ポッドキャスト

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 […]

Toshifumi Suzuki died last week. He was 93. And if you have spent any time in Japan, you have felt his work every single day — even if you never knew his name. He was the man who built the konbini. Not just as a business — as infrastructure. As a part of daily life so essential that most people in Japan cannot imagine the country without it. In 1973, when every analyst was certain that small neighbourhood stores were finished and the future belonged to American-style supermarkets, Suzuki looked at that consensus and decided it was wrong. He licensed the 7-Eleven brand, opened Japan’s first 24-hour convenience store, and […]

A reporter from The Telegraph in the UK contacted me for my views on the challenges of market entry in Japan. What follows is my manifesto — a set of principles I believe apply not just to Japan, but to any market, anywhere in the world…

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…