グッドハートの法則とAIメトリクスの専制
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 […]
ニュースを読むことは戦略ではない
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. […]
CEOラウンドテーブル：不屈のリーダーシップ
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 […]
AIストラテジーがあるか、それともAIプランだけか？
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 […]
少数派の繁栄：44%という数字が的外れな理由
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 […]
社員の起業家マインドセット
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 […]
破壊者が破壊されるとき：鈴木敏文氏が残した教訓
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 […]
市場参入マニフェスト
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…
CEO Roundtable Discusssion Summary: Strategy on Your Own Terms
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.
株主アクティビズムの建設的不調和
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…
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