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.
One day, through a student-initiated club activity at GLOBIS University, I had the opportunity to speak with a representative from Panasonic who was responsible for the recall of defective oil fan heaters in Hokkaido and Tohoku. Panasonic employees had urgently carried out door-to-door checks across all neighborhoods in spite of a winter storm.
As he relayed the story, I wondered if employees at another company would have acted with the same amount of urgency?
Essentials for management according to Konosuke Matsushita
Konosuke Matsushita founded and developed Panasonic into one of Japan’s most prominent electronics companies in a single generation. He is highly regarded for his work, not just in Japan, but also in the United States. Harvard Business School professor emeritus John Kotter described him as “the 20th century’s most remarkable leader.”
In his book, Takashi Nakajima recalls a time when Matsushita answered a question during a lecture:
“If you had to name one concept that is most important for management, what would it be?”
Matsushita grumbled a bit, took some time to consider, and finally replied, “May I have more than an answer? Could it be two?”
The questioner agreed, and this was Matsushita’s response:
“A perspective of the universe and a perspective of humanity.”
Why would a perspective of the universe be necessary for management? Or a perspective of humanity?
The right principles are guided by the flow of the universe
A perspective of the universe is equal to understanding the construction or philosophic principles of the universe. What, then, are the philosophic principles of the universe? While there are many perspectives on this, I think that we can say this:
1) In the universe, something will manifest if it contributes to social harmony and progress
2) Ideas and reality are interconnected.
The universe will gently extend its supporting hand and encourage us if we take the right behaviors and the right actions that contribute to social harmony and progress. One might call this the “flow of the universe.” However, this flow is not always in just one direction. The universe itself is constantly circulating, but as a whole, it will support us if we can align our activities so that they contribute to social harmony and progress.
The actual meaning of contributing to social harmony and progress may change according to the maturity of society. During the rise of capitalism, for example, the universe flowed toward people who sought to maximize their wealth. As a result, wealth accumulation accelerated investments into industries that lead to greater global prosperity. However, as wealth became monopolized to the point of being excessive, there came a strong headwind from an aggravated society.
This could be one explanation for the rise of CSR activities and NPOs.
Imagine that a company is like a small yacht in the ocean. The flow of the universe encourages activities that contribute to social harmony and progress. If one can set sail according to this flow, the yacht will speed ahead. Furthermore, if management maintains a business philosophy and vision to contribute to social harmony and progress, and organizes the company’s actions along these thoughts, the yacht will find itself pulled along, bringing its vision into reality.
A rich perspective of humanity brings stakeholders together
A perspective of humanity refers to one’s way of thinking towards people. Matsushita recognized that humanity has an opportunity to harmonize with the universe.
Consider this: a company is formed not only by the vision of a leader, but rather by the actions of employees, by the cooperation of business partners, and by the support of customers.
Unlike machines, human beings have emotions and abilities which change with time and environment. Most people will find that their feelings are most calm and stable, and their skills most effectively utilized, when they are engaged in activities that contribute to social harmony and progress.
That is, when they are attuned to a perspective of the universe.
This brings us to the role of ki.
Ki is a spiritual energy that aligns with the flow of the universe, guiding right actions that contribute to social harmony and progress. Therefore, management that understands the universe perspective can bring much ki into a company.
In fact, the human body itself can be viewed as a “micro-universe.” In martial arts, one form of a micro-universe is created when the center of gravity is placed in the seika-tanden, just below the navel, and the individual stands in shizentai, a natural posture. The seika-tanden becomes the center of this micro-universe, where one’s inner and outer consciousness interact. In martial arts, this is called the “unoccupied state” and is recognized as the time when a person’s potential can be maximized.
When management achieves such a state, employees work harder, more business partners offer help, and more customers support the company.
Think back now to Panasonic’s defective fan heater. Every Panasonic advertisement issued an apology and announced the recall of its oil fan heaters. Employees concentrated on recalls, but the company’s sales maintained very high figures.
Of course, ki alone does not explain the success of Panasonic, but there is value in recognizing, as Matsushita did, the value of a perspective of the universe and a perspective of humanity.