Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Content Marketing
In this course, you’ll learn how compelling blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media can reach customers and drive sales. You’ll also learn steps for creating an effective content marketing plan, and some important ways to measure its impact and success.
Content marketing is a essential digital marketing strategy for companies looking to provide relevant and useful information to support your community and attract new customers.
Get started on your content marketing journey today.
Sustainable Innovation in Times of Disruption: Choices for a Better Society
There are opportunities for progress all around us. The key is to innovate on these opportunities sustainably.
To help identify most effective path forward, you'll need to gain a global perspective to these challenges in an open discussion. How can Japan and the world take action to create a more sustainable, innovative world? Where do you fit in?
It's time to find out.
Social Media & Digital Communications: Impact on Global Public Opinion
Social and digital media have dominated the communications industry for decades. But it's no secret that social media has the power to sway public opinion, and the way in which many companies use these platforms could be seen as manipulative.
What do companies need to be aware of when utilizing social and digital media? How can these mediums be used to better communicate strategically with the world?
Discover what top media and communications experts have to say.
CAGE Distance Framework
Want to expand overseas? The CAGE distance framework can help ensure you're constructing a solid global strategy in four areas: cultural, administrative, economic, and geographic. Learn how to leverage useful differences between countries, identify potential obstacles, and achieve global business success.
Servant Leadership
There's more to leadership than driving a team to profit. In fact, there's a word for looking beyond self-interest to prioritize individual growth: servant leadership. Try this course for a quick breakdown of what that is, how it works, and how it can lead to organizational success.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Strategy: Understanding the External Environment
To plan strategy on any level, you need to understand your company's external environment. In fact, your level of understanding can impact hiring, budgeting, marketing, or nearly any other part of the business world. Want to learn how to do all that? This course from GLOBIS Unlimited is the perfect first step!
Using Japanese Values to Thrive in Global Business
Japanese companies have unique cultural, communication, and operational challenges. But they also have values that have led to remarkable longevity. Check out this seminar to hear how these values help earn trust from overseas head offices and develop employees.
Marketing: Reaching Your Target
Every company works hard to get its products into the hands of customers. Are you doing everything you can to compete? In this course, you’ll find a winning formula to turn a product idea into real sales. Follow along through the fundamentals of the marketing mix and see how companies successfully bring products to market.
Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
Want to compare your performance vs. a competitor? Or evaluate a potential vendor? Then you'll need to conduct a financial analysis. This course will teach you how to use three financial statements and evaluate financial performance in terms of profitability, efficiency, soundness, growth, and overall strength.
Career Anchors
What drives you to be good at your job?
Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.
Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!
Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
The key ingredient to success? Passion.
Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.
This article covers the sales day (November 3) for the 14 teams of elementary schoolchildren entering Junior Economy College in Tatsuno. Part 1 is here.
On November 3rd at the city festival, all 14 teams sold their wares. All sold food, while some also sold crafts they had made.
The sales day started very early. Due to hygiene rules, all food needed to be prepared that morning. The teams were split into two groups, each heading to a local elementary school at 6:30 am to prepare their food. They had 90 minutes. With limited preparation time, it was the teams that took time to plan and decide exactly who did what that were most efficient. The team that had the furthest to travel arrived flustered a few minutes late. They were a little behind already, even before they started. Three of the 5 members were peeling locally grown potatoes, while 2 washed. A couple of them ended up cutting their fingers, eating further into their valuable time. Another team just seemed to walk on water. They had all their products—sandwiches with yakisoba noodles using locally produced soy sauce and basil sauce—cooked, bagged and boxed with 30 minutes to spare. It was almost magical, like seeing Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints from The Goal in live action.
Learning Point #5
Be sure to understand your process.
These kids only got one chance. Yet they knew their roles and exactly what to do. In the business world, companies can kaizen (continuously improve) as they go. But when you’ve got only one chance to sell, it helps to do practice runs or make prototypes. I didn’t ask the children in this case, but I suspect they practiced before the big day.
In Japan, presentation is key, and the children can definitely be proud of what they created. Some teams expended effort on their uniforms or on the stalls. One team even created a stamp with their company name, branding every single one of their homemade cookies. Their level of attention to detail was exemplary.
Learning Point #6
Attention to detail with branding can be a key success factor.
In the world of startups and self-help books for procrastinators (which I usually read when I should be doing something else), they say perfection is the enemy of the good. But showing you care is often enough to make your product extra special, delighting the customer and making them put their hand in their pocket. It’s called branding and it’s easy to forget sometimes.
One of the special rules for this year’s competition was to try to use locally produced ingredients in at least one of the products each team sold. Teams didn’t have to do this. But those that did would receive a weighted score acknowledging this effort. Tatsuno is famous for soy sauce. The city is home to Higashimaru, Japan’s third biggest producer. Soumen noodles are another main product with Ibonoito, a famous Japanese brand (actually an association of noodle producers) based here. Its third major product is very high quality leather. Hyogo Prefecture produces about 70% of all Japanese cattle hide and of that 40% is produced in Tatsuno. So – perhaps not surprisingly – many teams used one or more of these products within their offerings. A couple of teams made keyrings and even wallets out of leather. Many used soy sauce. I liked one team’s idea to sell locally grown potted plants. They were unique (no team had thought of this before) and easy to sell. And something I learned later is that another of the teams even went to meet an organic farmer to thoroughly understand their raw materials.
Learning Point #7
When you have a skill, make best use of it.
When you don’t, learn. The teams making leather products made great use of their existing talent. The team that interviewed the organic farmer could use this information when selling the product. Both make great stories when speaking to potential customers. And a great story is a wonderful way of creating value.
The stalls closed at 3:00 pm. By the end, every single team had managed to sell all their products. Apparently, this had never happened before in four years of competition. The first team sold out around 1:00 pm, quickly followed by a few more teams. It’s better for the heart to sell early. But on the other hand, teams selling out closer to the deadline were probably better planners, while the early birds could well have sold more.
Over the next two hours, the sense of panic was palpable as the teams with product remaining became more and more anxious to sell. Gradually, as panic exceeded their fear of not selling, the kids got braver, venturing out of their stalls, canvassing harder and louder to make a sale. Some teams even decided to reduce their prices. It was great to see how a sense of urgency created action, like John Kotter’s 8 Steps to Change in fast forward!
Learning Point #8
Don’t wait until the last minute to push for sales.
This learning point is one I really must take to heart. Even though I have lots of experience in sales, I prefer working through introductions than cold calling. When calling in Japanese rather than English, the telephone still scares the life out of me! I have to psych myself up before making a call. I know that this fear has meant lost opportunities for me.
In the final article, we’ll look at how the teams wound down their companies as well as some of the results.