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.
If you want to find a place to spawn business innovation, paradoxically, you may want to choose a city with a long history. Consider the advantages: unique culture, abundant heritage sites, and deep-rooted local communities.
One such place is the ancient city of Kamakura, located 50 km south of Tokyo.
Recent movements in this city, once Japan’s ancient capital, have indeed made Kamakura more attractive for startups. From the ZenHack hackathon workshop housed in a Buddhist temple to a growing “iikuni” crowdfunding platform—big things are happening in the area now dubbed “Kamacon Valley.”
Kamacon Valley (or Kamacon) combines Kamakura and Silicon Valley—an apt name, as most of the organizations’ members work in the IT industry. There are high hopes that the next big tech startup will emerge from here.
One such company, Kayac, went public on Christmas 2014. The crowdsourcing provider Lancers (funded by GLOBIS Capital Partners) also recently moved their offices to Kamakura.
One of Kamacon’s missions is to “support local people who love Kamakura through the power of information technology.” However, the founders stress that the group consists of people from a diverse range of organizations, not just IT workers.
It’s great that so many companies are finding success, but one must wonder, why do they choose to leave Tokyo?
Some Kamacon members say Kamakura has the best mix of nature and culture. In short, they can enjoy a good work-life balance, something very rare in Tokyo.
Others claim Kamakura has good ki, or natural energy. Traditionally, many of Japan’s creative classes have gathered in Kamakura. Perhaps the area has an inexplicable natural draw for attract creative-minded people.
Kamacon is not just a place for tech innovation. Members propose ideas and produce action plans to improve the quality of lives of people who live in the surrounding areas.
Speed and a sense of ownership are the name of the game, reminiscent of a startup venture. Both virtual and real communities stimulate each other to produce and refine ideas, which are later finalized in real-world group meetings.
Kamacon’s founders decided that the best way forward for an organization such as this is through collaboration, not competition. This rings true with the inherent value of consensus-based decision making in Japanese culture.
As most members are volunteers, some people do not understand why members work so hard without pay.
One Kamacon member answered: “We’re so happy to join this group because it’s fun and exciting to be part of a community willing to change and improve the local environment and lives of local people.”
ZenHack
One of the most interesting and perhaps peculiar events held by Kamacon is ZenHack, which combines a hackathon with Zen Buddhism. The hackathon brings together computer programmers, designers, and other IT pros to collaborate on intensive software projects. Hackathons traditionally take place on university campuses or large exhibition halls. Typically lasting between 24 hours and several days, participants are fueled by copious amounts of energy drinks and junk food.
Not at ZenHack.
ZenHack dictates that all participants follow the rigorous rules of 13th-century Kencho-ji—the oldest Zen temple in Japan.
All hackers must stay overnight, sleep in communal tatami mat rooms, and eat shoujin ryouri vegetarian dishes. They must go to bed at 9 p.m. and wake at 4 a.m. sharp. After practicing Zen meditation, they are ready to begin the hackathon.
Mr. Imamura, organizer of ZenHack, explains: “From ancient times, changes and societal shifts have been the norm here. Kamakura…has a special power to move and change people.”
Mr. Takai, a monk at Kencho-ji, agrees. “Kamakura’s culture lies in the nature of continuous change,” he says.
Sounds like the perfect conditions for an IT startup!
Crowdfunding Project iikuni
Mr. Yanasawa, a Kamacon co-founder, is the president of local IT firm Kayac. One of his current ZenHack projects is a safety campaign dubbed “Run to a higher place when an earthquake hits.”
The purpose is simple: reduce the number of earthquake victims by increasing awareness and educating people how to escape to safety.
This project is well suited to the location. The epicenter of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake struck 80 km offshore from Kamakura. Over 90 years later, the memory of the natural disaster has faded, but another big earthquake could hit the area anytime without warning.
Kamacon has also started crowdfunding using a new platform called iikuni. The name (meaning 1192 in Japanese) refers to the first year when Kamakura was the capital of Japan.
One of iikuni’s aims is to raise 2.9 million yen to support the earthquake safety campaign. Anybody wishing to support the project can donate (3,000 yen and up) and in exchange receive items such as Patagonia T-shirts, emergency food, and shopping bags.
Kamacon’s Mission isn’t limited to IT. Organizers say as long as activities can improve the local economy and the quality of life of local people, they are welcome. Luckily, interest in the area has continued to grow. Visitors are coming in from across Asia as more people hear about Kamacon and ZenHack.
It’s an exciting time to run a startup in Japan’s quiet ancient capital.