Indomitable Selling Capability: CEO Roundtable Discussion Summary
A sales manager in Tokyo sends every unannounced salesperson packing, in full view of his own team. His CEO in Kobe receives every one of them herself. Two leaders, same company, two standards, and the salespeople live by the one they watch every day. The standard for your salesforce is set by you, not by your sales managers, HR or external trainers. I walk through the seven principles from my CEO Roundtable on building an indomitable selling capability, from treating sales as a noble profession to making weekly role plays non-negotiable. Then come the hardest questions CEOs in the room raised: whether you can really let people go in Japan, […]
The Golden Rolodex Trap
A vice president of sales sat across from me after a client visit, and he admitted something that should have troubled him far more than it did. He wasn’t sure he could get back into that office alone… My book, Indomitable Selling Capability, is available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/INDOMITABLE-SELLING-CAPABILITY-Building-salesforce/dp/B0GW4P7BLB/
You Don’t Have a Governance Problem With Your Japanese Partners — You Have an Intelligence Gap
Citigroup just grew its Tokyo investment banking team by 30 percent. Daiwa Securities is rebuilding its M&A staff from 640 bankers to 900. Goldman Sachs committed over 5 billion dollars to Japan’s mid-cap market over the next decade. Every one of these firms is chasing the same thing: a Japanese M&A market that hit 350 billion dollars last year — the highest since anyone started counting in 1998. If you’re a foreign executive running a business in Japan, you probably read that news the way most people do. Interesting. Background noise. Somebody else’s deal. It isn’t. And the reason has nothing to do with M&A. It has to do with […]
The Fight Is Inside the Building
In every story four healthcare leaders in Japan told me, the first “no” came from inside their own organizations. Not from regulators. Not from competitors. For anyone leading a company in Japan, that changes where the real work of change lies. I walk through five lessons from a leadership panel I moderated in Tokyo: why leaders who win carry the risk personally, why you should stop trying to convert the unconvinced, why institutions move on self-interest rather than mission, why staying close to the work matters, and four things leaders should stop accepting as the way things are done in Japan. If you are interested in more on leading change […]
Japan’s ¥1 Trillion Bet: Capacity Isn’t the Constraint. Coherence Is.
Japan just committed roughly one trillion yen to double its shipbuilding capacity by 2035. Roughly ¥213 billion to Imbari Shipbuilding and others as the first tranche. The goal — reclaim the market share Japan lost to South Korea and China. It’s bold. It’s audacious. On paper, it’s exactly the kind of strategy I tell CEOs to pursue: state the vision of the future first, then work backward to the present. Don’t let today’s constraints dilute tomorrow’s ambition. There’s only one problem. The assumption underneath this entire plan isn’t just unstated — it’s wrong…
The ‘Who’ Question of Strategy
Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi wants to spend 370 trillion yen. The government’s own numbers say she doesn’t have enough people to spend it well. That’s not a footnote. That’s the story. Takaichi’s cabinet has approved a long-term blueprint for public-private investment across seventeen strategic sectors — AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, defense, biotech, shipbuilding. The claim is that this level of government-directed capital will double Japan’s real gross domestic product growth rate, from zero point seven percent a year over the last decade to one point four percent through 2040. The pitch even includes knock-on economic benefits running up to twenty times the investment itself. Meanwhile, that same policy apparatus projects […]
Japan’s Luddism Toward AI Is a Leadership Trust Problem, Not a Technological One
An employee at a Japanese financial services company was given a labor-intensive task — modify an enormous spreadsheet of data manually, using a mind-numbing repetitive process. It would have taken days. He chose instead to combine some AI and automation tools — available in the company for anyone to use — and completed the task in an hour. Was he praised for his innovative ingenuity and initiative? Far from it. His colleagues were angered that he demonstrated how their jobs could possibly be replaced — or how he made it more difficult to justify overtime pay, which many rely on to supplement their income. His managers were annoyed that he […]
DISRUPT OR BE DISRUPTED: CEO Roundtable Discussion Summary
A few years ago, I stood up at an Economist Corporate Network event in Tokyo, surrounded by executives from some of the best-known companies in the world. And the entire session was about one thing: how to avoid being disrupted. I couldn’t sit still for that. So I said it out loud: somewhere in Tokyo, right now, there’s a parallel event happening. A room full of people talking about how to disrupt every business represented in this room. Why on earth should we just stand for that? We should be disrupting them. That’s the whole premise of my book, Disrupt or Be Disrupted. And it’s the reason I brought it […]
The Tyranny of KPIs
A sales team had inventory. A customer wanted to buy it. The company needed the revenue. The salespeople said no. Not because they couldn’t sell. Not because the product wasn’t available. They refused to sell because the transaction would have made their sales forecast look inaccurate — and they were being evaluated on forecast accuracy. So they turned away a willing customer, with cash in hand, to protect a KPI. When the company’s president found out, he was livid. He killed the KPI entirely — in direct defiance of his global headquarters. And he was right to do it…
No Country for Old Men – An Homage
A CEO client of mine was fired. No performance issue. His results were outstanding. A regional VP sat down with him, said it was to talk about the future, and then told him he was out. The reason: “to make room for new blood and reduce headcount.” He found out later he wasn’t alone. Same VP. Same reason. Different executives. Every single one of them was over fifty. Age was the offense. Here’s what that VP didn’t understand. Wisdom is not for sale. It cannot be trained into someone in a workshop. It comes from years of doing the job. Getting it wrong. Getting it right. Staying calm when the […]
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