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. Not growth. Not export dominance. Resilience. The capacity to absorb shocks that nobody predicted, keep functioning, and adapt. And it raises a question every business leader in Japan should be asking right now — not about government policy, but about their own organization. How resilient is your strategy, really?
Here is the uncomfortable truth about most corporate strategy in Japan — and most strategy I encounter globally. It is built on assumptions that nobody has written down. No strategy means much without a statement of the assumptions upon which it is based. Yet I rarely see a statement of assumptions in strategy documents. What I see instead is a justification of why the strategy is right and a list of tactics. That is a plan. It is not a strategy. The distinction matters enormously right now. A plan tells you what to do if everything goes as expected. A strategy tells you how to think and act when it doesn’t.
So here is the question I want to leave you with. Take the strategy currently guiding your business. Can you state the three or four assumptions it depends on? Are they written down anywhere? Who is monitoring them — and what is your contingent response if the most important one turns out to be wrong tomorrow? If you cannot answer those questions, you do not have a resilient strategy. You have a plan that assumed the world would cooperate. The world is not cooperating. That is not a reason for paralysis. It is the reason strategy matters more than ever.
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