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.
A virtual startup company
This is the first time I will be entering the majestic Mori Tower, and I’ve arranged to meet my MBA classmate Monthakarn Baipowongse ‘under the spider’. Just like in my case, her internship is the last official part of the Globis MBA experience, and I wanted to share her experience as an intern in a virtual company with you.
Kenja is all about cloud computing, offering a platform where you can communicate in ‘rooms’. Like other cloud services, you can upload files, share calendars, but Kenja is much more. It’s a one-stop solution to have everything you need to keep connected in one platform, from chat and sharing files to video conferences and setting appointments, with a user-friendly self-explanatory design .
Because Monthakarn and I shared our internship advisor, I had been hearing stories about her experience, and I was able to visit Kenja in the Academyhills library. I interviewed Monthakarn and Ted Katagi, Kenja’s CEO, on the 49th floor of Mori tower on a beautiful bright day. The view from the large glass windows was spectacular, the space open and bright and welcoming, it seems like a nice place to work.
Ted Katagi: “Rather than paying a lot of money for a private small office, I chose to work from more public locations from the beginning. In fact, when we were only 3 employees, we used to gather at a local Starbucks to work. I decided to relocate to Academyhills because of the excellent location and services they offer; we can use the public spaces or reserve a private room when necessary. But still, all our employees are extremely free in choosing where they do their work, be it at home, here, or in a different location.”
The virtual company is a new trend, but is not yet well-known or accepted in Japan. You will find many freelancers working away in locations like this one, but as soon as a company has more than a few employees they tend to revert to the traditional system. Kenja now has 12 employees, but because of the nature of the development work, not more than 2 or 3 employees have met each other in real life. Even Ted Katagi, as CEO, has only met 3 of his 12 employees in the flesh. In fact, Kenja Rooms was basically developed as a tool to communicate effectively with the employees, who are working not only in Japan but also in other Asian countries and Europe.
Pros
For employees, the flexibility the company offers is certainly appealing, to work when and where is most convenient, it’s a dream many people share. For Ted Katagi, it means that he has access to global talent wherever they might be located. Many of his current employees are referrals from other developers he has employed, it’s a close-knit community.
For a startup, the fact that he has no need to have an official office structure is also helpful. The overhead cost can be kept low, and any work that is not directly related to the development of the product, like HR or accounting, is outsourced.
The fact that the employees are located all over the world actually means that a lot of thought goes into being effective at work. At Kenja, there is a daily morning meeting through video conference, where all employees share the work they are currently busy with. The daily meeting also means that any new developments can be swiftly dealt with; the mindset of CEO and employees is extremely flexible.
Cons
It takes a special kind of person to work at a virtual startup; people have to be able to deal with the absence of structure and the freedom and flexibility this job comes with. Because the company is still in startup phase, the number of employees is limited, there are no set job descriptions, and depending on the necessity people fill in different roles. This can be a challenge.
Ted Katagi: “When you interview someone you have not met in real life, of course you try to figure out if this person will fit in your company or system. I try to pick people very carefully, what I look for are people that are self-motivated and that don’t need day-to-day instructions. This kind of job can be quite tough, you need to get used to meeting virtually and setting your own boundaries when to work and when not to. Rather than selecting people on the basis of a skill set, I look for people with the right mindset. Skills can be taught, after all. However, sometimes it just doesn’t work out. I’ve had instances where an employee was moonlighting other business on the side, which taught me to temper the trust I have in people with a system of checking on their work regularly. Still, after those initial glitches we have now arrived at a stable system, and I firmly believe that the advantages outweigh the challenges.”
Interning at a virtual company
Monthakarn tells me that although the daily virtual meetings are very useful, there is of course a difference in how you interact with your colleagues. Socializing over a cup of coffee is only possible with the people she meets in the office, but she compares this to being part of a department in a bigger company where you also only know the people you interact with daily.
Monthakarn: “This is my first working experience in a virtual company, and being responsible and having discipline can be hard, but it’s a great learning experience. We are pushed to be inventive and creative, can learn new things and try out new things without fear of failure. Then again, because of these new things popping up and changing strategies and external circumstances, it’s sometimes hard keeping to promises and deadlines. There can be a lot of talk, and sometimes I feel like it just gets in the way of delivering output. It is however a very stimulating environment and I love being a part of it.”
The virtual future
It definitely seems like the virtual company has a lot going for it, it’s certainly well suited to the global community and the new needs of companies with employees in several locations. Now if only more traditional companies would start using services like those Kenja is providing regularly to lower their ecological footprint and save time and expenses, everybody wins.