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.
On September 19, the Japanese stunned the world by beating South Africa in their first game in the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England. The BBC described the victory as “a miracle,” “a bombshell” and “arguably the biggest upset in rugby union history.” Everyone praised the skill and spirit of Japan’s “Brave Blossoms.”
No wonder. South Africa was a two-time world champion that had only lost to three nations in previous Rugby World Cups. Japan, by contrast, had not won a match in the tournament for 21 years!
I think there are four reasons why the Japan team performed with such world-beating brilliance.
1. A global team
The Japanese team included six non-Japanese players from a variety of nations. That’s 40% of the total.
2. World-class leaders
The Japanese coach, Eddie Jones, is an Australian. He coached the Australian national team from 2001-2005 and worked in both Japan (at club level) and in South Africa (as assistant coach) before he took over the Japan national side in 2012. The team captain, Michael Leitch, is a New Zealander of Fijian stock. (He became a Japanese citizen in 2013.)
3. A diversity of skillsets
Japan was traditionally strong in the maul (an extempore scrum) and had plenty of speed. Bringing in foreign players added POWER, one area where Japan was weak. Combining Japan’s native strengths with new strengths imported from abroad has enabled the team to deploy a greater variety of tactics.
4. International battleground experience
The Japan team used to do most of its practicing in Japan. Now, by actively taking part in international competitions like the Asian Five Nations and the Pacific Nations Cup, the team has got used to facing top-notch foreign competition on a regular basis.
OK, so what relevance does this have to the world of business and LinkedIn?
One of the rallying cries of the Japanese government in the late 19th century, when the country was modernizing rapidly, was wakonyosai, the “combining of Japanese spirit and Western know-how.”
I think the phrase is in need of updating: Japan’s rugby team improved not just by combining Japanese spirit and Western (or foreign) know-how, but also by utilizing foreign leaders and manpower, and by actively building up experience on international battlegrounds.
I believe that the same changes that supercharged Japanese rugby are now taking place in Japanese corporates and, by extension, Japanese society.
Take foreign manpower. Although Japan is notorious for blocking immigration, ever-increasing numbers of non-Japanese are coming into the country without any serious debate on immigration needing to take place. The business school I run is a good example of the phenomenon: we have students from over 40 countries doing English- and Japanese-language MBAs, plus nine nationalities on the school staff. Recently, I visited the office of a well-known architect in Tokyo: fully one-third of his employees are non-Japanese, he said. That’s not quite the 40% of the rugby team, but it’s well on the way! Japanese companies are actively importing global manpower and all the diverse skills they bring with them.
Foreign leaders have been coming into Japan for a while. Corporate turnaround legend Carlos Ghosn has been in the driving seat at carmaker Nissan since the turn of the century. More recently, Japan’s biggest drugs company, Takeda Pharmaceutical, made Frenchman Christophe Weber CEO in April 2015.
Japanese businesspeople are also recognizing the need to hone their business skills on international battlegrounds. My company has a venture capital arm as well as a business school. As a result, I get to see some of the hottest new companies in Japan from very close up. One trend I’ve noticed is for young Japanese CEOs to deliberately base themselves outside Japan, whether in Hong Kong or Singapore (to keep in touch with Greater China and ASEAN), or in San Francisco (to be closer to Silicon Valley). Japanese business leaders know that the only playing field for globally competitive business is…the globe.
So it’s not just about the national rugby team.
Many, many Japanese institutions—from startups to big corporations, from creative studios to business schools—are working hard to become better organizations, bringing in global leaders, global manpower and a global mindset to turn themselves into global winners.
That’s why, after sports, it’s in business that I expect Japan to unleash its next miracle.