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I run a monthly, private CEO Roundtable for my best clients and business leaders in the community whom I choose to invite and share the discussion summary with my community. During the May 2026 CEO Roundtable, we discussed “Strategy on Your Own Terms.” Strategy failures are rarely caused by insufficient data or inadequate frameworks. What determines success or failure is boldness in development and speed in execution. The session was structured around nine deliberately provocative statements, each grounded in real client experience.

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is moving to raise the thresholds required for activist shareholders to propose resolutions at company annual general meetings. This is not a technical adjustment to securities law. This is protection — for incumbent boards, for mediocre capital allocation, for the status quo that suits the people already comfortable inside it. And it reverses years of momentum that was, slowly but unmistakably, changing something real…

Honda just announced its first net loss since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — in 1957. Let that sink in. Nearly seventy years of profitability, and this is the year it ended. The company cancelled three EV models it had been engineering for years — writing off up to two and a half trillion yen in a single fiscal year. They calculated that a two and a half trillion yen write-down was better than launching into a market that had moved against the original business case. That fact alone is worth sitting with. This is not a story about a company that failed to try. This is a story […]

Today’s episode hits close to home for many of the CEOs I work with. Almost every week, I’m in a conversation with a senior leader who tells me the same thing: “Steve, my sales team is underperforming — and I don’t know what to do about it.” They see it in the behaviors. They see it in the results. And too often, they’ve already thrown money and workshops at the problem and gotten nowhere. So today, I’m giving you seven unconventional tactics that I actually advise my CEO clients to deploy. Not theory. Not frameworks that sound good in business school. Tactics you can act on — starting today.

Today I want to talk about strategy. Specifically, I want to talk about a mistake I see leaders make constantly when they set strategic goals — and I’m going to use a somewhat unusual teacher to make my point: a flight instructor from the early days of jet aviation. Bear with me. This is going somewhere useful…

Today I want to talk about one of the most common — and most avoidable — crises I see in foreign companies operating in Japan. A CEO is preparing to move on. Maybe he’s been recalled to head office. Maybe she’s found a compelling opportunity elsewhere. Maybe it’s simply time. And when that moment comes, they look around at their organization and realize: there is no one obviously ready to take over. Not because there aren’t good people. There are. But there are no developed people. No one who has been genuinely prepared for the role. No one who has been given the right experiences, the right responsibilities, the right […]

On March 11, 2011, the ground under Japan moved. You know what happened next. The earthquake. The tsunami. The Fukushima nuclear plant. The world watched Japan face one of the worst compound disasters in modern history. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, a Swedish clothing retailer had to figure out what to do with its Japan operation. H&M's acting CEO in Japan — a man named Hans Anderson — called headquarters in Stockholm. He needed instructions. He needed a plan. And headquarters told him: "We don't have one."