumption scores. Meta employees are doing it. Microsoft employees are doing it. The phenomenon even has a name now: tokenmaxxing. Workers gaming an internal leaderboard — burning through AI usage metrics that mean nothing — in order to satisfy managers who have confused the measure with the outcome. This is not an AI problem. It is a management problem as old as management itself. And it has a name: Goodhart’s Law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The moment you attach a reward or […]

Japan’s government recently released its 2026 white paper on manufacturing industries. The headline finding: 60% of Japanese firms are now working on economic security measures, up from 40% the year before. That sounds like progress. It isn’t. Read the fine print. A large share of that 60% were merely collecting information on international affairs. In other words, they are reading the news and calling it strategy. This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between a company that will survive the next supply chain shock and one that will not. The shock is not coming. It is already here. Strategy failures are rarely the result of insufficient data. […]

I once asked an HR director a simple question. Two candidates. Identical resumes. One had never failed at anything. The other had failed so many times he’d lost count. Which one do you hire? His answer came without hesitation: the one who never failed. To him, it was obvious. He was wrong. Here’s what that answer actually measured. Not talent. Not judgment. Fear. A candidate who has never failed has never been tested. He’s avoided risk long enough to keep a clean record. The other one has been in the room when things went wrong, and stayed in the room long enough to fix them. Show me someone who never […]

A new Gartner study has just landed a finding that every CEO in Japan should read carefully. Among organizations deploying AI and autonomous business capabilities, approximately 80% report workforce reductions. Yet those reductions do not appear to translate into ROI. Companies cutting headcount with AI are getting roughly the same returns as those that aren’t. Gartner’s conclusion was direct: workforce reductions may create budget room, but they do not create return. This is not a technology problem. It is a strategy problem. The companies failing to get returns from AI are not executing a strategy. They are executing a plan. These are not the same thing — and confusing them […]

A new survey is making headlines across the business press. Only 44% of employees globally feel they are thriving at work. In Japan, the number is even lower — just 31%. And only 8% of employees in Japan report being engaged at work. Eight percent. The global average is 20%, which is already nothing to celebrate. The reason being cited? AI anxiety. Workers are losing confidence. They fear their roles are about to be replaced by machines. Here is the fundamental flaw in engagement surveys — and it applies equally to this thriving statistic. They treat every employee as equal. The excellent and the mediocre get the same weight. The […]

Let me ask you a direct question. Are you an entrepreneur — or are you a careerist? Most salaried employees are careerists. Their decisions are filtered through a specific lens — what advances the career, protects the position, avoids the wrong kind of visibility. The incentives are different from an entrepreneur’s. The risk calculus is different. And no KPI scheme in the world fully closes that gap. But here’s what’s important: careerist and entrepreneurial thinking are not mutually exclusive. Some salaried people think and act like owners. The ones who do are markedly different from those who don’t — and the difference shows up in how they handle decisions, spend […]