The Black Ships in the Harbor Again
This week, Softbank Group CEO Masayoshi Son stood in a Tokyo hotel ballroom and told Japan’s top executives that AI is coming for them. He invoked the Black Ships from Japanese history — U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853 with a squadron of four gunships — as a metaphor for a […]
Succession as a Discipline, Not an Event: What Toyota’s CEO Transition Gets Right
In February, Toyota announced that its next CEO would be Kenta Kon. He’s the company’s CFO, and for eight years he was the personal secretary to chairman Akio Toyoda. Some of the coverage outside Japan framed this as a family story. Akio Toyoda’s son, Daisuke, the founder’s great-grandson, was given a role at Toyota’s Motomachi […]
Uncertainty as Your Strategic Weapon
Japanese automobile manufacturer Suzuki just announced they are targeting Africa as their next major growth market. They’re calling it “the next India.” They entered India in 1983. At the time, the consensus said India was too poor, too complex, too far from the kind of premium market that serious companies were supposed to chase. The […]
Defy the Head Office, Deliver Customers Bad News, and Survive
A technology company CEO I know recently told me a story I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. His company was facing a crisis. Supply chain constraints — driven in large part by the AI-fueled explosion in chip demand — had caused component prices to triple. In some cases, product simply wasn’t available at […]
RAPID CULTURE CHANGE: CEO Roundtable Discussion Summary
Last week I presented some of the most provocative ideas from my book, Rapid Culture Change, at my CEO Roundtable here in Tokyo. The talk opens with a trick: I read out a list of dysfunctions that sound unmistakably Japanese — and then I tell the room they actually describe a French utility. It’s designed […]
Strategic Resilience Is Not Just a Supply Chain Problem
Japan’s government just designated 17 priority sectors for long-term protected investment — AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, shipbuilding, defense, and more. The headlines call it a return to Japan Inc. But what Japan is actually doing — whether its policymakers fully realize it or not — is attempting to build strategic resilience into the national economy. […]
Goodhart’s Law and the Tyranny of AI Metrics
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 […]
Reading the News Is Not a Strategy
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 […]
DAUNTLESS LEADERSHIP: CEO Roundtable Discussion Summary
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 […]
Do You Have an AI Strategy — or Just an AI Plan?
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. […]
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