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.
At the end of the Edo Period, the samurai Sakamoto Ryoma brought about an alliance between the Choshu and Satsuma clans, creating the basis for the restoration of the emperor and opening the way for the Meiji Era. Sakamoto has become an immensely popular figure.
Often chosen as a person GLOBIS MBA students admire, it seems students suffering from a stagnating Japanese society look to his example for a way to open a new era of their own.
The man who created a new era
Sakamoto’s name was pushed to fame with the publication of Shiba Ryoutarou’s masterpiece, Ryoma ga Yuku, which describes Sakamoto’s life.
The book explains how Sakamoto was born in Tosa (present-day Kochi Prefecture in Shikoku) in 1836. The Tosa Clan was a hierarchical society strictly divided into upper- and lower-class samurai. Sakamoto was in the lower class, as he came from a country samurai family. He was a bit of a crybaby as a child, but that changed when he was 17 and went to Edo to study the Hokushin Ittō-ryū style of kendo swordsmanship. Later, he was admitted as a full master and went on to study the West through the painter Kawada Shoryo.
In 1862, Sakamoto escaped from the Tosa Clan and became a ronin, or masterless samurai. He then met and studied as an apprentice under Katsu Kaishu, a renowned statesman at the time. When Katsu opened the Kobe Naval School, Ryoma became its headmaster and assumed the office of ship’s captain, achieving one of his dreams. In 1865, he founded the Kameyamashachu (later known as Kaientai), a ship chartering and trading company in Nagasaki.
In 1866, he achieved the famous Satsuma-Choshu alliance by bringing together clan leaders Saigo Takmaori and Kido Takayoshi.
A year later, he was assassinated.
When one looks comprehensively at Ryoma’s life, some key words come to my mind: rationalism, equality, freedom, management, master, and timing. Sakamoto managed to create a strong personal mission in relation to society.
Trained in swordsmanship and steeped in Western learning
Ki takes time and energy to prepare, like clay for pottery and dough for bread. Sakamoto was certainly exposed to the many established routines, customs, and cultural restrictions within the strict, class-based society of the Tosa. From the pent-up energy accumulated in this oppressive environment arose a dream of the Japanese nationーa notion which had never existed before.
Ki requires timing. Regardless of effort, if things are not in line, intention will not bear fruit. On the other hand, a heart must be ready for a dream, regardless of timing. The key is to sense the quiet nuances of ki every day, in every activity.
Furthermore, understanding the circumstances of society is essential. Through his training in swordsmanship and study of the West, Sakamoto gained a view of society. Despite being a mere ronin, this view of society allowed him to meet Katsu Kaishu and connect two clans that had long been enemies.
Step by step, ki accumulates and converges. Still, it can scatter in an instant. In that sense, it is easier to maintain the energy of democratic organizational management than dictatorial management. Different people at different layers intermingling with each other, taking turns to shine as leaders, keeps ki steady. Sakamoto’s Kameyamashachu shipping company had an organizational management style based on this kind of model.
Translating Sakamoto’s lessons to the modern era
So what can we do now, living in this era? Most of us have not been disciplined in martial arts, nor do we have opportunities to meet someone as magnanimous as Katsu Kaishu. How can one create a sense of purpose?
Firstly, just as Sakamoto stored up his ki while living among the Tosa Clan, we too must accept our current environment, but prepare ourselves for a greater world in the future. We must recognize any discontent and anger in our current situation, face our imperfections, and work to develop our abilities.
Secondly, to feel and sense ki, we must understand and appreciate the best of things, form a sense of the moment. For example, we should notice a dusting of frost under the trees as the seasons change, appreciate the few seconds when tea leaves smell the best. Even at work, we can feel the perfect balance when a meeting facilitator senses just the right amount of time for participants to digest something before moving on. We can practice ki anywhere, every day.
Thirdly, if you encounter a person that you truly admire, ask them to become your mentor. If you don’t ask, there is no way he or she will take the time to guide you.
Finally, it’s important to develop good relationships, not only in a hierarchy, but on any level. Create a relationship in which positions rotate, where one takes the lead in a meeting today, and another in a project tomorrow. Exercise your energy to push your organization forward and allow others to do the same.
Sakamoto created a new Japan. We all have it within us to create something new, as well.