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.
Coronavirus has given society a peek into the future of capitalism.
Robbed of free-spending customers, economies have seen unprecedented peacetime collapse. Many governments have eased restrictions to let their economies claw back lost growth. With promising reports of vaccines, there’s room for optimism that the pandemic will be under control sooner or later.
Still, coronavirus has made a lasting impact on the global economy. A University of Chicago working paper suggests up to 42% of all jobs lost in the US to coronavirus will not come back. COVID’s heavy-handed destruction of employment is similar to a bigger specter haunting capitalism—the specter of automation.
Artificial intelligence promises a bright future.
Big data will give managers all the answers, and automation means humans don’t have to do menial, repetitive jobs. But the effects of technological disruption are hard to dispute. Put simply, it kills jobs, and it’s already happening.
Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing recently announced plans for one million autonomous vehicles by 2030. A slew of companies, including Softbank, Nvidia, Volvo, and BMW, are racing to get autonomous freight trucks on roads. Drivers aren’t the only vocation under threat, either. A Nikkei survey of the Persol Career website in May and June found there were 30% fewer positions in job categories defined as “easily automated.” The World Economic Forum predicts that even general managers and financial analysts won’t escape.
This decline in jobs is a problem because capitalism relies on two sides of the same coin. On one side, there’s production. Companies produce items to sell because there is demand. With their ability and willingness to pay, customers feed that demand.
While many people extract income from capital (buying and selling shares or renting real estate, for example), most derive their income from labor. A person automated out of a job loses the ability to pay and thus feed back into the capitalist system. The newly unemployed must reskill to adapt to the changing world. Some might reinvent themselves as, say, YouTubers, but it’s unlikely they’ll all find work.
Free cash can help feed demand.
Lack of demand has brought global economies to their knees. Several governments have offered short-term solutions to help their citizens start spending again, but Spain’s is the most far-reaching. On May 29, the government approved a “minimum vital income” for 850,000 of the country’s most vulnerable families (2.3 million people, or 5% of the population). The measure will cost €3 billion per year and promises each eligible family at least €462 per month.
The Spanish economy is expected to shrink 12% this year, with unemployment hitting 20%. So a measure like this is needed to help those who find themselves out of work. The country learned a hard lesson from its 2008–2014 financial crisis, when unemployment topped 25%.
The program is a bold move that will help those who need it most. But it doesn’t go far enough.
Universal basic income isn’t a new idea.
Outmaneuvering both coronavirus and automation will require more than temporary bolstering of demand. In fact, long before Spain, there have been programs offering free money to citizens in many parts of the world. Alaska and Manitoba are commonly cited North American examples, while there have also been experiments in India and Africa.
The idea of universal basic income (UBI) is not new. Some say it originated with Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book, Utopia. Others go further back to Ephialtes’ citizens’ income reform in ancient Athens.
In 1967, shortly before his death, Martin Luther King wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” In 2016, when Black Lives Matter published a list of demands for change, it included calls for “a guaranteed minimum livable income.”
UBI acts as a social dividend.
UBI is a return on the investment that we all make in society through our learning and labor. It is universal: everyone receives it. It covers basic needs, so it’s not a disincentive to work. And as a right, it is an unconditional income.
According to The Origins of Universal Grants, UBI aims for “capitalism with baseline income maintenance.”
UBI provides a level of freedom.
We cannot be effective citizens, workers, learners, or providers when we worry about how to pay for shelter or food. UBI provides a buffer against this psychological burden.
Unlike the initiative in Spain that will reach only the segment of society deemed most in need, UBI goes to all citizens, not just the designated head of household, ensuring one family member doesn’t hold financial power over another. Furthermore, a guaranteed income allows us to work fewer hours if we choose. This option provides better work-life balance and opens up possibilities such as job sharing and more mothers back in the workforce part-time.
UBI reduces poverty, inequality, and insecurity.
It won’t solve all the world’s problems, but it will help stem future injustice. It helps all citizens get and stay over the poverty line. Initiatives in Kenya, Alaska, India, and Finland brought strong, positive socioeconomic effects such as fewer hospitalizations from social and domestic violence, lower incidences of mental health disorders, fewer school dropouts, and lower crime.
Today, most governments provide welfare to citizens who can prove they need it. This “means-testing” can be degrading, as citizens must answer personal questions. They also fall into the poverty trap, as unemployment programs often force them to take jobs that make them worse off than before. These systems also require massive and expensive bureaucracy to check and administer claims.
How do we pay for UBI?
Opposition to UBI is often on the basis of expense. Guy Standing suggests that “affordability comes down to the priority society gives to social justice, […] freedom and economic security.” If the need is great enough, governments will find ways to reallocate budgets.
To reduce bureaucracy costs, governments could replace unemployment and most other benefits with a standard amount provided to all, no strings attached. They could claw back the UBI of higher earners through higher taxes, thus redistributing some of the uneven wealth.
The World Economic Forum provides some reasonable numerical estimates for the US. After removing food and nutrition assistance, wage subsidies, child tax credits, temporary assistance for families, and the home mortgage interest deduction, the cost would be less than “a few hundred billion dollars.” A shortfall of this size can be covered by higher taxation of landowners, financial transactions, and companies that pollute or choose to automate, reducing tax breaks for the wealthy, or cutting military spending.
Though technological disruption won’t be as abrupt as coronavirus, both stress capitalism by decimating demand. Keeping everyone out of poverty is the only way to sustain demand and save capitalism.