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.
I was in Hong Kong and had just finished speaking at a technology conference hosted by Red Herring when the email arrived. It said that the Netage Group had been listed at an opening price that was twice its public offering.
At the conference, I had felt like a lone warrior fighting the good fight, describing how Japan is now at an evolutionary threshold facing sheer opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the audience had been focused on China and India. The email announcement of Netage’s success unwittingly reconfirmed my message at the conference, and I was in the mood to celebrate.
I have known Mr. Kiyoshi Nishikawa of Netage for nearly ten years. We had first run into each other after a speech I made near Gotanda at the invitation of Michihiko Kawamata, the president of Tsukasa Downtown Development. As Nishikawa and I exchanged business cards, he remarked that he had just joined AOL and had come to hear me speak because he was interested in ventures. I invited him to join a study group I ran, and our friendship began.
The study group, called the MBA Venture Workshop, started around 1995, four years after I graduated from Harvard Business School. MBA students at that time were still conservative, so I was ultimately the only one who actually started up a venture company right away. I had started the group in response to that, hoping to inspire my MBA contemporaries to get involved in the world of venture.
The group was open to those who intended to either start a venture company or to support venture companies in the future. Once a month, we would assemble in the GLOBIS classroom and learn about ventures through activities such as inviting guest speakers or discussing business plans. A number of venture capitalists eventually came out of this group, including Mr. Mikitani of Rakuten, who had at that time retired from The Industrial Bank of Japan and established Crimson Group; Mr. Hiroki Hayashi of Dream Corporation, then in the midst of startup preparations that would eventually lead to the famous Bagel & Bagel; and Mr. Shinichiro Nishino of Fujisan Magazine Service, who at that time was at NTT and subsequently set up Amazon.com in Japan. There was also Mr. Soichi Kariyazono, who would become a partner of GLOBIS Capital Partners (GCP).
Upon joining the study group, Nishikawa began to brainstorm ideas and mull over business concepts. Then, in February 1998, he established the Netage Group.
Obviously, GLOBIS completely supported Netage right from the start. We invested in Netage and had Kariyazono join as an external executive director. I visited the Netage office in Shibuya several times. After removing my shoes and entering a room in the apartment, I noticed several part-time staff who looked like students. The room was steeped in the very essence of venture.
Nishikawa subsequently hit it off with Mr. Satoshi Koike of Net Year and developed the Bit Valley movement. They named it Bit Valley by taking the “bitter” from the Japanese word, “Shibu” of Shibuya, and “ya,” meaning “valley.” Nishikawa told me that this was also a play on words based on the computer digital unit, bit. He consequently gave this name to the area in Shibuya where many internet venture companies gathered and held monthly meetings.
While some young entrepreneurs launched the wildly successful public offerings of such companies as Livedoor and CyberAgent, Netage has continued to steadfastly focus on being an incubator. The young people who gathered at Netage subsequently raced ahead to become third-generation entrepreneurs. One of these is Mr. Kasahara, who created the social networking site Mixi. Mixi took off with substantial support from Netage.
Now, more than eight years after its establishment, including seven years and seven months of investment from GLOBIS, Netage was prepared for the much-awaited achievement of going public. With a public offering price of 600,000 yen, an opening price of 1,200,000 yen, and a closing price of 1,400,000 yen, this was a fantastic beginning. (forty times the original investment cost for GLOBIS).
Netage’s public listing was particularly significant for GLOBIS Fund No. 1. Six out of thirteen investments from that fund have become listed companies, including the The Goodwill Group, Fullcast, FISCO, and Works Applications.
The sole remaining company was Dream Corporation. If this company were also to become listed, our track record would rise to seven out of thirteen—over half the businesses we invested in would have gone on to become listed companies. In addition, in terms of investment performance, a return of better than seven times the original investment meant we could cover our investment costs ten times over.
Needless to say, while this level of return in itself delights me as a shareholder, I really want to congratulate Nishikawa as a friend. My relationship with him goes far beyond that between a shareholder and manager. We are fellow entrepreneurs.