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. Every company in Japan knows about the rare earth restrictions. Every CEO has read about the Strait of Hormuz. The information is available to everyone. That is precisely why acting on it is a leadership decision, not an analytical one. A robust strategy is explicit about the assumptions on which it depends — and it has contingent responses ready for when those assumptions fail. Most Japanese firms have not named their assumptions. They have not prepared contingent responses. They have collected information on international affairs and checked the economic security box. That is not a strategy. That is current affairs knowledge disguised as strategy.
The sense of urgency should not come from government. It should come from the CEO. A CEO who needs the government to tell them that China’s rare earth restrictions represent strategic risks to their business is not operating with the level of strategic awareness their role demands. The companies that are acting are not doing so because they received a government directive. They are doing so because their leaders decided that waiting is more dangerous than moving. The 60% that are collecting information but not acting are in a different kind of trouble — the kind that is harder to see because it looks like diligence. Reading the news is not a strategy. Deciding what to do about it is.
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