Influencer Marketing
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Leading High Performing Remote Teams
How can leaders ensure that performance remains high in remote or hybrid-work environments?
Design Thinking
Learn the 5 phases of this problem-solving methodology and switch from technology-centered to user-centered thinking.
Gantt Chart
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Navigating Change Successfully
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Halo Effect
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Anchoring and Framing
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ZOPA and BATNA
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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.
Blockchain
Blockchain is one of the most captivating technologies out there. Learn what it is and how to make use of its opportunities in this short online course.
Mehrabian’s Rule
The 7-38-55 Rule, developed by Albert Mehrabian, suggests that effective communication relies less on the words we choose than on our tone of our voice, appearance, and body language. Learn how to put this theory to use for better communication in business.
Pareto Principle
Your time and resources are limited. Efficiency means learning to prioritize. The Pareto principle (also called the 80-20 rule) can help you identify the best way to use your time for maximum results.
Country Analysis Framework
Overseas expansion requires careful planning. The Country Analysis Framework can help you look beyond an industry-level analysis and reframe your view based on performance, strategy, and context. Try this short course to learn how it works.
SECI Model
The SECI model illustrates how knowledge is created and shared. Learn how to put it to use for best practices, and how the Japanese concept of “ba” fits in to broaden your perspective.
Johari Window Model
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Sunk Costs
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CAGE Distance Framework
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Groupthink
Groupthink refers to group pressure and the perception of consensus which together lead to ill-formed decisions—or even unnecessary risks. Learn to identify the warning signs of groupthink and apply countermeasures in this online course.
Deductive and Inductive Reasoning
Solving problems with the best results means using two types of thinking: deductive and inductive reasoning. In this online course, learn to form a broad premise, make observations, and form conclusions from different perspectives.
Critical Thinking: Hypothesis-Driven Thinking
Anyone can come up with a good idea. The real challenge is putting that idea into action. In this online course, explore how to form compelling, testable hypotheses and bring ideas to life in your own organization.
Critical Thinking: Structured Reasoning
Even a few simple techniques for logical decision making and persuasion can vastly improve your skills as a leader. Explore how critical thinking can help you evaluate complex business problems, reduce bias, and devise effective solutions.
Critical Thinking: Problem-Solving
Problem-solving is a central business skill, and yet it's the one many people struggle with most. This course will show you how to apply critical thinking techniques to common business examples, avoid misunderstandings, and get at the root of any problem.
How to Dream
Join globally renowned author and Columbia Business School professor Dr. Sheena Iyengar as she explains how to approach your dreams with a new perspective. Learn to reflect on what you long to accomplish and what stands in your way.
Logical Thinking
Logical thinking is at the heart of confident, persuasive decisions. This course will equip you with a five-point approach to more becoming a more logical thinker. Learn to classify ideas and distinguish fact from opinion.
Investing & Diversity: The Changing Faces of Venture Capitalists
Is the venture capital industry embracing diversity in investors? Watch global venture capitalists from around the world discuss the state of things and what needs to be done for a more inclusive future.
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.
Organizational Behavior and Leadership
Ever wonder what makes a great leader? Whether your role requires leadership or not, understanding organizational behavior is useful for your career. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can set you on your way.
Leadership vs. Management
Leadership and management are different skills, but today’s leaders must have both. Try out this course from GLOBIS Unlimited to understand the difference, as well as when and why each skill is necessary for motivation, communication, and value.
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.
Turnaround Leadership: The Differences Between Japan and the West
What's the best way for leaders to communicate a shift in corporate strategy? How do you even know when it's time for such a change? This course explains how Japan might have one answer, Western companies another.
Conflict Management
Conflicts in the workplace are inevitable. But they can lead to positive outcomes if they’re managed well. Check out this online course for a two-step process that can help you manage conflict successfully.
Evernote Founder: How Tech Startups Can Break through in Japan
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Women Empowerment: Lessons from Cartier
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Marketing: Reaching Your Target
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Marketing Mix
Seeing good products into the hands of customers is no easy task. The marketing mix can help. It's a collection of strategies and tactics companies utilize to get customers to purchase their products or services, and is an essential part of the overall marketing process.
The Principles of Negotiation
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Negotiation: Creating Value
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Finding Your Life Purpose with Ikigai
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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
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Confirmation Bias
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An Investor's Lesson to Entrepreneurs
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Managerial Accounting
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Finance Basics: 1
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Basic Accounting: Financial Analysis
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Career Anchors
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Digital Marketing Psychology to Transform Your Business
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Pyramid Structure
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Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi
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AI First Companies – Implementation and Impact
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Technovate in the Era of Industry 4.0
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Technovate Thinking
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Product Life Cycle
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Logic Tree
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MECE Principle
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TL;DR: Social media has evolved far beyond the days of viewing your friends’ latest posts. Algorithms, using predictive machine learning, now decide what content users engage with based on what they most likely want to see. And in today’s attention economy, where businesses value attention as finite currency, “paying” attention to the screen costs more than spent time.
When social media first emerged in the mid-1990s—via social networking sites like Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com—they were simple online communities with a clear purpose: to connect people with one another. They were also straightforward: posts appeared in chronological order, surfacing on users’ feeds purely based on time.
Today, social media is a complex and dramatically different landscape. What you see on your social media feed is less about recency—and now about relevance.
Behind every Facebook story swipe and Instagram reel recommendation, social media algorithms decide what content viewers see and how often they see it. These editorial engines of the digital world have evolved from simple ranking formulas into sophisticated artificial intelligence models capable of filtering out the daily deluge of overwhelming content to zero in on what users will most likely engage with.
With 4.9 billion people (around 60% of the global population) now spending an average of 2.5 hours a day online, social media has transformed from a primarily community-focused platform into a commerce-driven ecosystem and search engine—powered by algorithms designed to capture our attention for as long as possible.
As social media algorithms grow more powerful, they raise deeper questions about the relationship between attention, technology and public discourse. While algorithms solve the practical problem of information overload, their engagement-driven incentives also shape behavior in ways that impact cognition, mental health and social ethics.
Understanding how these algorithmic systems work—and the risks they create—is increasingly essential to navigate today’s overwhelming information economy.
The Fundamentals of Algorithmic Ranking: From EdgeRank to Machine Learning.
Social media algorithms trace their origins back to early ranking systems. EdgeRank, launched by Facebook in 2006, was the first algorithm that organized user newsfeeds to display relative content—relying on three factors to determine content relevance:
Affinity measured the relationship between a user and a content creator. Posts from people or pages a user frequently interacted with were most likely to appear on their feeds.
Weight prioritized certain types of engagement. Comments and shares on posts signalled stronger interest than simple likes, and therefore carried more influence.
Finally, Time Decay ensured that newer posts were prioritized while older content gradually lost visibility.
While effective, EdgeRank was just the beginning of algorithmic development. As social media use and content volumes exploded globally, platforms required far more sophisticated systems to curate content experiences for billions of users.
Today’s modern social media platforms—including Instagram, TikTok and Youtube—now rely on machine learning systems that analyze a vast number of behavioral signals in real time.
Facebook, for example, abandoned EdgeRank in 2011. By 2013, its machine learning algorithm ranked content according to more than 100,000 factors—including watch time, scrolling speed, engagement history and viewing patterns across different devices.
Another prominent example is the recommendation system behind TikTok’s “For You” feed. Content is first shown to small groups of users. If the algorithm detects strong engagement, such as high watch completion rates or repeated viewing, it is distributed to larger audiences. If engagement is low, it quickly disappears from the recommendation cycle.
This shift represents a massive, fundamental change in the logic of content discovery—using behavioral data to predict what will capture a user’s attention.
The Economic Logic of Curation.
Algorithms primarily serve a practical purpose: managing attention scarcity in an overloaded information economy.
With billions of social media users producing massive volumes of content daily—whether that’s 500 million tweets on Twitter, 95 million Instagram photos and videos or 750,000 hours worth of videos on YouTube—algorithms necessarily filter out a limited set of relevant posts from an overwhelming pool of information that users would not be able to process.
This filtering mechanism isn’t just a usability feature. It underpins the entire business ecosystem of today’s commerce-driven social media landscape. Social media platforms generate most of their revenue through advertising—and the longer users remain engaged, the more economically valuable attention becomes.
Today, approximately 41% of businesses rely on social media algorithms to increase revenue through targeted, data-driven marketing. By analyzing user behavior, platforms are able to match advertisements with users most likely to respond with action—dramatically increasing marketing efficiency.
Algorithms, therefore, are not neutral technologies. They are strategically powerful economic engines driving the attention economy—designed to maximize and extend user engagement and optimize advertising performance with the aim of converting attention into profit.
The Dark Side of Design: Hijacking the Human Brain.
The same design principles that allow social media algorithms to effectively capture attention draw heavily on behavioral psychology. One particularly influential psychological conditioning technique is variable reward timing: a mechanism long used in gambling machines.
Slot machines are effective because they thrive on unpredictable dopamine-driven rewards. The uncertain timing of wins drives compulsive, repetitive behavior and dopamine spikes among players hooked on the possibility of a payout with every gamble.
Social media platforms replicate this mechanism. Unpredictable likes, comments and notifications to posts or infinitely scrolling and swiping for that next funny video and viral post trigger small bursts of dopamine in the brain—reinforcing these same habits.
Unlike traditional media, which has obvious stopping points—such as the end of a television program or newspaper page—social feeds are designed to continue indefinitely.
Over time, machine learning systems learn which types of content generate the strongest engagement. The result is an addictive feedback loop in which algorithms continuously refine stimulating content which will most likely keep users engaged for as long as possible. Studies show that social media addiction produces the same neural circuitry seen in gambling addicts and recreational drug users.
Additionally, rapid short-form videos that range from 5-90 seconds—popularized by TikToks, Instagram Stories and YouTube Shorts—have conditioned the brain to switch focus quickly rather than focus deeply. Research shows that average attention spans on digital screens have dropped to 47 seconds as opposed to 2.5 minutes more than two decades ago.
Psychological and Social Risks: Cognitive Issues, Echo Chambers and Mental Health.
Declining attention spans aside, the cognitive consequences caused by internet and social media addiction are increasingly visible—especially among adolescents and young adults.
From impaired memory and decision-making, decreased cognitive flexibility and reduced impulse control to mental fatigue and “brain rot”—neurobiological and structural changes in the brain erode the ability to focus on complex tasks. Deep reading, analytical thinking and long-form content comprehension all require sustained comprehension.
In other words, the same algorithmic systems that optimize engagement are reshaping the way we process information.
This has drastic implications for the future of education and work. Creative thinking, critical analysis, problem-solving and strategy development depend on our ability to engage with ideas over extended periods of time—but as digital environments become increasingly fragmented, maintaining that capacity becomes challenging.
Additionally, the mental health implications of social media addiction are equally concerning—especially among the youth. A number of studies reveal correlations between heavy social media use and rising levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, low self-esteem, body issues and suicidal ideation.
Algorithmic curation further impacts a broader social landscape.
Heavily personalized feeds lead to echo chambers and digital bubbles that reinforce existing views while limiting exposure to diverse perspectives. As emotionally charged content tends to generate stronger reactions and higher engagement rates, algorithms may also unintentionally amplify content that is polarizing, sensational or misleading—creating a trust vacuum that erodes balanced and carefully verified information.
Algorithmic Exploitation & Ethical Guardrails.
Another serious problem is the growing exploitation of algorithmic systems by bad faith actors—fueling distrust and societal division.
Advances in generative AI have made it easier to produce large volumes of convincing fraudulent content—such as deepfakes, fake news, deceptive advertisements, phishing messages and scams. These can be rapidly scaled across platforms by exploiting algorithmic distribution systems to reach massive audiences.
Disinformation campaigns also benefit from algorithmic amplification. Highly emotional and provocative narratives spread faster than factual, rational and nuanced explanations—allowing malicious agents to shape public discourse.
Fortunately, governments and regulators are increasingly responding to these global challenges. Emerging policy initiatives such as the European Union’s Digital Fairness Act aim to introduce stricter transparency requirements and accountability for algorithmic systems and strengthen protections against manipulation.
Meanwhile, private and public organizations are investing in Active Cyber Defense measures to mitigate real-time threats—including AI-powered fraud detection systems, identity verification tools and advanced content moderation technologies.
Businesses and brands are also reshaping their digital strategies according to shifting algorithmic dynamics. Authenticity and trust are now becoming strategic assets in a saturated, algorithm-driven, AI-powered content market.
Many social platforms are moving away from “engagement bait” and prioritizing authentic engagement—interactions that reflect genuine conversation and community participation. Instead of chasing viral reach, brands are focusing on building sustainable relationships within smaller, highly engaged communities.
Conclusions: Balancing Personalization with Well-Being.
The future of social media will likely depend on achieving more balanced platform models that combine personalization with transparency, ethical design, and responsible governance.
For individuals, the most practical response is awareness. Understanding how algorithms shape digital environments allows users to establish healthier digital boundaries—auditing their time online, being more conscious of the kinds of content they consume, diversifying information sources, and prioritizing real-world relationships.
Ultimately, the question is no longer whether algorithms curate our digital experiences. It is how society chooses to design—and govern—the systems that increasingly capture our attention.
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