The Growth Zone

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/

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]