PREFACE
PREFACE
The mission of GLOBIS is to develop “visionary leaders who create and innovate
societies.” One of the three pillars of our educational principles is kokorozashi;
the others are management skills and human relationship networks.
When GLOBIS University was founded, I taught a compulsory course in the MBA
program called, “Entrepreneurial Leadership.” The course emphasized
developing your personal mission, or as we call it, your kokorozashi.
Finding your kokorozashi is, simply stated, difficult. I spent many long evenings
and nights debating with my classmates when I was at Harvard Business School,
and also talking with successful people and advisors, so I know how it is. One’s
kokorozashi is not to be found solely in books, but rather it must be found
through your own experience, through pursuing the meaning of life and
understanding your inner self, as well as through the interactions with friends,
advisors, and colleagues.
In “Entrepreneurial Leadership,” students are expected to challenge themselves
to come up with a kokorozashi and to present it to classmates on the last day.
Typically each student may have between four to eight minutes to present. Many
students have struggled with this. Yet, we feel that this is important for a person
to develop, so that they have a vision, a goal, by which they may navigate the
future. In Western cultures this may be referred to as a life narrative, a view of
how you see yourself in a given moment within the context of your past, what
you are doing now, and what you wish to do in the future.
Kokorozashi is more than that. At GLOBIS, we want to emphasize the will,
determination, and the commitment required in achieving a goal, and the ethical
values that must support you as you strive forward in your journey. When all this
is combined into one’s kokorozashi, we believe a person has a strong life
purpose that helps them achieve their goals.
GLOBIS University has grown steadily over the years and we now have roughly
900 students entering each year. I alone, obviously, cannot teach
“Entrepreneurial Leadership,” and so the responsibility was passed several
years ago to GLOBIS senior faculty.
To support this change, Yoshihiko Takubo, Japanese MBA program dean, Keiko
Murao, Japanese MBA program deputy dean, and others, interviewed many
faculty and alumni to write Developing Your Kokorozashi (Kokorozashi wo
Sodateru) published in 2011 by Toyo Keizai, and available only in Japanese.
GLOBIS University has now become the No.1 business school in Japan. We
provide MBA education in English and Japanese. We also have added an online
program featuring live, interactive courses, to expand our reach regionally and
globally. We now have campuses throughout Japan, offering MBA courses in
Japanese in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Fukuoka, Mito, Yokohama, and
online. The English MBA program is offered in Tokyo, Singapore, and online.
Clearly the time has come to for us to offer insight in English as to how to
achieve a kokorozashi. This book, written by Tomoya Nakamura, dean of the
English program, Kenya Yoshino, head of the Singapore campus, and Gil
Chavez, senior faculty, is the cornerstone upon which we aim to further build our
international MBA program and instill kokorozashi, a sense of personal mission
and achieving good for society, in our students.
Yoshito Hori,
Founder and President, Graduate School of Management, GLOBIS University,
Kojimachi, Tokyo, Japan
Chapter 1: KOKOROZASHI AWARENESS FRAMEWORK
Kokorozashi should be viewed as a personal life goal – something important and
yet also that you enjoy doing, that occupies your thoughts on the weekend, and
makes you excited to wake up on Monday morning.
Kokorozashi takes imagination. You have to imagine what you want to be far into
the future. In this respect it has similarities with the question Clayton Christensen
asks in his book, How Will You Measure Your Life? Kokorozashi, it seems, is
more a question of how you will spend your lifetime: what you will do with the
time that you have been given. Let’s say you spend five hours every day working
on something, practicing for 300 days a year, you would total 1,500 hours in just
one year. In 20 years, you would total 30,000 hours, and in 30 years 45,000
hours. What will you do with all this time? What will you create that will make
your life meaningful?
Finding and defining one’s kokorozashi is one thing, sticking with it, remaining
motivated to achieve it is quite another. Finding inspiration can be difficult at
times, but the interviews within this book may help to inspire the reader.
My colleagues, Yoshihiko Takubo and Keiko Murao introduced in Japanese the
Kokorozashi Wheel (Fig.1), the Kokorozashi Spiral (Figs. 2 and 3), and the 2x2
Kokorozashi Matrix, which comprises two dimensions for kokorozashi:
autonomous decision-making versus social contribution (Figs. 4-6). In writing
this book, we would like to introduce these concepts in English, followed by a
Kokorozashi Awareness Framework (Fig. 7) that we (I, Nakamura, and my
colleagues, Yoshino, and Chavez) also developed.
Kokorozashi concepts by Takubo and Murao
Fig1
The Kokorozashi Wheel explains one cycle of the kokorozashi process. You start
from the upper left, “Reflect objectively.” Moving clockwise, you subjectively
question yourself. The third part is setting a goal. This is the intersection of
“Being” and “Meaning.” And once the goal is set, you work towards the goal.
Eventually, your kokorozashi will come to an end whether it succeeds or fails.
Then, the cycle begins again.
Fig2
The Kokorozashi Spiral is a Kokorozashi Wheel in three dimensions. We believe
that after pursuing a kokorozashi once, each person will have a higher or
broader perspective.
Fig3
Growth is seen through each iteration of the cycle. After multiple pursuits of
kokorozashi, we believe that you will find your ultimate kokorozashi, which will
have grown largely from your first kokorozashi.
Fig4
The 2x2 Kokorozashi Matrix was discovered by the GLOBIS Japanese Faculty
after conducting several kokorozashi interviews. The vertical axis maps
autonomous decision-making, while the horizontal axis refers to public
contribution. The ideal movement of a kokorozashi is toward the top right,
“Kokorozashi for society which I defined.” But let’s take a closer look at the two
axes.
Fig5
First, let’s look at autonomous decision-making. Low autonomy starts with the
adoption of others’ goals or advice. You follow your parents’ directions or
teacher’s suggestions. As you become more autonomous in our decision making,
we exercise more Self-control. You are making decisions about your life by
yourself. The most autonomous decision-making is when you lead others to your
goals and support them to grow.
Fig6
Next is public contribution. As you move from left to right, your perspective of
public contribution perspective will change. In the beginning, most people think
about themselves. Then, they take into consideration their family members and
friends. Third, they think about the future of their company or industry. Finally,
some people will think about the wider society.
The Kokorozashi Awareness Framework
The Kokorozashi Awareness Framework (Fig. 7) involves four steps that can be
explained by citing popular Western concepts and how they relate to Eastern
concepts and philosophy. The framework relies on the individual’s awareness
(consciousness) of where they stand in the process of achieving their
kokorozashi and reflecting on how they may proceed to the next step. The steps
are the Foundation Period, Planned Happenstance, The Alchemist, and
Synchronicity. Although there are many shades between each step, usually
individuals can define where they are in the process and why.
Fig7
The First Step: The Foundation Period
The Foundation Period is akin to a difficult apprenticeship, where one works
hard, learning a great deal, and building a foundation of skill and ability in the
process. In Japanese, there are many words for this type of training. One that
can be applied here is shugyo – difficult training that forges a person’s character
and mental steel. In this period, a person often feels that they are being pushed,
even forced, to work and develop. This may be true initially, but ideally the
situation should lead the person to take up the initiative to train and attain skills
and to develop themselves on their own.
For an example, let’s look at Yaichi Mizuno, who was the highly successful head
coach of Kyoto University’s American football team, the Gangsters. Kyoto
University is one of the most difficult academic universities in Japan, and yet
Mizuno managed to make the Gangsters into one of the most successful teams
in the country, winning the Koshien Bowl, the Japan university championship, six
times, and the Rice Bowl, the Japan corporate champion versus the university
champion, four times.
Mizuno said that winning required each player on the Gangsters to understand
and develop their strengths, while also knowing their weaknesses and working
to overcome these. He trained players physically and mentally, teaching strategy
and technique, and then asking them for execution. In a continuous process, he
emphasized the need for players to accept and develop their uniqueness.
Players had to be fully aware of what each of them brought to the team and
voluntarily devote themselves to helping the team in whatever roles they were
best suited, practicing diligently to become even better. Mizuno asked his
players to give everything they had; leaving it all on the field, as they say. In
doing so, he believed that each player extended himself beyond his comfort
zone – beyond what each thought himself capable of – thereby finding a new,
greater, and more capable self.
Kokorozashi is similar. Starting out, we must find our strengths and understand
our weaknesses. Then we must commit to completely developing ourselves,
relentlessly training to push beyond what we think we can do.
I have practiced aikido since my teens. More than 30 years have passed since I
first entered the dojo. Through this training, I came to realize that it is very
difficult to give everything you have on your own. For example, even if we are
asked to exhale all our breath, it is common that we reserve some air in the
lungs because of fear and our body structure. My master, Arikawa Sensei, threw
me and held me in locks many times. He also taught me how to exhale all the air
from my lungs, so that I could make full use of my ability. This practice led me to
experience complete stillness or total yield. If you have completely emptied your
body and your mind, then when you inhale, you can intake a huge amount of air
as well as a new perspective. In my view, this is what Mizuno taught his players
at Kyoto University, pushing them to achieve a new perspective on themselves
and their situation.
At GLOBIS, we try to play the role of Mizuno, pushing our students (business
professionals) to go beyond what they think they can do. Through our Keiei Dojo
and Entrepreneurial Leadership courses, we push students to think about
“Being: Who are you?” and “Meaning: What excites you? What do you value?”
This enables them to develop a kokorozashi that is the intersection of their
background, and personal and social interests (Fig. 8). In this process, we ask
students to push themselves to their limits, to get all the air out of their lungs, so
that when they inhale, they have a new sense of who they are and where they
should go. They have a kokorozashi direction. Through this type of hard work,
we hope that even the passive students can find their inspiration and their
initiative. Students are looking for a kokorozashi, a vocation, which may become
as enjoyable and fulfilling as anything that they do in their free time.
Fig8
Here, I will take up Mihoko Suzuki, whose interview you will find in this book. Her
first kokorozashi was to attend a business school. Starting with “Being,” because
of her family background, Suzuki is good at English. She is used to talking with
international people. She worked for a global energy company and met many
capable people. She saw her colleagues making logical comments in meetings
and big contributions to the company.
Some of her colleagues had an MBA and
gave her advice to go study at a business school.
Now, let’s think about her “Meaning.” She wanted to acquire the necessary
management skills to understand the essence of the meetings held at her
company.
She wanted to learn “Critical Thinking” and “Business Presentation”
so that she could express herself in the meetings. She started to research
business schools that offered an International (English) MBA in Tokyo.
The Second Step: Planned Happenstance
After the Foundation Period, the next step involves the individual setting out on a
journey into the world, like Buddha leaving behind the palace walls, and
becoming open to new things; welcoming challenges, not as hardships, but as
simply exciting steps toward achieving their kokorozashi. In this process, the
individual realizes that what seemed to be difficult training, was merely the
match that lit an inner fire of motivation. And because the kokorozashi was set in
the first step, their thoughts and actions are more focused and attuned, leading
to more opportunities and advancement. (Before you have a kokorozashi you
are thinking and taking actions in various directions, which may be stimulating,
but they are not a progression.)
As a consequence, your kokorozashi awareness moves to the second step:
Planned Happenstance. This is similar to the concepts developed and defined
by Dr. John D. Krumboltz, Emeritus Professor, Stanford University, a leader in
career counseling theory. Dr. Krumboltz is particularly known for his
theory(Mitchell, K. E., Al Levin, S., & Krumboltz, J. D. (1999). Planned
Happenstance: Constructing Unexpected Career Opportunities. Journal of
Counseling
&
Development,
77(2),
115-124.
doi:10.1002/j.1556-6676.
1999.tb02431.x) that careers require flexibility and openness; that one should
not be too fixed in a career, but rather open to opportunities and trials.
Unplanned, happy accidents should be allowed to happen, as well as the
planned. In this turbulent age, of rapid change and innovation, he suggests that
people try new things, making many mistakes in the process, and learning from
them. By being flexible and open, you will encourage seemingly lucky instances
– planned happenstances that help you along.
A key benefit of Planned Happenstance is that it fits with today’s world –
companies rapidly restructure, governmental policies are forever changing, and
new business models continuously emerge. In this fast-changing environment,
our mindset should be prepared for continuous change and self-investment,
flexibility and serendipity.
We encourage students to tell their family and friends, as many people as they
can, about their kokorozashi. The more they explain it, the clearer it becomes,
and the more likely people will understand and assist them in achieving it.
They should also be open to a variety of possibilities to achieving kokorozashi.
Like climbing Mt. Fuji, there are many paths that lead to the summit. You can
take the Yoshida, Subashiri, Gotenba, and Fujinomiya routes – all different, but
with the same destination. You need not choose which route will take you. In the
beginning, you only need to decide to climb and begin. Along the way you can
collect information, prepare materials, check the weather and your personal
condition, and choose your path as you go (Fig. 9).
Fig9
If you were to plot your kokorozashi journey, where would you be? Would your
spot be relatively high on autonomous decision making (the vertical axis)?
Or
would your spot be relatively high on public contribution?
Typically, those high on autonomous decision-making tend either to seek an
entrepreneurial career, or to climb the corporate ladder relatively quickly. If you
are of this type, I believe that you have likely tried in your career to gain power,
be independent, or even to influence people.
On the contrary, those who appear high on public Contribution are people, in
many cases, who seek a career in government, hospitals or NGOs. They work
hard to help and support people. It is common for younger generations to show a
strong appetite for public contribution.
Please note that you are not expected to reach the right top corner like the
almost-straight gray line. In many of our kokorozashi interviews, we have seen
our students and alumni wander between the two axes during their lives.
The Third Step: The Alchemist
Following Planned Happenstance means being open to opportunities and
seizing them. Eventually you will advance in your kokorozashi journey to the
next step. This stage that I call The Alchemist.
The Alchemist is named after Paulo Coelho’s best-selling novel about a
shepherd boy who travels to realize his dream(Coelho, P. (1998). The alchemist:
A fable about following your dream. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.
Originally published in Portuguese in 1968). The boy leaves his home in
Andalucia, Spain, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar into Morocco. He continues
across North Africa, traversing the Sahara, to achieve his dream of seeing the
pyramids in Egypt. On his journey, he meets a king, a crystal glass shop owner,
a true love, and an alchemist, and in the process learns how to use his heart and,
eventually, his soul.
“There is only one way to learn. It’s through action.”
“Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our
legend.”
These quotes are two of my favorites from Coelho’s book. First, let’s stop using
our head – logic and numbers. Let’s forget about net present value, the internal
rate of return, and the value chain. Start by using your heart. Smell the flowers,
watch the birds in the sky, feel the wind, and love the moon. Throw out
everything trivial and think about what makes you passionate and enthusiastic.
What do you love? Whatever it is, let that lead you to a more devoted and
focused self.
Another quote from The Alchemist:
“Every search begins with beginner’s luck.”
Let us be open to luck and our true feelings and be brave enough to follow our
intuition.
If you use luck as your guide and are true to your feelings, you should
be able to come up with a kokorozashi that involves your head and your heart
and soul.
The third step requires you to overcome fears. Fears such as Why am I blessed
with good fortune? Why was I selected as a leader? Can I meet everyone’s
expectations? There are many people who become conservative, or move away
from Planned Happenstance, becoming complacent in a certain position, fortune,
or monetary position.
But Paulo Coelho does not stop here:
“Alchemists show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything
around becomes better, too.”
Coelho says, that when we strive to become better to achieve our life purpose,
we are making everything around us better. Developing kokorozashi awareness,
that is being open to opportunities, but not getting caught in fear, can bring
fulfillment to you and others, and eventually enable significant positive change to
your organization or even to your society. This is associated with the upper-right
dimension of the 2x2 Kokorozashi Matrix in Fig. 3.
The Fourth Step: Synchronicity
The fourth and final step in the journey is Synchronicity. The name comes from
the book, Synchronicity, the Inner Path of Leadership, by Joseph Jaworski, a
former senior fellow and board member at the MIT Center for Organizational
Learning and a well-known leadership consultant and researcher(Jaworski, J.
(2011). Synchronicity: The inner path of leadership. San Francisco, CA:
Berrett-Koehler Publishers).
Jaworski uses his own life story to introduce the inspirational aspects of
leadership.
Born in the U.S. to a famous attorney, he followed his father’s path,
becoming a partner in a Houston law firm. He married his high school classmate.
They had a son and lived in a big house. One day his wife asked for a divorce.
This event led Jaworski to review his life, and to become open to new feelings
and emotions. He found himself sitting on a park bench, despairing, and decided
to sell all his property. He packed a suitcase and flew to Paris without
reservations or itinerary – something that he would have never done before. In
Paris, he read a story in a newspaper about David Bohm, a well-known quantum
physicist, and he impulsively requested an appointment. Bohm, surprisingly,
agreed to meet Jaworski. Bohm introduced him to quantum mechanics and the
Bohm Dialogue technique, a method for deep free-flowing group discussions, in
which judgment and evaluation are withheld, but eventually understanding
between the participants may be reached. This led Jaworski to develop the
American Leadership Forum with the goal of strengthening diverse leaders to
better serve the public good.
Jaworski’s experience, then, is a real-life example of synchronicity and planned
happenstance, as several lines of action and thought converged into a
significant pursuit that brought about great personal change and satisfaction.
From Synchronicity:
“It’s about a shift from seeing a world made up of things to seeing a world that’s
open and primarily made up of relations.”
“Successful leadership depends upon a fundamental shift of being, including a
deep commitment to the dream and a passion for serving versus being driven by
the pursuit of status and power.”
Jaworski’s position is that if we can change our perception or consciousness
toward the world and look at the world as a network of interconnected relations,
things will start to change, we may begin to achieve synchronicity, encouraging
good in ourselves and others. It should also be noted here, that this echoes
Krumboltz’s theory of planned happenstance – when we allow relationships in
the world to show us something surprising – a serendipitous event.
This moment of having found your kokorozashi – when you see it clearly before
you – might be characterized by Martin Luther, the 16th Century theologian, as
the “point where our freedom and destiny merge.” We cannot resist destiny’s call
because we also have chosen it. At this point in the fourth step, you cannot help
but choose to take up this endeavor, this personal mission, this kokorozashi. The
decision to do so comes not from outward pressure or influences, but from your
willingness to devote your time, energy, and self to realize your goal.
Synchronicity also links some concepts of Western leadership research and
traditional Eastern philosophy. Two influential thinkers that span these worlds
are Otto Scharmer and his book, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it
Emerges (Scharmer, C. O. (2016). Theory U: Leading from the future as it
emerges: the social technology of presencing (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA:
Berrett-Koehler), and Peter Senge and his book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art
and Science of the Learning Organization (Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth
discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. (Revised &
Updated). New York: Doubleday).
Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT, chairman of the MIT Ideas Program, and a
Thousand Talents Program professor at Tsinghua University. He uses the word
“presencing” – a combination of presence and sensing, as an approach for
encouraging innovation and cross-functional change leadership; a shift from the
“ego” to the “eco” by applying some of the concepts of mindfulness to broad
groups and organizations.
Peter Senge, also a senior lecturer at MIT, deals with complex systems and
system science, and has developed concepts regarding how organizations can
continually learn, remaining open to change. He has practiced meditation since
1996 and has incorporated this into his thinking.
Being a student of aikido, the concepts of synchronicity and presencing – at the
dead bottom of the Theory U – I find are similar to total stillness in aikido. This is
when you stand entirely at peace, fully connected to the world, enabling and
being enabled at the same time.
From Synchronicity:
“Invoked or not invoked, God is present.”
I find it profoundly satisfying to see the essence of Eastern philosophy captured
in Western management theories. I hope that this book and the interviews herein
will shed light on your pursuit of kokorozashi, helping you to achieve greater
awareness of where you are in your journey and support you in leading a
fulfilling life.
Chapter 2: THE INTERVIEWS
Teruaki Nakatsuka, CEO, JATCO
Nakatsuka has experienced synchronicity many times in his life. Now at the helm
of a company in the automotive industry, he applies his experience and
knowledge to steer his people through the rapid changes in the industry.
Nakatsuka views kokorozashi as a series of achievable goals, each greater than
the previous.
What are you doing now?
I am currently CEO of JATCO, the number one continuously variable
transmission manufacturer and supplier in the world.
Becoming a global leader, the head of a division by 45 and president by 50 – that
was what I envisioned as my long-term goal and, you could say, my kokorozashi.
This was my thinking when I joined McKinsey & Company, the only company
that I applied to while I was working at Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese
trading firm. I loved Marubeni and really did not see myself leaving there, but I
disliked the seniority system. That was the one thing that bothered me.
Eventually, I became head of GE’s Aviation Division when I was 44, and then
was headhunted to become JATCO president when I was 50. So in that way, my
vision and kokorozashi came true; I achieved them. Along the way through this
process, I believe I have reached Step 4.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I grew up in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture. My father ran a small steel
machining factory there. I have a sister three years older than I, and a twin sister.
Everyone in my hometown knew the Nakatsuka twins. We were both good at
academics and sports. I enjoyed running, swimming, baseball, and tennis. I was
president of the student association when I was in Ajino Junior High School.
While there, I came in third in the city tennis tournament. In high school, I was
runner-up. So I made good use of my time and tried to stay busy achieving
things that I thought were important.
I came to Tokyo and majored in business at Keio University. One of my
professors, Dr. Yoshio Sato, often used to say, “Don’t lose your intellectual
curiosity.” I find myself saying the same thing to younger people these days.
How did your MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has
it changed over time? What led to those changes?
After graduating from Keio, I chose to work in a trading company because I
wanted to do global business. I did well at Marubeni and was eventually asked to
go to Brazil as an assignee. At that time, I told my boss I was more interested in
going to business school in the U.S. to get an MBA. My boss and the staff
around me persuaded me to continue working and go to Brazil as an expat. I still
could not let go of my dream of studying in the U.S. and becoming a global
leader. I decided to apply to Marubeni’s in-house selection process to be a
corporate-sponsored MBA. I was chosen and went to Chicago to study at
Kellogg, Northwestern University’s business school.
My two years at Kellogg gave me the opportunity to examine myself in a global
context.
I came to understand strategy and improve my presentation skills
while I was there.
At the same time, I felt that if I continued to study, I
eventually would be able to compete and win against my classmates. I did an
internship at Marubeni America in the Office of the President. I really enjoyed
that, reviewing and analyzing investment plans for Marubeni America.
Mr. Katsuo Koh was the CEO of Marubeni America. He had a great executive
presence; displayed deep, clear and consistent judgment; and had a very warm
approach to people. He is a person that I really admire and look up to. He, with
Mr. Yoshiaki Fujimori, the former chairman of GE Japan, are the two executives
that I think are ideal and whom I try to emulate. Even today, as president and
CEO at JATCO, there are times when I ask myself what would Koh-san or
Fujimori-san do.
So, after more than 13 years at Marubeni, I went to McKinsey. I stayed there for
three years and then was headhunted and entered GE Japan as director of
business development. I brought in excellent results during my time there, but
my career was not progressing as I had envisioned. During this time, I came to
know about “Planned Happenstance Theory” by Prof. Shunsuke Takahashi at
Keio and how you can make it work in your career. I was assigned to the GE
Aviation Regional Headquarters in Singapore, and I discovered how to develop a
career in a multinational company. I went to dinner often with my colleagues and
spent personal time with them. We shared many happy moments and through
this camaraderie, basically, I was accepted into the GE community. I was 44 and
division head of GE Aviation with 130 reporting to me.
After a while at GE Aviation, I began to feel that I wanted to work for a Japanese
company, to give back to my country. A headhunter approached me during this
time about the position of president of JATCO. I was 50 years old when I took the
position and so made my vision and kokorozashi come true.
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome this?
One of the big differences between being a division leader at GE Aviation and
the JATCO CEO is the numbers of eyes watching me. At GE Aviation, 260 eyes
-- 130 people -- watched me. Now, I have 30,000 eyes watching me. I need to
stay sharp, full of energy all the time, because I may send the wrong message to
my employees just by looking tired. This means that I have to take care of myself
and manage stress. When on vacation, I prefer to sit on the beach and relax;
listen to the waves, watch the sky and just allow my stress to go away. When I
am in Tokyo, I regularly run in Komazawa Park to clear my head.
I typically make decisions based on facts, logic, and numbers. Of course, in the
implementation, I consider passion, emotion, and feelings. But I believe that
management decisions should focus on enhancing corporate value. Thus, the
net present value should be increased in all management decisions.
JATCO is an automotive supplier, the number one CVT (Continuously Variable
Transmission) manufacturer in the world. But the automotive industry is going
through big changes, notably electric vehicles, autonomous driving, artificial
intelligence, and the Internet of things, and so my role at JATCO is to prepare my
team to show the intellectual curiosity and willingness to take on new challenges.
Yes, JATCO is the leader of transmissions, however, if we are to survive until my
grandchildren’s generation, we need to invest in future technologies and new
fields. Thus, I’m pushing JATCO on growth and a 10% operating profit so that we
can invest in R&D for the future.
One of the things that I do as CEO is visit all our plants and offices twice a year. I
talk with customers, suppliers, and employees. When we have group dinners, I
write down a seating chart with employees’ names and record what we spoke
about. These things help me understand what’s going on in the company. I tend
to give opportunities to young employees who show seriousness or
determination. A young employee’s eyes can tell us many things. Of course, the
HR division has a systematic view of an employee’s performance and I consider
that, too, but the determination in an employee’s eyes is something that I have a
gut feeling about. There’s a particular kind of employee who talks about JATCO’s
business as if it were his or her own business. Looking into their eyes, I can feel
their commitment, their seriousness.
Some advice that I would offer younger people, is that they should write down
what they want to accomplish. I started writing my vision, kokorozashi, when I
applied to business school and then updated it when I decided to go to McKinsey.
By rereading it, you can recall what you were thinking, and can refocus and
return to the basics of what is important to you and to your life. I also think that
you have to read many books; to make a habit of investing in yourself through
learning. I really believe that there is a moment when all your study raises the
quality of your output.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
There were many times that I felt synchronicity in my life. Everyone in the Group
of 999, which is the name I gave to the 12 colleagues who entered McKinsey in
Tokyo, September 1999, has done well. One member, Noriko Tojo, Otsuka
America president, really inspired me last year when we met and discussed our
roles as CEO and president.
When I chose to go to McKinsey & Co., and then accepted the position at GE
Singapore, and even later became JATCO president, I relied on my intuition. I
hear that great CEOs make decisions with intuition. That may be true, I have
certainly been doing this, especially for my career choices.
As to what differentiated me from others who wanted to become a CEO, I would
answer with what my wife once said: In every moment in life I have treated
people sincerely, which may have led to the luck that has put me in the position I
am in today. You need to believe in yourself and smile. I believe that if I am
involved, I can make a positive change to the organization.
My kokorozashi going forward will be to build a stronger JATCO and develop
future leaders of the company. In the longer term, I would like to give back to
society by teaching what I learned at business school and through my
management experiences at Marubeni, McKinsey, GE and JATCO.
Wilson Chan
Chan has a strong track record in business. He is fearless when it comes to
attempting new projects.
He puts himself between Planned Happenstance and
the Alchemist steps in his development.
His willingness to try new things has
put him into the arena where he can apply his experience in many new ways to
create new value.
What are you doing now?
I have had several pivots during my time after GLOBIS. I started with a private
equity firm in Japan, working in the internal deal team trying to help globalize our
portfolio while adding value from both sourcing and corporate governance on a
global scale.
After this, I was given an opportunity to become a partner with a Pan-Asia
focused management consulting firm from Japan that was setting up their office
in Hong Kong. There I was working with both multi-nationals and regional firms
to help the cross-border development of their platforms. At the time, I was also
focused on the development of startups in and around Hong Kong, becoming
actively engaged in the local startup scene and collaborating with them to launch
products and services faster across the region.
In that space, I was then lucky enough to be provided an opportunity to take over
as the CEO of Buyandship, a startup that we had been previously supporting for
the last two years. Through funding and governance, we were able to launch the
company from the regional leader into one of the largest cross-border
e-commerce logistics providers in Asia, now in seven countries and counting.
We successfully raised US$2.3 million in our first round, and are now positioned
to take Asia on full force.
When I was at Japan Industrial Partners, I learned the concept of paying back.
They were very smart but very western-minded: short horizon and quick returns.
They had the same concept as vulture funds. Their time horizon was too short:
three to five years. I liked the company and the work but knew it was not what I
wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to add more value and focus on
operations, implementation and execution.
When I was at the consulting firm we focus on implementation, a close
competitor to us in Japan is Dream Incubator. They focus on implementation and
a little bit of strategy and have been successful doing it. They focus on listed
companies and reduce the overhead. We focus on opportunity and expansion.
For many Japanese companies, trying us is a risk. We don’t have the track
record that others do, so we are willing to go as low as possible to get them on
board, show the value, and then bring the company back to the market price.
Initially, the firm didn’t believe that I could do the implementation as fast and as
local as I said I could. So, I showed what I could do. The current CEO was a
referral of one of the GLOBIS professors. I’d met him once before, but it didn’t
start there. We were later introduced through a recruiting company.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I have an uncle who runs a logistics company. He was selected to transport the
materials for the Lion King musical tour in China. He became famous for
importing Western culture. He had to deal with so much -- the communist party,
government, media. And he was taken advantage of because he didn’t know the
processes that were required. The people he was dealing with would mention
anything he didn’t know about or should know about. He almost lost his company,
but because many people supported him he was able to rebuild. His community
supported him because they didn’t want to see a person with good will lose. His
company eventually became the largest high-value transportation logistics
provider in China. He always had a very strong sense of sustainable business.
He asked for my opinion because I could speak English. He wanted to know
about the Lion King and about the key issues in the business. He was calm and
meticulous. Everything had to be done carefully. He told me there is always a
chance to make more money. You can make a lot of money in one shot, but it
cannot be sustained.
My uncle was down and got back up. It was a lesson about resilience. He taught
me to do research and groundwork. If I commit myself to do something, I must
be the best at it. This was my family value. We feel we must be highly educated
-- professors, doctors. My grandmother went through the Cultural Revolution and
the war. My mother was one of the first to go to a university and to Canada. She
wanted to give her children a better education and future than she had.
How did the MBA help your career and your personal mission? Has it
changed over time? What led to those changes?
I had this idea for a long time, before I came to GLOBIS, but the concept
changed. The reason I didn’t go to a Western business school is that I wanted to
come back to my roots. I grew up in the West, but I learned a lot in Asia.
Through the MBA, my concepts of Asian business changed. I thought corruption
was intrinsic in Asia, but in most cases it’s just a phase of the country. We
learned about why Japanese companies survive so long – 200 to 300 years –
and through these courses, I began to understand that the core values of Asian
companies are like family. I grew up in Canada and worked in my family’s trading
business. My education was very Western, but my parents are very Asian. How
they value money and look at business is very different. Aggressiveness, how
direct the message is, and the hierarchy are all different. At first, I thought the
West could bring electricity and education, but I realized they were tools. So, I
looked at Japan, which had redeveloped business from scratch. It was different,
relying on personal connections. I realized that the Western way of doing
business doesn’t have to be the only way to do business. When I was 12 or 13, I
first encountered China, visiting our relatives there alone. It was an eye-opening
experience, their way of life and routine were totally different.
I remember in a discussion with my MBA classmates, one asked me about my
personal mission. I said I like business. Another said, “You like money.” But
money was not it. My roots are Chinese, and I thought about Chinese wisdom.
There is a saying in China, that if you can’t feed yourself, you can’t help feed
others. I thought that was something wise. I realized there was something of
value there.
The time spent on personal reflection really helped me clarify my personal
mission. Through various presentations that I made regarding my personal
mission and reflection, my ideas evolved. The ideas I have now are what is most
true to me now. I know, at least, I’m moving in the right direction because my
personal mission is why I wake up in the morning. I feel energized every day. It is
my passion, my path.
What about adversity? How did you overcome it?
I will always remember my family trading business. I started it with an uncle and
a family friend, a total of three people, and we grew it to more than 50 people. I
was a member of the board. Eventually we had differences of opinion about how
to run the company. Then it ended for me, because there was no space for me
and I was the odd one out. It was just a rejection. One day everyone was against
me and there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. Things were great and the
next moment, everything that I had been doing for two years was gone. So, then
I went to GLOBIS for an MBA.
I was frustrated, angry, and disconnected. I felt failure. Looking back, I probably
could have done better and done some things differently, with less arrogance,
less aggression, and less pushiness. When you have too much going on right in
front of you, you lose the sense of what is important and what you are trying to
do. I never asked: What am I trying to do? The answer was sustainability, to
continue the business. I was short-sighted. Traditional Asian culture has
sustainability built-in. Maybe it’s similar to European traditions, such as
Monsanto, which is still very family-oriented. Money is not the ultimate goal in
creating a business. In North America it is clear. Money is the purpose of doing
business.
People don’t learn from other people’s mistakes because they have pride
–thinking that it will never happen to me, or I know what I’m doing. They have
their own way of doing things and I see it still all the time -- so much trial and
error.
It’s not a problem to fail. It’s not necessarily the end of the world, but stopping,
quitting, giving up is. Having very big catastrophic failures should help you
improve exponentially. Those people who say they are afraid to fail haven’t done
anything. Everything was given. You have to try something. Each generation has
its own hurdle to get over, to overcome. Right now, there is the maximization of
efficiency and the next generation will have to work even harder. Things will be
more expensive. Globalization will be integrated.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I see myself between the second and the third steps. Right now, I am thinking of
how to execute my own ideas -- how to do things that add value to people, to
society.
My personal mission is to bring the sustainability of the Asian business model to
the world. Hermes and other traditional family-run brands have similar strengths.
They stick to what they are good at and do not do mergers and acquisitions. My
personal mission is not yet very clear, but it seems like a good idea.
What is the most sustainable action? Everything that lasts long has to be taken
care of. You’re better off having a strong culture rather than a strong leader. You
have to melt the business concept down to a single idea. It has to be simple to
last. I keep on saying traditional. How can we create a system to support
everyone, to go beyond generations? The idea and concept are not dependent.
The value is to provide job security, a salary and a sense of contribution, to
improve your skill set every day.
It is an uphill battle. If I were to do nothing with my experience, that would be a
waste. Every person’s mission has to be their own. My personal mission may be
vague and it may not mean so much to other people, but to me it means a lot.
The personal mission is for you to know. If you are true to your personal mission,
it will have a positive impact on the world.
Rod Enriquez
In talking about his kokorozashi when he entered GLOBIS, Enriquez was still in
the early steps as he sought to define his mission and build upon his learning.
Now several years after graduation, Enriquez talks about his calling: teaching
others and the planned happenstance that made it happen. He seeks to make
an impact on society by helping others to be more financially intelligent.
What are you doing now?
I am now a vice-president and regional head of Philippine National Bank under
its Branch Banking Group. I have handled different regions of the Philippines. I
am currently handling the Mindanao region where I supervise 92 branches and
about 750 people.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
My father was an accountant in the finance industry -- a very organized and
balanced person.
He was balanced with work and family, too.
My mother was
a day-care school teacher. I remember her taking me to her school and singing
and playing with other kids the same age as me. I saw how happy and content
she was, although she had studied science in university. She became a school
teacher after she married, so it was more like volunteer work than a profession
for her.
I enjoyed mathematics and problem-solving in school and it became natural for
me to choose a course in business and finance when I entered college.
I took a
bachelor's degree in business management at Ateneo de Manila University, a
leading Philippine university that granted me a full scholarship.
My first encounter and perhaps the start of my close affinity with Japan was in
1998, when I was 28.
I took part in a one-month trip to Japan under the
Philippine-Japan Friendship program sponsored by JICA. I applied after seeing
a notice on the bulletin board at the bank where I was working. Candidates went
through a screening process with a Philippine government agency, and I was
fortunate to be one of the 20 Filipinos selected to go. I wanted to expand my
horizon and experience a new culture and new approaches to the management
of businesses. We went to Osaka, Hiroshima, Tokyo, and visited companies
like Sony, Panasonic, and Tadano. It was my first trip abroad and I was
overwhelmed not only by the culture but also by the scale of business,
advancement in technology, attention to detail, and passion for continuous
improvement that I witnessed in the Japanese companies we visited.
My next trip to Japan was in January 2007 for a week-long internship including
visits to Fujitsu offices and plants. This was after completing a post-graduate
diploma
in
intercultural
management
from
Japan-America
Institute
of
Management Science (JAIMS) in Honolulu. JAIMS is affiliated with Fujitsu and
my post-graduate study was a scholarship grant from Fujitsu.
During my stay in
Japan for one week, I felt that I had grown familiar and could easily relate to
Japanese life for some reason. I was half-kidding when I told my family that it
seemed I had been a Japanese in a past life. After my studies in Hawaii and
internship in Japan, I resumed work in the bank.
After some time, I wanted to pursue an MBA to complete my further studies. I
wanted to expand my horizons, get a bigger view of the world. So, I looked at
schools such as AIT (Asian Institute of Technology) in Thailand. Then, Hitomi
Michino (a JAIMS and later a GLOBIS alumna) posted a link to GLOBIS in the
JAIMS alumni email group. I chanced upon it and started to inquire about the
possibility for GLOBIS to accept an international student from overseas. I
eventually got accepted with a full scholarship and went to Japan for the third
time to spend almost two years as a student at GLOBIS University.
I was 41 years old when I joined GLOBIS. You could say that pursuing MBA
there was the forced period of my life because I really wanted to build my
capabilities and somehow see how far I could go in terms of learning new things
and exploring new possibilities in my life.
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome these?
Before leaving for Japan, I sold the family car as a financial safety net.
I also
left the bank where I had been working because the company did not offer a
two-year leave of absence.
There was also a company policy not to rehire
people who had resigned.
So there was a lot of pressure on me regarding my
move to Tokyo to study for the MBA.
she always had my back.
My wife never opposed my decision and
She understood that I was doing all this to improve
the condition of our family.
That was just getting to Tokyo. The next thing was all the anxiety about the
program.
Could I complete the program without any income?
decision pay off with a new opportunity after the program?
Would my
How could it be
worth it, leaving a stable job after 10 years? And personally, could I handle
living alone in Tokyo, the language barrier, the loneliness?
think about quitting and going back to the Philippines.
thought about it. I agonized with these thoughts.
I did sometimes
There were times I really
Especially when I was alone.
But the sense of purpose, strong desire to finish always prevailed. I think there
was a powerful sense of faith: Somebody beyond me, someone greater than me
always taking care of me, like there was a hand that brought me to that moment,
guiding me to complete what I had set out do to.
I have believed since I was a
child that something greater than me guides me.
After I finished, and I went back to the Philippines, I reconnected with my
company which offered to rehire me, giving me a bigger responsibility and a
higher rank than before I left. From a senior manager with a branch head
position, I became an area head with a rank of assistant vice-president. What
great news! This was certainly a premium given to my MBA degree from
GLOBIS.
How did the MBA help your career, your personal mission? Has it changed
over time? What led to those changes?
The MBA was the forced period as defined in the Kokorozashi Awareness
Framework.
I was forcing myself to pursue an MBA outside of the Philippines.
GLOBIS was, as he might say, planned happenstance. I had to overcome
anxiety and loneliness, being away from my family.
I had a sense of purpose to
contribute to society before GLOBIS, but never had a clearly articulated mission.
I only defined and articulated my personal mission when I was at GLOBIS. I
have always had this sense of purpose, which in general terms was to reach out
and be a positive influence on others. GLOBIS enabled me to clarify that sense
of purpose and come up with a personal mission by merging my passion,
background and experience together with my vision for the future.
My personal mission has since been to influence people through teaching (my
passion) in the field of financial literacy and development (my background and
experience) so that I can uplift their economic condition (my vision for the future).
I love to teach and am good at finance. So, I merged the two to become a
positive influence.
I am teaching financial literacy classes to blue-collar
workers. So far, I have taught three classes with 30 to 40 participants in each
class. The opportunity just flowed to me.
I met a journalist and a vice president
of an insurance company at an event. We just happened to be seated at the
same table and began talking about having a financial literacy session or a book
launch event.
I really see teaching as my calling.
I feel very happy doing it. Teaching comes
from the sense of sharing your knowledge, going out of yourself. By teaching
you give part of yourself.
If you can see the transformation of your student, that
is like a bonus, a source of fulfillment, joy, and a reward. The transformation is a
validation of your teaching.
After coming back to my work in the bank, I am awed by the experiences of
synchronicity in my life. There have certainly been events, people, and
encounters that brought me closer to realizing my personal mission. As my life
unfolds, I find things, either big or small, aligned with my mission, fall into place.
I see everything in my life as a gift.
This gives me a deep sense of gratitude.
This enables me to see my blessings and appreciate the goodness and kindness
of others. This allows me to share with others and celebrate our humanity.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
Although my mission is personal, I cannot accomplish it alone. My network is
essential and critical in realizing it. For example, it was people from my network
that helped me organize and implement the financial literacy lectures we started
in 2015. They helped me with finding sponsors, marketing, logistics and other
essentials to effectively set up the lecture series. The camaraderie and fellowship
with my personal network made the activities towards my personal mission so
much fun and enjoyable.
It was very important to overcome all extreme emotions first before progressing
towards my personal mission. I needed to let all the emotions settle before I could
clearly see how my life events could be aligned. For example, I had to deal with
feelings of anxiety and fear every time I was relocated or given bigger
responsibility.
To handle stress, I spend time with my family and friends. I enjoy simple meals
with them or going out to watch movies. Their company and our lighthearted
talks certainly relieve me of stress. And there are times when I also like to be
alone and take quiet walks or reflect and meditate. These moments allow me to
regain my sense of balance before heading back to my daily grind.
To maintain this sense of balance, I have to think about the people I love.
When there are several options in a decision, I consider the options that would
be good for the people I care about.
This gives me a sense of being grounded.
My expectation is tempered so I can be more into doing what is best for
everybody. When you look outside of yourself, that’s where joy and happiness,
and sense of content flow.
I try to avoid a sense of entitlement, such as having a convenient parking spot,
scolding subordinates, and so on.
myself in others’ shoes.
It is natural, but I try to avoid it. I try to put
How would I feel?
I try to find a quiet time and
examine myself; not on a regular basis, but occasionally when making decisions.
Did the decision come from ego or pride? Or was it made looking out for what
is best for everybody.
This is where prayer helps me a lot.
It could be a quiet time and meditation, but
to me having a conversation with God unburdens me. I have had this habit
since I was little. It is my anchor.
My idea of God is someone who shares the
work of redemption and uplifting the lives of others, being a citizen of the world
and being a service to others.
I am not trying to make a big impact on the world but doing what I can to help the
people I meet. I am concentrating on what I can do and have a ripple effect.
You have to have a mission no matter how small it is -- no grand illusion of
saving of the world. It can be one person or one family or community -- that is
more than enough. Sometimes people with great dreams lose connections
with the people around them. Friends, family and the local community are those
who should benefit from your personal mission.
making you a better person.
Helping others changes you,
Those who burn out might be looking inward. “I’m
tired because I am supposed to be recognized, praised, but I am not.” You
have to be outward looking.
We are always a work in progress.
Now is the time that I want to make other people’s lives a bit easier and leave a
sense of legacy.
I have become more influential in making decisions.
Everything is coming together.
I hope to continuously seek to realize my
personal mission. I have a reason to get up in the morning.
My family is always
my refuge and shelter. And my faith is something I always gain strength from.
Eventually everything gets better.
Looking back, GLOBIS was a life-changing experience. I was able to develop my
personal mission there.
concrete mission.
From my initial sense of purpose it grew into a
Jose Fernandez Villasenor
Villasenor constantly pushes himself to expand the boundaries of his learning.
Based in Silicon Valley, he now combines the fields of medicine and electrical
engineering to build his startup. Villasenor sees the value of interconnectivity,
which helps him as he works on his latest product.
What are you doing now?
I’m the chief operating officer and co-founder of Biointeractive Technologies Inc.,
based in the Silicon Valley since 2017. I helped to expand the company from
healthcare to consumer – virtual reality and augmented reality. We’re about to
close our pre-seed funding and in January 2018 we launched our TENZR™
wristband to the market at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Same month we were accepted to Techstars business accelerator whose
companies have collectively raised over $4.4 billion, with 90% of them still active
or acquired.
The timing was amazing.
I was laid off from my previous job in November 2016
because the company was acquired.
I was the development manager for
global healthcare business and had been there 10 years, starting out as a
systems and applications engineer in healthcare.
They had hired me because
of my double degree -- electrical engineering and medicine.
Then, I moved to
research and development, product marketing, then sales.
The layoff helped accelerate my decision to join Biointeractive. I joined as a
founder, working on market validation.
I’m basically working as a CFO, CSO,
CMO—doing all the things a founder should do.
We’re really happy right now
because NASA approached us. They’re using our device to train astronauts in
zero gravity space simulators at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston.
We
have a lot of traction in the market. We have already secured a couple of
investors. We’re pretty sure we’re going to close our pre-seed round soon.
The way this new venture came about was that I met a guy at a symposium in
Cancun, Mexico. He’s the director of the biomedical engineering department at
Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and uses a Stanford approach to creating
groups of graduate students, master’s and Ph.Ds., who are working on certain
technologies, and helping them incubate and then accelerate to form a company.
I ran a session at the symposium on security and innovation in healthcare and
he approached me afterward and said, “You have a lot of business experience.
I don’t have any business experience, but I have a lot of intellectual property.
I
think it would be a really good match to work together.”
We spent a month analyzing all the research in his lab, identifying which groups
had more opportunity to successfully launch. I identified one particular group of
students, who are now my co-founders. They’re based in Vancouver.
The team is in their late twenties, passionate about healthcare, and that really
resonated because I have the same passion for biomedical technology.
The
environment was quite different from here in Silicon Valley, where I’ve been living
the last few years. Attending all these startup events and mingling here, it’s
really a harsh environment, very competitive.
approach.
It just doesn’t click with my
I think people are often dishonest and there’s a lot of prejudice
against non-white people.
Anyway, these Vancouver guys were cool.
We clicked.
None had any
business experience so, I said, “Okay, I want to join your company as a founder.
I think you have a great product and great IP, but you need to change if you want
to survive after your incubation period is over.”
I had no position to say that to them, really.
They have a lot of technical
knowledge, but they were not ready to run the business from a CEO standpoint.
I’m not saying that I was prepared either, but I was the only one who had some
knowledge of what a CEO should do from my GLOBIS MBA.
Also, I had my
business in Mexico, which I sold when I moved to Japan, so it was not my first
attempt to become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship has always been in my
DNA. But, definitely, the skill set that I learned at GLOBIS was critical in giving
me the confidence to join this company and redirect it.
We needed to expand from healthcare. They were focusing this hand-tracking
bracelet on stroke rehabilitation. The idea was that patients who had suffered a
stroke would wear the bracelet during rehab to detect if they were moving their
hand correctly again. That’s a small market and they would need FDA
certification for it. I told them they had to be realistic and focus on VR – to get
into that market, which, after running different marketing and financial analysis of
the segments, is bigger.
We have a great product. It’s a wearable silicone band with embedded sensors
to track hand movements. For virtual reality, this is really important because all
the solutions right now use headsets with a video camera and if you want to
detect your hand, you need to put your hands in front of your headset. It’s not
natural to be in VR with your hands always right in front of your face. Another
issue we are solving is control. VR users have to hold a band or a tube controller.
They are holding something in their hand all the time. If they need to open a door,
the band they are holding gets in the way. It’s not natural. You can see a lot of
pictures on our website (tenzr.me) but, basically, we’re freeing the hand from
controllers, making hand use in VR more natural.
We looked into VR, analyzed the different consumer and industrial segments,
and found that the market is exploding -- like the early 90s Internet. The timing is
there. We have a really good solution that fits into the market. That’s why we
decided to go after the VR segment and that’s when NASA approached the
company. Two of the guys were presenting at a VR expo in Vancouver and
NASA came knocking.
Our long-term plan is to expand our core capabilities in healthcare into other
applications that bridge between medical, wellness and fitness; while continuing
to license our technology for the consumer market.
Our team has a great combination of skills. One co-founder worked for 10 years
in an FDA Class III medical device company. He has a lot of experience in IP
protection and product development, which is a huge area of expertise. I’m a
surgeon and an electrical engineer, which are really complementary. Our third
founder has a master’s in biomedical engineering, experience in a startup, and is
a social butterfly, which is great for marketing. He is really smart--street smart. A
solid set team.
Between the three of us we have a strong passion for healthcare but also are
well networked with the industry. Eventually, I want to help incubate. There
needs to be more risk-takers. Investors need to have a deep understanding of
regulations, not only in the U.S., but globally. They need to understand the
clinical environment. Healthcare is complicated. My experience as a doctor,
engineer, and now entrepreneur is a skill set that is lacking in all these
incubators and accelerators. That’s where I really want to invest my time –
helping, coaching, and mentoring people like these guys from Canada. People
who have great ideas, but don’t have a clear path to monetize their technology.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
My parents both have business administration degrees. My dad worked in the
government and private sectors, and also co-founded a financial institution and a
construction company. My mom was a housewife and taught part-time at
universities. She also had a small business making and selling crafts.
My older sister is an accountant. She and her husband run a successful
company in the construction industry. She was a senior auditor before becoming
a mother of two. The entrepreneur spirit runs in the family.
My mom was most influential to me. I learned to dream big and pursue my
dreams. She always encouraged my crazy decisions, such as when I chose to
study two careers at the same time. She helped me land my first job as a teacher
at the school where she was teaching. Through discipline, she taught me to
study hard to be the best at school without forgetting to be humble.
I was born premature and spent most of my childhood in hospitals and visiting
doctors. I even had to do my homework while in the hospital. I was really at ease
with and attracted to the hospital environment and ecosystem. When I went to
middle and high school, I was good at math and physics, and became interested
in biology and medicine. I couldn’t choose. I loved engineering. I loved all those
classes, but I also wanted to be a doctor. Why can’t I do both things? Why do I
have to choose one?
When I was 18 in my first semester in engineering, I went as an exchange
student to Japan.
I was surprised at how disciplined and hardworking the
Japanese were. Initially, my plan was to go to engineering school and then
medicine -- one degree at a time. But, seeing all these people working 12, 15, 18
hours a day, I thought, I really have a lot of spare time. Maybe I should study
both at the same. That’s what led to my decision to do both engineering and
medicine – a trip to Japan.
I went to medical school and engineering school at the same time. I did a
master’s in medicine after I finished my degree, while I was working.
Then, I
did my MBA when I was in Japan. I’m now at Stanford doing two degrees: One in
artificial intelligence and another in entrepreneurship and innovation. I’m taking
classes in Palo Alto, so I’m working seven days a week.
But, it’s been like that
all my life. I’ve always been like that.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find a mentor until we got accepted to TechStars, which is
pretty recent. The core of the acceleration program is actually based on finding
the right mentors for each company. During the first three weeks of the program
we interviewed with approximately 70 potential mentors in something
reminiscent of speed dating. You have 20 minutes with each of them and you
have to do a pitch and ask questions to figure out if they are a good match for
your company or not.
I was impressed by all these people who voluntarily help you, to make your
company successful. Finding other entrepreneurs and business people who had
failed and made it in their industries and learning from their experiences helped
us to become more focused and shared their network with us.
We currently have five lead mentors and a TechStars’ network that helps each
other to be successful.
How did your MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has
it changed over time? What led to those changes?
My MBA gave me the skills to run a business and understand how organizations
work. It also helped me be more realistic about what I could achieve and when,
and what steps to take achieve my life goal. My goal has refined over time, but
it has not changed.
technological
The external macroeconomic environment, the
discoveries,
the
industry
dynamics,
and
my
personal
circumstances -- getting married and relocating several times -- have also
shaped how I am pursuing that goal.
To achieve my personal mission, I need two things. One, be recognized as a
successful entrepreneur, which I’m trying to do now through this company.
If
we can exit, then we will become known as somebody who knows how to do
things. The second thing is to have the network and the money.
I need to get
my name out and be recognized, create awareness of who I am and my skill set.
I have been doing that for the past three years here in Silicon Valley.
The three degrees help, but so does the experience.
I feel more confident.
GLOBIS gave me the skills and when you go through finance and venture
strategy courses, it gives you good, solid groundwork. But if you don’t have the
experience -- and I think Silicon Valley is the place to be if you want to become a
tech entrepreneur -- you’re nothing.
nothing.
Even if you have five degrees, you’re
A lot of friends have companies that failed.
They had to go back to
their country -- sometimes, because of immigration problems; or a lack of good
founders; or a lack of market understanding. Thankfully, everything has been
fine for me.
risk.
I found a way to live through my severance package and take more
I got my green card through my company. I found an awesome team. We
have a great product and we’re moving in the right direction. Yay!
What about adversity? How did you overcome this?
I have had a lot of adversity and failure, but I don’t often think about it.
bullied at school, even at university.
I was
I was challenged compared to my peers
because my lungs were not well developed, and I had to spend a lot of time in
the hospital. I was terrible at sports. It was tough going through junior and
senior high. But, I never let that be a barrier.
I took it as a chance to build my
own life; ignore people, learn, forgive, let go, and then move to the next thing,
focusing on what I really wanted to do, not on negative people. It was an
opportunity to grow and become wiser.
I had to face a lot of rejection from peers at school, but also from my own family.
I had to leave home because I’m gay.
I didn’t talk to my parents for many years.
I told them, this is who I am. I’m not going to change.
accept it.
They didn’t want to
I was about to finish med school, six months to go, and I had to leave
home. It was hard. I lived on $40 a month, sleeping in the hospital. You just
go through all that, build character and move on.
Then I met my husband.
He’s also a medical doctor.
He helped me a lot
during the first years after med school, but eventually we grew apart.
We were
married for ten years, but we took different paths. He never wanted to move to
Japan or California. That was also really hard for me.
when are you going to stop?
He was always asking,
You’re always doing things.
You’re always
looking for more. I moved to Japan and we had a long-distance relationship for
three years. Then, I moved to the U.S. and he moved in for a year.
He’s a
doctor, but he couldn’t work here, so he was like a househusband. He became
depressed.
I told him, “You have to go back to Mexico. This is not good for you.”
We are walking different pathways and it’s good learning.
It’s adversity, but it is
what it is.
My parents and I now talk again.
They never talked to my spouse. They don’t
acknowledge that at all.
But, we talk. Being discriminated by your own family
is one of those things.
Black people get discriminated from other races; gay
people get discriminated by their own families.
However, I took all these opportunities to grow, forgive, and overcome.
happy life.
I live a
I have made good and bad decisions, and have always learned
from failures and adversity.
It’s just a part of life, opportunities to grow.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
My current study, artificial intelligence, is part of a computer science master’s.
I’ll probably just do the AI part and not pursue the full master’s.
The other one,
innovation and entrepreneur certificate is eight classes. You go there, take your
exams, and that’s it.
I see myself as becoming a serial entrepreneur, helping startups in the
healthcare industry.
I’m on Step 3. I already have built a company.
three founders and another five employees.
We have
I’ll stay here in Silicon Valley.
This is where all the big players are. Vancouver will remain our design center
because we have tax breaks that we don’t have here.
a Silicon Valley for Canada.
Vancouver is becoming
A lot of cool stuff is happening there.
As for finding your kokorozashi, you have to look deep into what you’re
passionate about.
No one can tell you what you to do.
your passion and what motivates you.
That’s it.
Just look deep into
Try to make sense of that.
Nitin Hingarh
Hingarh, leads Ambika, the company he started several years ago in Tokyo. He
cares about the growth and development of his employees as he looks for new
markets to enter.
What are you doing now?
I am president of Ambika Trading. We supply 5,000 restaurants in Japan with
genuine Indian spices. In 2016 sales were $17 million. Within the coming three
years, I want to achieve annual sales of $50 million. You need difficult, but
achievable goals. You need to be inspired. Even if you don’t make it, you will
learn things and know why you didn’t make it. But we will make this goal.
When I first came to Japan in 1994, I worked in marketing for a diamond
company.
The market in Japan for finished diamonds 20 years ago was big,
but by 1997-1998 there were a lot of bankruptcies in the diamond business.
When business started to decline, I wondered what should I do. I’m from a
middle-class family and running my own diamond business was just too risky. I
decided to go back to India.
There was even a farewell party for me leaving
Japan.
Still, I was looking for startup ideas. I thought about handicrafts, but that didn’t
seem good. A friend, Muninder Panda, advised me to look at food and that
seemed to make sense. Being vegetarian, I always faced a problem with the
availability of Indian food in Japan. There were no Indian products available. Our
choices were mostly Italian, Chinese, and occasionally Thai. I had problems
finding food that suited me in Japan, but coincidentally my wife’s family was
involved in the food business for many years. So it worked out. The diamond
business needed a huge investment, but food I could do. I had discovered the
demand and the supply for Indian food in Japan, but was still difficult beginning a
new business.
I started Ambika in 1998 with a small consignment of two tons of Indian spices
and beans. When I met with customers they told me I was the first Indian food
supplier. Some suppliers were selling spices from China or Korea, but not India.
Indian chefs were especially pleased. They had grown up with Indian spices and
were uncomfortable using anything else. Some families running restaurants had
not spoken to anyone in Hindi for 10 years. They were happy just speaking
Hindi.
When I started, I didn’t know much about Japan. There were 200 to 300 Indian
restaurants in the country.
Since then, Ambika has averaged 10% annual
growth because the Japanese are fond of Indian curry. Only 25,000 Indians live
here.
Ambika has expanded only because it provides authentic Indian ingredients.
Now we have 40 staff and are outsourcing all of our packing work. The staff does
all core marketing, accountants, HR, and finance.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I grew up in a small, simple town in Rajasthan with a population under 20,000.
There was no theater, and TV had just arrived. My mother had an undergraduate
degree. Her father was a military doctor. Her side of the family was educated. My
father was a CPA.
My parents always encouraged me to study. I always use to sleep and dream a
lot. They warned me not to spoil our image in respectable society. My answer
was always, don’t worry, I will start my own business.
From the time I was young, I dreamed of starting my own business. It might be in
my blood, because I’m a Jain.
Jain is a religion that represents about 0.2% of
the Indian population, yet we contribute 25% of the Indian economy. Hence, I am
a businessman by birth.
After graduation, I took diamond training in Mumbai. It
was extremely strict -- diamond sorting under a light eight hours a day. You
cannot make a mistake on any piece. There was nowhere to go. It was like a
prison.
That year of training was good for me because it meant I was able to come here
to Japan. It taught me that if you want to win something, you have to sacrifice
something.
You should have patience. You should not take a second or third
way – no shortcuts. It will take time, but if your goals and direction are good, be
patient. You will get the result.
Today, I don’t really remember many of the specifics of setting up my company
in Japan. It was difficult, but I had to do it. I was very prepared mentally for all
that. The same with joining the MBA at GLOBIS, I was also mentally prepared to
sacrifice. I knew that I was doing it to gain something good.
In my family we have a policy to be strictly honest. My paternal grandfather was
a tycoon. He had good relations with the royal community in Rajasthan and he
married for love during the time of arranged marriages. Our family was the only
business family in the area. Even now people say if anyone worked in my
grandfather’s company, it was the equivalent of an MBA. It was a pioneering
company. My grandfather came to Japan 40 years ago to import folding umbrella
technology to India.
On one occasion, his company made commitments to supply sesame seeds but,
unfortunately, that year’s yield was below the desired amount.
However, they
had to fulfill their commitment. Desperation got the best of the Hingarh brothers
and they chose a path that led to the whole business empire’s collapse. In my
family’s home there was a bed that was built with elephant ivory (we were so rich
at that time) and my mother had to sell it for the equivalent of 500 yen.
When I heard this story from my father, I understood the importance of honesty.
Generally, people like Konosuke Matsushita – the founder of Panasonic – are
inspired by some incident in life. My honesty and motivation are inspired by this
story. That’s why I don’t take shortcuts, even if it means earning less.
My father left his practice CPA practice to run construction material business. He
is my mentor. I have learned so much from him. In my college days, I visited his
office often. His first lesson to me was honesty. He also taught me how to
converse with vendors and suppliers. He told me very clearly that if you do not
know accounting never do business. It’s not only marketing that’s required, but
also accounting to run a business. If you sell and money does not come, that is
not a business. You should know to whom you are selling, how much you’re
selling, and whether you have received money from them.
Now, many other family members also play a vital role in guiding me. I have
friends at P&G and Pfizer. They advise me, as well.
How did your MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has
it changed over time? What led to those changes?
From now on whatever business I build, the credit goes to GLOBIS. Without
GLOBIS my growth would not be possible. GLOBIS, my MBA, my education, all
play a vital role in my goals.
For example, in the Organizational Behavior and Leadership class, I learned
about Lewin’s Change Management Model of unfreezing, changing, and
refreezing the organization. We completely unfroze Ambika, gave it a new shape
and then froze it again.
All that I have learned in that class, I have applied to
my business.
Now we’re working with management by objectives.
I learned that from
GLOBIS. The company’s goals are divided by departments. The people working
in each department have very clear objectives. We do individual evaluation
interviews with everyone every six months. We also evaluate each team and
depending on the evaluation, we decide their bonus; their raises and payscale.
One thing in my mind before GLOBIS was profit sharing. After reading about
Kazuo Inamori, founder of Kyocera, who implemented profit sharing, we started
it in my company.
I always say to my team that growing a company doesn’t mean buying tall
buildings. Growing a company means growing each staff member’s strength.
We’re training the team. I sent some of them to GLOBIS for courses.
If someone has the ability, creating results is very easy. When you have
command over your own work, you enjoy it more.
If you don’t know how to
swim, the pool is death to you, but if you know how to swim, then you can enjoy
swimming.
I’m now growing my company without any stress and enjoying it.
To accomplish my mission, I have prepared my company, not with 3Cs or 4Ps,
but with 6 Ps -- purpose, passion, proactivity, profit, process, and people.
Purpose means your objective or goal. If you don’t have a purpose, it creates
ambiguity and whatever you do is not good. Once you have a purpose, you need
passion. Without passion, you will not accomplish much. And when we’re
working in this competitive world you should be proactive. You are constantly
checking, actively working on the problems that come up.
These need to be
managed constantly. Even if you do not achieve your goals, you should gain
knowledge and know why you didn’t achieve it. You should be able to anticipate
what kind of problems you will face in the future.
For the management part, without profit you can’t do business. For profit, you
need process, and for process you need people. I developed this concept over 4
½ years at GLOBIS. Everyone understands why profit is important, why process
is important. Now my mission is to go global, so I need these 6Ps.
What about adversity, or failures? Have you had that much? How did you
overcome it?
By nature, I tend to think nothing is impossible. Impossible is not in my
dictionary. I never went to school to learn Japanese because there was no time.
I started my own business and learned the language while talking with
customers. When the pressure comes you learn everything quickly! But, still, I’m
learning Japanese.
When I started my business, I went to the customs officials and they would help
me. I couldn’t speak Japanese. In my mind, it is very clear that as you grow you
have to face more problems, so I’m always ready to face problems. Every day
when I come to the office I know that I must solve 10 new problems. That is how
I grow. I’m a very balanced person mentally, physically, and emotionally. I
started going to the gym 10 years ago. Before that, my lifestyle was very
different. When I started Ambika, my wife and I unloaded so many shipping
containers every day and that was my gym!
Your mind should be prepared to handle challenges. Otherwise, you should not
start a business. It’s very important when starting a new business to assess your
strengths and how they fit with the type of business you want. The limitation for
my company is that we’re Indian. I can’t hire Japanese salespeople for Indian
restaurants. The pool is smaller, too. They aren’t MBAs. I always work with them.
When they’re making a budget, I sit with them. In business, you have to be
diplomatic on some level, but you have to be strict too.
I used to get angry with my team members. Then I hired a new HR manager, she
said, “Nitin-san, these are people. When they’re not doing well, if you get angry,
you will not achieve anything through them. Let me observe. I can try to see
where we can develop these people. We will set benchmarks like MBO. If they’re
not doing well, then we can reduce their salary. You should take a softer
approach. Showing aggression is not good.”
One thing I can surely say is that I have good sense, which to my knowledge is
not so common. This helps me achieve a balance in life. To me, good sense
means what you do unto others will come back to you, the golden rule. It is very
difficult to judge character at first glance; this is why I look to see if the person at
least has traits of the golden rule.
I had an arranged marriage. In one meeting
with my wife, I found the same with her.
Having good sense is the most important. Yes, other knowledge is necessary,
but common sense is the key. After you have identified those with great common
sense, it is up to you to bring change and inspiration to them. They will learn and
grasp new information very quickly.
I have created changes in my family and my company, because I have
confidence that I can change people. If you have the confidence, you can
change anybody. You can change a thief into a good person. Confidence is very
important in a business. It gives you comfort. It means you can control the
situation.
In short, my life is very balanced; I spend time with my family and take care of my
health, education, and knowledge. I take care of my business and delegate
work, building my team. I don’t want to put all the responsibility onto my
shoulders. If I do, then only I grow. I want organic growth, growth with systems,
and to recruit good people. I don’t want to grow by experiencing pain. I want to
grow by enjoying.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
The main reason for studying at GLOBIS was for my company. I had been
working with consultants for a long time, and I felt it was not enough; that my
knowledge was not enough. The second was for my kids – so that I could guide
them to the essential things for entrepreneurs. My son is now in 12th grade. Next
year he will go to California to study entrepreneurship. I send him to America
every year for summer school, for global entrepreneurship and mathematics.
Influenced by my MBA, he started an entrepreneurship club.
There’s still more that I have to do. My vision is for the global satisfaction of
Indian people in terms of food. Now, that I’m very clear about what I have to do
and how, I have to determine what the important ingredients are to do it.
We now have offices in Japan and India.
The Japanese office is Ambika
Trading Company and the Indian office is Ambika Global. Ambika overall is run
by the Hingarh family. My father has been an entrepreneur for a half-century
and now is the backbone and the guide for us when making major decisions. My
brother Vipin is with my father in India. He has a master’s degree in pharmacy.
Over here with me, are Vinit and Sachin, my brothers. Vinit is an engineer and
oversees IT and finance. Sachin oversees the marketing department. We also
have Masako Shimada in the role of COO. All together we are a strong team,
bringing different knowledge to the table.
Recently, I went to the U.S. to see if there was potential for Ambika. The U.S.
importers of Indian food were working as they did in the 1980s. People are not
using software. When I met them, they told me that 70% of their time is spent
managing the warehouse, not marketing. Here in Japan, I’m 100% free to do
development.
That’s why I’m working with process and people. We have developed a whole
system for Japan with an Indian IT company because we take orders from 5,000
restaurants.
Ambika Global manages about 100 food manufacturers that directly export
goods to Japan with Japanese specifications. It manages all operations that
occur within India.
Over here, Hitachi is a third-party logistics partner for clearing the cargo and
maintaining stock. From Ambika Trading, we take the order and send it to
Hitachi. They package it. Then courier companies collect and deliver.
Until now we have been dealing solely with imported items from India, but in
restaurants the main items are meat, fresh vegetables, milk products, rice, wheat
flour, or maida, for naan. Ambika is now in the top 20% of Japanese companies
in terms of credit ranking, and that is a key factor in helping us collaborate with
Japanese companies -- a rice company, a wheat company, an oil company.
We’re changing the value chain here again. We have tied up with these
companies and developed a unique process. Our IT system will send them daily
orders and they will ship directly to my customers. We can eliminate middlemen
and the transportation cost, which are very expensive in Japan.
In the coming three years we’re going to expand, because we have a credit
facility, we have local partners now, and the value chain. My value chain is
unique for any Indian food company working either in India or outside.
The work I have done with Ambika has also led me to the position of food
governor for the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. I guide a
lot of Japanese food companies wanting to do business in India. I also assist a
lot of companies coming into Japan, guiding them to make good relations
between India and Japan. I have done many food industry seminars with the
Embassy of India. Ambika is influential within the food industry between India
and Japan.
From the IT class at GLOBIS, I learned about platforms. With that knowledge we
are trying to develop a platform for the Indian restaurants. For the long term, we
will develop a B2B platform for all those importing from India. They are facing a
lot of problems, so we will provide an open platform like Alibaba, where they can
buy. We will reach number one and Ambika will be written about in a case
study for future GLOBIS MBAs.
Jesus Rodriguez Villegas
Rodriguez, a serial entrepreneur, is currently focused on building a content
business focused on Japanese anime and films. Although he feels he has a long
way to go toward fulfilling his kokorozashi, his current business is in line with his
mission of connecting people and cultures.
What are you doing now?
After my MBA, I started my own company based in Mexico. We are a
cinematographic distribution company for the Latin American market.
Our focus since the beginning has been movie theater distribution in Mexico,
and we’ve expanded now to Home Video, VOD and more distribution channels
as well as to 16 more countries in LatAm including Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.
We want to spread to all of Latin America. All these places have heard of us
through our anime distribution, for which we are now the pioneers in all these
territories.
Currently, we have three business divisions. Our core business is the distribution
of feature films and anime movies. We also have an entertainment events
production division organizing our movie festival and premiers for our films and
other companies’ titles. Lastly, we have a digital production laboratory for our
own distribution materials and as a service to other distributors.
We are rapidly expanding to cover all the distribution channels for our content in
most of the territories where we have a presence. Our goal is to cover them all
by 2019.
And now that we are in the Latin American market we have access to a broader
range of content. We have been flexible, adapting to a fast-changing market,
finding what works and then following it, always trying to produce innovative and
attractive events. Now we have eight full-time and 12 part-time collaborators as
well as two outsourced companies working for us engaging in different activities
in Mexico’s main cities allowing us to coordinate and provide services
countrywide. Soon, we will have new collaborators in other Latin American cities.
At the beginning of 2017 we had a music concert with over 3,000 attendees, as
well as the co-production of the Mexican Comic-Con and the release of a new
movie all in a couple of months, I must admit it was way too much to handle as I
was working on several fronts at the same time. It was very exciting but
exhausting as well, even with my great team. So, I'm more selective about our
projects nowadays.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
My dad was my mentor growing up. He has a strong personality and is a family
guy; very focused on guiding his children in most aspects of life.
be my guide.
He will always
He had a really strong presence until I went to college.
I have two sisters, both living in my hometown.
My dad is a doctor and my mom
a university teacher, my older sister is the head teacher of a university (the first
female head teacher). My younger sister is a human rights lawyer.
I grew up
in a mid-size city of a million people; attended private school until high school.
It was a good school and I still have many good friends from there.
Most of
them are still living in my hometown, which comes as a surprise because many
of them studied abroad but decided to go back.
One of the main aspects of my personality is that I’m a conciliator; I’m a middle
child and since I was a kid I took on the role of mediator between my sisters,
sometimes my parents, friends, you name it; and it wasn’t because I wanted to, it
just came naturally to me.
My high school SAT score was high in most areas related to law, so I got
interested in both the practice and the theory – Roman law, historic international
treaties, revolutions, trading systems, ancient companies.
I already liked these
subjects, so loved the idea of studying more. I did some research, visited
universities, and finally decided to go ahead with law and become a professional
mediator. I got a great scholarship and my parents supported me as well.
After finishing law school, I practiced law for about 18 months, but I wanted
something more creative, with more freedom. I learned a lot as a law student,
many principles I still use in my daily life. I focused on international law, which is
more about cooperation and contracts. This is getting closer to the business
world, which, as I see it, is about making favorable agreements. When I was
practicing law, a friend wanted to start a hotel in my hometown, Oaxaca.
He
asked me to start the business with him. I jumped at the chance to enter into a
great partnership. We opened a hotel and restaurant. The business worked
really well, allowing me to rapidly grow.
Enjoying good profits at an early age can be deceiving.
Making money fast
made me believe that opening new businesses was easy.
It made me believe I
could rapidly succeed in other businesses as well, making hasty decisions.
was too quick opening my second business and branches of it.
I
Unfortunately, it
didn’t work well and we almost lost the whole business – both the old one and
the new one. Luckily, I was able to change direction and rescue the businesses,
bring them back into good shape and profitability. This experience and other
more personal experiences made me think I needed much more knowledge and
preparation to be sure of what I wanted in life.
So, I made a 180-degree turn.
I chose to keep preparing myself and let go of my business because it was
impossible to continue to do both.
How did your MBA help your career, with your personal mission? Has it
changed over time? What led to those changes?
I started looking into MBAs, particularly in Japan -- a country I was so impressed
with when visiting during a university trip. I knew little about contemporary
Japan, but much about its history and all the struggles its people lived through
after the war.
Witnessing the high standard of living in Japan really amazed me.
The Japanese became an example of resilience and improvement for me, and
the main reason I decided to go study there. I was very interested in learning
how to do business in Asia. I checked out a few business programs, and I
really liked the practicality of GLOBIS.
Other programs were very academic. I
didn’t want to become an important academic or anything like that, and so I went
to GLOBIS.
I spent almost three years in Japan, and it was mind-blowing.
It’s so different
from Mexico and the other Western countries that I had visited.
In Japan, it is
possible to achieve a balance between great entertainment and serenity. I had
traveled a lot and never considered any city as a place I could live, but then I met
Tokyo.
In the program there was one class where we had to make a list of business
ideas – 20 to 30 big ideas – and then use critical thinking and other tools to
shorten the list, taking out the unviable ones. A lot of them sounded good at the
beginning, but with the practical training you get in the MBA, you realize that
there are many factors why you cannot do them, saving you time and money
chasing crazy projects.
In one of the more advanced courses, Venture Strategy, the objective was to
develop a business idea in teams of four and make it a viable business project to
analyze during the entire course before finally pitching it to a panel of company
directors, with only one winner.
My team focused on my business idea – an
online anime licensing and distribution company. We were a great, diverse
team – Shun Nagashima, a regional CEO and Japanese family guy; Josh
Easten, an Aussie multicultural adventurer, risk taker, and best friend; Mayumi
Takatori, a creative and cosmopolitan Japanese woman, and me.
We were
able to build the business platform tackling all the issues presented by our
classmates, our professor, Shinichiro Ishikawa, a seasoned business
entrepreneur and anime expert, and finally, the judging panel, which voted us the
best business project!
I did not have any more real mentors until I finished the MBA. Then Ishikawa,
who had challenged me a lot, became close to me and pointed me in the right
direction to develop my business.
He still guides me and connects me with the
right people that I would never have been able to meet on my own. He’s
provided a lot of business counsel that only experience can provide.
When I
finished the MBA, I just didn’t think there was any way to make the business
happen beyond the classroom. I realized that I needed money and contacts.
The contacts - Japanese companies, which tend to be very conservative and
reluctant to deal with newcomers, especially foreigners, seemed beyond reach.
That’s when Ishikawa asked: Do you really want to do this?
He hooked me up with contacts in anime companies. They were really useful
contacts and then it all seemed doable.
I still needed the Mexico part of the
deal – distributors. That was the most difficult part – the licensing – because
nobody cares about licensing.
Everything is pirated here.
This raised the
question of where does a distributor really need a license?
Movie theaters
were the answer, and it so happens Mexico has the fourth largest cinema
attendance worldwide.
This became our main channel because we could
actually compete here.
Theaters are the only non-pirated channel and so I
changed the focus of my business.
Before going to the MBA program, I never considered myself an entrepreneur. I
thought that concept fit only people with multimillion-dollar startups in Silicon
Valley.
I was just thinking of ways to create a simple business.
However, after
the program and meeting more innovative people, I thought, “Wow, these people
are real entrepreneurs, leaving everything behind just to follow their ideas and
create a business – big or small – from the ground.” That’s an entrepreneur!
And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for some years now, so I’m glad to
consider myself one.
For me another main aspect of an entrepreneur is to be innovative, create
something that isn’t there yet, which tends to be challenging. When I started
this business in Japan and brought it to Mexico the first challenge I faced was
that potential business partners did not have much of an idea of what Japan is. I
could be talking about films from China or Korea and they would not even know
the difference. All these countries were the same to them.
Japanese content is quite challenging sometimes.
there and is hungry for new content.
To define and sell
Fortunately, the market is
From our festivals and other sources, we
estimate there’s a niche of about 500,000 people in Mexico alone.
We have
about 120,000 followers and a good percentage of them attend every festival.
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome this?
When my friend approached me about starting the hotel, I quit my job as an
attorney. Within a couple of months, I went into full-time management, without
any experience at all.
restaurant.
The hotel worked really well, so we opened the
It was a huge mistake.
We went into a lot of debt, but managed to
turn it around. We changed the concept and it worked.
We gained a third
partner and expanded from there.
It was an Asian fusion place, spicy Asian/Mexican food, and it was successful.
We opened the second one in Puebla, where I went to college. We were priced
too high and the concept did not work. We really thought about closing the
whole thing down and leaving it.
We thought maybe we should just go back
and focus on the hotel. It was so difficult. We took our last cents and put them
into redoing the place. We redid the entire concept, cut our overhead, focused
on students and it worked.
The hotel had only been open 18 months and we
thought we knew everything about business.
We were thinking in teenager
years – oh, yeah, we’ve been doing this a long time, a year and a half!
Eventually, it started working and even now I hear that they are still doing well
and opening places in other towns.
This experience definitely helped me in the distribution business. We have to
keep refocusing and restarting the business. We were really profitable in 2015,
doing horror movie distribution. We had capital and we went crazy.
We said,
let’s get some great indie movies and distribute them in the general market.
Unfortunately, they were too specific for the main market.
too many of these projects.
We lost money on
We learned that we had to stay with broader films
and leave the indie and niche to our Japanese anime.
We had to regroup and
rethink.
It’s so stressful, but you have to keep your sense of humor. You have to laugh
instead of getting angry. Getting mad is destructive and dangerous.
doesn’t work. You have to release the stress.
It just
Last weekend, we were doing
these extreme haunted houses and here we were at the top of this mountain in
this haunted theme park being chased by zombies!
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I’m not so focused yet on the accomplishment of my personal mission.
I’m still
developing projects and ideas that are helping me to build the channels I need.
My personal mission is always evolving and getting more complex. I’m working
one step at a time.
In some ways, most of my work is related to my personal
mission, which when studying at GLOBIS I described as to build a bridge to bring
cultures together.
I don’t think there should be divisions between people and
countries. We are one world, one species, and I always try to live by those
principles.
I think understanding each other’s culture is a great beginning, and
that’s what I’m doing here.
I first got this concept attending a lecture about the EU and its economic and
social systems.
The idea of trying to unify a territory or even a region made me
believe this could be the seed of a trend long in the future toward unifying the
world. I studied this deeply: it was my final graduation thesis on international
law.
The biggest takeaway was that if we ever become a world without borders,
sharing and understanding our cultures is the way to start; books used to be a
great way to do it, movies is how you get to people nowadays.
Roi Shefts
Once a military helicopter pilot, Shefts sought out a new life in Japan. After
achieving success here in Japan, he moved with his family to Australia. Shefts,
like Nakatsuka, views kokorozashi as achievable goals, each of evolving
importance as he grows. He is now focused on a work-life balance for his family.
Shefts has achieved his dreams (kokorozashi) three times already. In the
process, he has tried his best, taken action, and overcome fear, seizing
synchronicity moments.
What are you doing now?
I moved to Australia in 2013. I wanted to raise my four children in a good
environment. I am from Israel and my wife is from Japan. I wanted to live in a
country where our influences were neutral to our children.
I am a Customer Care Director for Verint-Systems, a U.S. software company
which focuses on improving customer service. I am a big believer in the service
management model that I studied in the GLOBIS MBA program and in the
software we are selling. I feel that during my time here I have matured and have
learned to enjoy helping my team grow and achieve results. It has been a great
experience.
In my new life in Australia I have more time for activities outside work -- sports,
volunteering, and family activities. I also run half-marathons and have a target of
running one under 100 minutes. I mentor teenage boys once a week at a high
school. And we have been holding TED-type of lectures for friends and
neighbors at my house. I recently explained semiconductors and the fascinating
story of the invention of the silicon chip. I can do so much now, taking kids to
school, having dinner together, and visiting their schools.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I grew up on a kibbutz, a farming collective, in Israel. The basic ideology of the
kibbutz is a truly socialist society:
1) everyone is equal, everyone has one vote (direct democracy) and everyone
gets paid the same regardless of their position or job;
2) the motto is “contribute as you can, take as you need,” so everyone is
expected to work, and everything is free;
3) children sleep in a kids’ house from the age of three months, not with their
parents. We had a kids’ society, which gave us much freedom but also greater
responsibility. There was not much emphasis on studies or test results, but
looking back, we had some great teachers. I did not spend much time in class,
but always ensured that I studied enough to get good results.
My father and older sister influenced me. They trusted me deeply. This led to me
trusting my employees and my team. I also trust my kids that they will be just fine,
so while I want them to work or study hard, I have no doubt in their ability to
succeed.
I also was lucky to work as an apprentice from the age of 12 and throughout high
school for the kibbutz electrician. His no-nonsense professionalism taught me a
lot. We had to fix everything and there was no manual. Just troubleshoot and
improvise. I learned from the best teacher in this apprentice-style learning. He
wasn’t much for talking or compliments, but when he gave one (and I still
remember it) I felt I had finally achieved something significant.
Then when I was 18, I worked as a developmental leader in southern Israel. I
was involved in after-school activities for struggling kids. I played games with the
smaller kids and talked about the meaning of life with 16- and17-year-old boys. I
think I gained their trust and they started to rely on me. I wondered how my
activities could help lead them out of their situation.
Growing up on a kibbutz, I had everything. We were not rich, in fact we were
quite poor, but we had security, food, education, healthcare. The environment
was supportive.
We did have to work (I started working after school when I was
12), but I never really struggled. Then, seeing these kids in southern Israel who
really had it hard, didn’t have much and had to fight for everything they wanted to
achieve in life, was inspirational for me. If they were fighting, then I would fight,
too, and so I stayed. In the first few months the kids tested me, saying that no
one survives there; that all my predecessors left within two to three months. But I
saw through that. We started with only three kids, but by the end of the year 70
came regularly to our activities. Those kids -- many were only a year younger
than me -- taught me a lot, about friendship, about making do with what you
have, about going after what you want. I do not think I would have been able to
complete the military flying course without that experience.
Trust: I think it is the basis for business, the basis for society -- the broader the
circle of trust, the higher the level of society. How to inspire? Tell people that you
trust them. Look beyond the small imperfections we all have. Look at the unique
added value each person brings (this helps to overlook their weaknesses). Set
people up for success, not for failure.
My first dream was to be a pilot. I was in the Israel Air Force for nine years. Two
years training to become a pilot and seven years serving as pilot. I was one of
only a few pilots selected from hundreds of candidates. I went through a lot of
adversity and challenges. Flying is very hard work and it takes a lot of
preparation and study. The enjoyable moments are very short, but with time,
flying becomes part of your nature and you can enjoy it and get much
satisfaction from doing it well. The responsibility entrusted with very young men
is incredible.
After leaving the air force, I went traveling. I met my wife on my way to Machu
Picchu. I had a feeling that I would meet someone important there. And when I
saw her, I knew that she was the one.
I came to Japan because it was my wife’s home country. I had already achieved
my dream (kokorozashi) to become a pilot and I was looking for a new challenge.
This time I set a goal to build a career with my own hands from near the bottom
of society in a completely new environment and eventually run a company. I
started working in a restaurant as a waiter.
It was very tough. I don’t mind working hard. I always worked hard. But the way
people look at you. They tend to judge you and you almost start to believe it
yourself.
But working in the restaurant proved to be a smart move because I
met many people. I also quickly became restaurant manager so while I still did
the much of the dirty work (there were only three or four staff in the restaurant), I
also gained extra responsibility, which made it bearable.
While working in the restaurant I met the local representative of Indigo, an Israeli
high-tech company. Indigo was the creator of the world’s first digital printer. We
became friends and he introduced me to Toyo Ink, Indigo’s distributor. This led to
a job offer.
I grew into the best engineer at Toyo Ink. From there, I was headhunted to be
representative director of an Israeli company in the semiconductor industry. In
moving into this position, I achieved my second dream (kokorozashi).
Working in Toyo Ink on a certain type of machine was very complicated
–mechanically, electronically, fluids and software, but it did not scare me. I was
never shy to ask questions. My friend and mentor (one of the managers there)
told me he was surprised by the number of stupid questions I asked to reach
surprising conclusions he had never thought of. I just wanted to understand how
things work.
Most of my colleagues spoke Japanese, and I could only speak very basic
Japanese at the time. The language barrier and the mentality of a Japanese
company were not easy.
I was not actively seeking another job, but I was lucky
to meet another Israeli representative of a high-tech company who asked if I was
interested in a new opportunity.
I had built a successful career with my own hands from the near the bottom of
the society in a new environment. Through this process there were
synchronicities of events that led to where I am now. As I have been so devoted
to building and developing my career, I am now on my third dream (kokorozashi)
of supporting my family in Australia.
How did your MBA help you with your career, with your personal mission?
Has it changed over time? What led to those changes?
I came to GLOBIS to find direction in my company. The entrepreneurial
leadership course stirred an interest in me for lifelong learning. I confirmed what
I knew about life during my MBA. Life is life. Not only does it need to be logically
right, but you need to feel it’s right. There are coincidences that come in various
life stages. You need to recognize them and take them.
It was luck that I chose GLOBIS, as with many things in my life. Edi, a friend who
also attended and graduated from the program, told me about it. I came to see
and immediately fell in love: the concept, the attitude, the people (teachers and
students) – appealed so much to me. I took a few pre-MBA courses, as I was not
sure I would be able to juggle work and studies, but discovered that regardless
of the extra load, I was enjoying every minute of it. Not often in life does it
happen that you know something is right from the beginning. With GLOBIS, the
decision was easy. I knew.
What about adversity, or failures? It seems that you haven’t had that much.
How did you overcome this?
I had a hard time when I worked as a waiter. The conditions are tough. The
salary is low, and the working conditions are not pleasant. But I feel lucky that I
had a chance to build my career through the personal network I encountered
there. Through the hardship I learned to be sensitive to others.
I also had a difficult period when the Internet bubble burst in 2000. I had to cut
some of my people due to the financial condition of my company. I was young
and not a very good manager. I was proud, and it clouded my eyes to ask for
advice. My team did not respect me, sales did not go well. Luckily for me, the
company president still believed in me and supported me, but I did not believe in
myself. I was depressed (only later, after coming out of the depression did I
understood what I had). It was a very tough period.
Maybe it was the hardest
time of my life. It took me a few years to regain confidence and to be on top of
my game again.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
First, I would like to focus on supporting my family. In the long run, I would like to
become an educator, or a lecturer. If it were to be for my alma mater school,
GLOBIS, that would be fantastic!
Sathivee Sukarom
Sukarom is very driven and determined.
She has a clear idea and focus on her
kokorozashi.
She talks about how her personality has sometimes made it difficult to focus on
the bigger picture.
She continues to work on her long-term kokorozashi of
helping people in her country to gain access to quality healthcare
What are you doing now?
I am now in charge of an international medical center at a private hospital in
Bangkok Thailand. I took this role two years ago. My team is comprised of staff
from many disciplines. The medical staffs make sure that the international
patients receive good medical care and the non-medical staff help provide
facilitation for all foreigners such as language support, transportation, visa
extension, accommodation, etc. We also play a major role in acquiring new
patients from overseas through our inquiry system. Our beginning wasn’t smooth.
There were many obstacles and we had an extremely low budget. However, with
our team effort to take the best care of our patients and our belief in the system
we set up, we have become a strategic business unit of the hospital successfully
contributing to the hospital in many ways.
My personal mission is to help people gain access to good healthcare using my
administrative ability. In the future, I want to create a clinic or a hospital to do this.
There is a lot of inefficiency and redundancy in the healthcare system in
Thailand. In some ways they are too business-like. The hospital should be very
efficient -- a place to heal and help people. Treatment should be standardized,
clean, and safe.
I have also been helping a GMBA alumnus to set up and maintain a system in a
dental clinic in a small city where many Japanese expats live.
standards and many times he thought that I’m too strict.
I apply my ideal
From time to time, it’s
difficult for him to understand why healthcare must be extremely disciplined
which might compromise profitability. I have always insisted on what is right and
so far, the clinic has been doing really well. After I experienced the healthcare
system in Singapore during my posting there, I felt that it was right for society. I
always felt Thais could do much more if we worked harder.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I am a medical doctor specialized in emergency medicine. Currently, I do not
practice as much as before. I have been taking roles in management the past
few years. There are so many significant events or experiences in my life that
made me who I am: being a competitive swimmer when I was young, being an
emergency physician and facing all the managerial challenges.
Being a competitive swimmer was a big part of growing up. When I was young,
my parents were very busy. Every evening, I spent a lot of time training with my
team. I participated in many competitions with my teammates. It was a valuable
experience for me. I took away great things such as sportsmanship, which helps
me a lot in life. I also made wonderful friendships with my teammates that last
until today. I also believe that I have good discipline because of sports. I stopped
swimming when I had to study very hard for medical school. Back then I was not
sure whether being a doctor would be suitable for me. However, being a top
student in the class, I had a lot of pressure from people around me to get into
medical school. I was very young at that time and I could not come up with ideas
of my own. I decided to go with the flow. I would be lying if I told people that I was
passionate to become a doctor. I was not, but I have no regrets. When I finished
medical school, I chose to go for emergency medicine. At that time, I felt that the
quality of emergency care in Thailand was not well established, and it would be
wonderful if we could have a good standard of care that people can depend on
wherever they are in Thailand.
In selecting emergency medicine, I had one of the best opportunities to work in
Singapore after I finished training in Thailand. That was my first real job. I was so
fortunate to work with one of the best colleagues and best emergency care
teams of the tertiary care hospitals in Singapore. I met my boss who is one of the
greatest influencers in my life. In Singapore, I learned so much about good
systems and how important they are. People there value efficiency and what
they can create for the general public using the existing resources is something
that I had never experienced in Thailand. I was so inspired. I realized that
building a great system to serve more people had become my passion. I love
saving lives but at that time, I knew that saving one patient at a time would not
satisfy me and that I could do better.
I came back to Thailand to work at one of the most renowned hospitals in
Bangkok. Within a few months, I had become the chief of the emergency
medicine section. There were many great challenges during my five years at the
hospital. I needed not only to make sure that we delivered the best care to our
patients in the emergency room, but also to take care of the system, and, most
important of all, the people working with me. I learned that management skills
could not be gained simply by reading good books or going to a good business
school. Understanding and handling people’s emotions is extremely crucial to
driving the team forward. I had put up quite a good system for my team and I
was really satisfied with what I had contributed.
When I realized that I wanted to explore more in managerial roles. I took a risk
and left the hospital. Afterward, I had a couple of tough years. I changed a few
jobs and was quite confused about what I wanted to do. Even when I started my
current job, I felt really out of place. It was unlike what I imagined what I would do.
But somehow, I managed to make it work eventually.
People who have influenced me significantly in my life are my father, my boss
from Singapore, and my husband. My father has been a great role model for me.
He has been through so many adversities in his life. He used to be quite a
delinquent in school and university. It took him almost nine years to graduate
from his four-year degree in the Faculty of Engineering. During those years, he
was involved in one of the biggest scuffles between faculties in the history of the
university. He happened to be the leader of one side. He was expelled from the
university along with his friends and juniors who got involved in the incident.
Then something unexpected happened. All the students of the faculty decided to
protest and refused to study. The matter became known nationwide and it was in
the newspapers. Later, my father and his friends were offered help from
someone politically significant to submit a petition for a royal pardon from the
King of Thailand. They were all pardoned by the king and given a chance to
return to their studies. I do not want to go into details since I am not sure whether
I can get all the history correct. However, after the incident, my father became
much more responsible. He was voted in as the student leader of the faculty and
later in life he became a great boss, receiving a lot of love and respect from his
colleagues and subordinates. He has so many trusted life-long friends. He has
always taught me to live with integrity and to be a good person, to always seek
opportunities to give to others.
Apart from my father, my former boss showed me what it meant to lead by
example. In the two years that I worked under him, he was full of integrity and
discipline. Working in the emergency department is not easy and sometimes
unsafe. It takes a lot of courage to become a good leader in such a stressful
environment. I always knew that my father was a really good leader to his team,
but I never saw how things were really executed. I learned so many practicalities
from my boss.
My husband has taught me another aspect in my life. He does not have so much
ambition in his career. He simply enjoys helping other people and saving lives.
But the person who I come home to every day is extremely content with life and
always thinks positively toward other people. I have realized that over eight
years of my marriage that he has brought me so much emotional stability and
contentment. Regardless of the difficulties I have faced in my career, I always
feel calm at home.
How did the MBA help your career and your personal mission? Has it
changed over time? What led to those changes?
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to help others. When I first
learned about kokorozashi at GLOBIS, I thought that they had to be something
really concrete and difficult to achieve. I decided that my personal mission was to
establish a good hospital that could help a lot of people. I remember thinking that
practicing as a doctor I could save one person at a time. However, if I could
manage or build a good hospital, I could save thousands of people. When my
ideas were really concrete and fixed to one thing, it was so easy for me to feel
stuck and hopeless. Building a hospital needs a lot of money and power, and it
seemed impossible to achieve with my condition at the time. But that was not it. I
was wrong. Building a hospital has become something I want to work toward, but
the bottom line is that I simply want to build something greater for more people.
My core value has never changed. However, my personal mission has become
less concrete and more flexible. Most importantly I feel that I always have my
personal mission with me and I enjoy every moment of my journey.
Studying MBA has been such a big part of my life. Before the MBA, I was only
familiar with the culture and working environment of healthcare. In healthcare,
there has always been a hierarchy in the workplace and doctors are always on
top of that hierarchy. Until I met people from other industries at business school,
I never realized before that our culture limits our efficiency and ability to create
greater value. During my MBA at GLOBIS, I learned a lot from other people and
came to respect people from other industries. I started off arrogant, but I became
so influenced by my teachers and classmates that by the end I became a much
better person. This openness has helped me so much in my career. I came back
to work a better leader.
Moreover, I consider what I learned in the MBA great tools that I can use for
anything in my life. The structure of thinking, the frameworks—all help me
organize my thoughts. I have been working much more efficiently since I
graduated.
What about adversity? How did you overcome it?
Like everyone, I have many ups and downs in my life. Being an emergency
physician for many years has taught me to be patient and hold on through many
tough situations. I am a very strong person who can withstand adversities and
disappointments.
However, there were some extraordinary things that happened to me in 2017. In
2016, I changed jobs twice. And at the beginning of my current job, everything
seemed to be a disaster. I was OK in general, but I was not sure what I should do.
In January 2017, my doctor found a mass in my neck and he suspected cancer. I
had to go through a tissue biopsy and wait for the results. The wait was the
toughest time of my life. I have never suffered so much anguish. It took three
days. Luckily, the result was negative, and I found out that I would be fine. The
result changed my life. Now I let go and I take things more easily. I started to
appreciate all the blessings in my everyday life.
The experience led me to join a triathlon team and I eventually learned open
water swimming – another extraordinary thing that happened. When I joined the
first open swimming class, I was afraid, but at the same time I was quite
confident in my swimming skill. On the second day, we were asked to swim in
the sea. In the first 100 meters, I realized it would be the most exhausting swim I
had ever tried in my life. The power of the water was tremendous. It threw me
along the wave while I was trying to propel myself forward. I almost panicked.
but realized that I needed to focus and stay calm. I stopped all my thoughts;
stopped thinking about the other people swimming around me and took it slow. I
swam three kilometers that day with very little rest. I came out of the water
feeling like a different person. It was such an amazing feeling. I realized that I
really do not have to care about what other people think—whether to go fast. I
just had to do it at my own pace. I would have never thought that I could swim for
three hours in the open sea. Since then, I have become more positive. I can now
do things I never thought I could do.
Swimming makes me feel that I can do
more. I was doing what I thought was impossible. If you start worrying, you
cannot do so much. Once I stopped thinking, everything was fine.
I started to adapt to my job. Now I believe that anything is possible. I take it slow
and do what I can one step at the time. I became focused, utilizing my
knowledge. At one time, I even thought that I might have to change job yet again.
But that is not in my mind anymore. I made it great and I enjoy every single day
that I go to work.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I’m in the middle of the second and third steps because I’m confident and
consistent with my ideal in the healthcare industry. I had a kind of insecurity
about my job or how people think of me, but now it doesn’t bother me at all. I still
have this goal in my mind, and I’m quite patient about it. It’s okay not to realize
this goal today or tomorrow.
My core personal mission is the same, but I view it very differently now.
When I
was studying at GLOBIS from 2012 to 2013, I had this feeling that a personal
mission was very individualistic and aggressive, and only concerned about me. I
thought that I should own a hospital -- it was all about me and how to become
this ideal person.
Now I feel that I can make other people around me
understand my personal mission and be closer to what I want to do. I cannot do
it without other people now.
I have slowed down, but I feel that I have not lost
anything. I can focus on going toward my vision together with the people around
me.
It is important to be happy.
Even though my job is going well, there are
lots of problems, but now I do not feel too much stress. I feel like I am doing my
best. I seize the day. I have let go of a lot of things.
I know what I’m doing is important. My personal mission creates joy for me.
Mihoko Suzuki
Just before enrolling in the GLOBIS part-time MBA program, Suzuki realized she
wanted to help working mothers like herself through her own experience of
struggling to juggle her own career, housekeeping and childcare. Then, as
graduation approached, her kokorozashi became clearer. Now she faces the
challenges of expanding the business, but sees the good she is doing through
TASKAJI, a matching platform for home service providers.
What are you doing now?
I’m
a
shareholder
and
the
resource
manager
for
TASKAJI,
a
consumer-to-consumer matching platform for home service providers. The
sharing economy is growing in Japan.
C-to-C matching platforms such as
Airbnb and Uber are becoming more common.
Users can search home service
providers (we call them “Taskaji-san”) according to their preference and agree a
contract with them through our platform.
The contract is directly between the
user and Taskaji-san. We, the company, take a 20% platform usage fee. As
the platform provider, we handle users’ credit card billing and payment to each
Taskaji-san, we check each Taskaji-san’s ID and skills, and provide insurance in
the event of damage. We have 38,000 registered users and 1,100 Taskaji-san
as of May 2018.
As the resource manager, I oversee manpower and the quality
of Taskaji-san.
The supply-demand balance of users and Taskaji-san is not as
good as we want it to be.
human resources.
Demand is growing dramatically, and we always lack
I would like to give the housekeeper’s job a more attractive,
professional image. Actually, the Taskaji-san get a higher hourly wage than they
would working at a restaurant or a supermarket, and they feel appreciated.
I wanted to do something to help working mothers.
I came across TASKAJI in
my final year as a GLOBIS student when I was doing a six-month research
project. The project involved creating a business plan to start a real viable
business.
I always had a kokorozashi to help working mothers, but I was looking for other
options also.
I looked into English daycare services, a party business and a
house-sharing business.
But housekeeping kept my attention above all
because that was what I desperately wanted myself when I was having a hard
time.
I was investigating the market to find an idea for providing an affordable
housekeeping service.
My professor suggested that I try to focus and seek some companies providing
such services. He told me that I needed to use the service, go to the company,
do some field work.
The key to success: I always tell others what I want. So, people, including all my
GLOBIS friends, knew that I wanted to do something for working mothers -housekeeping something! One of my Japanese MBA classmates – a friend and
mother – introduced me to another woman, an entrepreneur named Sachiko
Wada. My friend arranged a meeting over coffee in Starbucks.
Wada was already offering a service similar to what I had been thinking about for
my research project. I was shocked when I saw the TASKAJI webpage. It was
well constructed, and the services had already been launched—and there were
more ideas than I had. I thought that I was too late to start. I had missed my
chance.
I didn’t know Wada so well, but the business model attracted me. I knew I
couldn’t start this kind of business by myself. TASKAJI had a great matching
platform with direct contracts between housekeepers and users, cutting out the
agency in between. Wada used to be a system engineer, so she is a specialist in
designing systems. She outsourced the code, but she designed it herself. The
business model structured to provide affordable housekeeping service was
ready.
The research project is one of the last classes I took at GLOBIS. I wondered
what I should do after graduation. I had two options: be hired by a big company
or do something by myself. Doing something by myself was risky and very
difficult, but I tried to look for both kinds of opportunity.
Wada already had TASKAJI, and I thought, if I start now, I cannot beat that level
and it’s not a good idea to be a competitor of hers. But, it felt like the TASKAJI
service was not perfect. She had so many things to do and no staff. So, I asked
her, “Can I be your business partner?”
She said, “I want a partner with experience starting a business and I can’t afford
to hire you at this point.” So, I offered to work for her for a month to get
experience and for my research project, and she said, “Oh, let me think about it.”
In the end, she asked if I would like to come on board as a volunteer to see if I
really liked the company. Later, she told me that she was so surprised because I
was so passionate even though I had no career at the time, no experience, and
she was not sure I could do the work.
So, I worked with her for one month. She felt that we had a good working
relationship, and after six months, she asked me to be her partner. I invested a
small amount of money into the business and became a shareholder.
At school, I never liked to be the leader. I always preferred to play a supporting
role. I became a leader of the girls’ soccer club in high school. It was a very
tough experience. I didn’t like it. It’s so tough and I thought that I’d never do the
leader thing again. I like being supportive, not leading people. And, also, I have
power as number two. I can give my ideas to the number one. Maybe that’s why
when Wada suggested I come to work with her, I happily joined. I didn’t want to
be a CEO. I don’t have that much leadership. So, I wanted to avoid that part too.
So, it was a good deal for me. And with the TASKAJI system in place, my dream
had come true.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I am the youngest. I have an older brother. He’s nine years older than me. And,
in my whole family, including my cousins, I’m the youngest. So, everybody took
great care of me. Imagine what that it is like. And, I had my grandmother and
grandfather living with me, too.
My grandfather ran a small local liquor shop, and when my father took over the
business, he changed it to a coffee shop. He roasts the beans and sells them.
And, now, my brother is helping my father’s business. In fact, I saw how hard my
parents worked at their business, and so I never really had the desire to run a
business.
Kamakura has a long history and is visited by many tourists. The shop is close to
Kita-Kamakura station. The community is very strong and close-knit. My family
was known in the neighborhood because we owned a shop. I had to be very
friendly, always say, “Hello!” to everybody on the street. I had to smile, be helpful.
The Suzuki family was big, and I couldn’t do anything wrong. Everybody was
watching me; everybody knew me. I grew tired of that. I went to elementary
school, and junior high school in Kamakura. And then went to Yokohama for high
school and then junior college, where I studied English.
My mother always wanted to learn English and she told me she had once longed
to have a non-Japanese husband and bicultural, bilingual children. But, in her
day, it was not easy. So, of course, she didn’t meet a foreign guy, it was just a
desire. That’s why she made her children learn English. I began studying when I
was three years old. I went to a special nursery school where they had English
lessons twice a week. And she put me in situations at parties to make me speak
English. Kamakura is a tourist destination, so you can find lots of overseas
tourists there. She made me go talk to them at the shops, on the street or in the
station. I would speak to them and I was happy about that. And, I was known for
being able to speak English in elementary school and at junior high school. And,
that’s why I chose a high school that was special for English. It was very natural.
I also learned traditional Japanese things such as the tea ceremony since I was
eight years old, also ikebana and kimono. I liked that part too and it is a good
combination when I speak about Japan.
When I chose my first job, I tried to find something that had a dormitory. Getting
a job was the first opportunity for me to leave my hometown.
to be free.
I was so happy
And, the first place I worked was the Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo.
How did the MBA help your career and your personal mission? Has it
changed over time? What led to those changes?
I served customers in an Italian restaurant at the Four Seasons. I had met my
husband, a non-Japanese. Soon we had our first baby—a boy—and after that, I
was soon pregnant again—this time, a girl. My husband wanted me to work. I
thought a career change, to be a housewife would be really good for me. But I
started to work in telesales for KDDI six months after my daughter’s birth.
I wanted to get an office job rather than work in the service sector, because with
the children, I didn’t want to do weekend work. Finding childcare is difficult on
weekends. I had no real experience, so it was very difficult to find a clerical job,
but telesales was easy to get.
I decided to do it for at least three years to build up my resume. During that time,
I took incoming calls and I was assigned to English and Spanish support. I also
created some manuals and did some training for newcomers. It was fun.
After three years, I wanted to move onto office work. Except for typing, I had no
idea how to use a computer, especially not Excel or Word. So, I went to a free
training course and vocation school with government assistance. It was a very
great service for me.
I got a secretarial job for a Japanese construction company, working on the client
side for a Qatari-American joint venture.
The project was to construct a huge
natural gas plant in Qatar.
I still feel very lucky for that experience. It was a turning point for me. I could
brush up my English and experienced working with other nationalities.
The
expats I worked with gave me so much great advice. They told me that my
English was very good compared to other secretaries. They also told me I was
smart and asked me why I was working as a secretary. I told them that I had only
graduated from a junior college and didn’t have a full degree. They encouraged
me to get one. But, I said that with two little children and no money, it was
impossible. But they said, “There should be a way.” And, maybe, I should try.
I could have chosen to study anything—communication, literature. But I chose
business. I had two particularly smart co-workers – young engineers, younger
than the others, but with a higher position. I wondered why they were so smart,
and I found out it was because they had MBAs. The way they explained things
was amazing. I wanted to be like them.
I found GLOBIS through the Internet. My criteria for choosing an MBA school
were classes in English, in Japan, and very active classes. I looked at other
programs, but the class discussions were not active, and the schedule was
difficult – two consecutive days on weekends. I looked at GLOBIS last and took
a trial class.
I loved it and decided to take the first course, Critical Thinking.
I was still working as a secretary while I was at GLOBIS. I never spoke out in
meetings, not because of my English level but, because I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t understand the contents of the discussion. I just listened. My first goal
was to be able to speak up in meetings. And, I could do that so easily after
critical thinking class. My next was to do presentations in meetings. I took the
business presentation class, which helped me a lot. I told my boss that I wanted
to have the opportunity to present in meetings and he said yes.
The first time I was exposed to kokorozashi was when I wrote my essay for my
application to GLOBIS. I had never thought about it. Then I began to think that if
there were a reasonable housekeeping service in Japan, it would be great for
working mothers. I lived in Colombia for three months, and saw working mothers
don’t do any housework. They had nannies or their own mothers taking care of
housework and childcare.
When they come back home, the food was ready,
and the laundry was done. The children were fed already and all they needed to
do was enjoy family time, read stories to their children, and go to bed at nine
o’clock. It was unbelievable compared to my life in Japan doing dishes and
laundry at midnight.
Hiring a housekeeper was affordable even for middle-class families—about
1,500 yen ($15) for half a day. This was about the same as a good lunch at a
restaurant. It couldn’t happen in Japan because we have a fairly high minimum
wage. I kept thinking that if there were such a service in Japan, that working
mothers
would
love
it.
So,
I
wrote
about
household
assistance
services—housekeeping, cooking, everything— in my essay. Until that time, I
never thought of making the service myself.
The classes helped me because there was so much opportunity to think about
what I really wanted to do. When I wrote the essay, there was no TASKAJI, only
very expensive services—10,000 yen for each use. It was not affordable for
most people. I was thinking about my kokorozashi the entire three and a half
years I was in the MBA program. The core idea was to help working mothers like
me. I was tired of my burden of housekeeping and childcare, because I had to do
everything around the house. Of course, my husband helped me, but that’s the
point, he helped me. It meant that the main responsibility still lay with me.
During my time in the program, I thought about English-language childcare
services, party services and a house-sharing business, too. I thought about
many other things.
But the key was something that really touched my feelings.
Every time, I came back to what touched me and that was housekeeping. When
I imagined that moment the working mom would come back home, and the
house was clean, I would come to tears. It shook my inner core. I was just
honest with my feelings. The first idea that came to my mind was not about how
much money I could make or how big the business opportunity was. My first
passion was to solve the problem, then I tried to find a way to solve it through
business.
When I wrote my essay, I just wanted to create a service and make it happen,
not a detailed plan. I had no clue what to do. After taking some GLOBIS classes,
I began to understand the difficulties. Many of the ideas and subjects were like
from another world -- human resource management, I had never managed
anyone, and corporate culture, accounting and finance. To be honest, I thought
that it was too difficult for me. I had no confidence. So, I set up lots of study
sessions with my smart classmates and studied with them.
In the beginning, I wanted to support working mothers like me, the user side. But
I found out our service contributes a lot to the worker’s side, too. When I see
them, it reminds me of my time as a housewife. Families often don’t appreciate
and are not impressed with what mom is doing each day.
It’s taken it granted.
It’s just mom’s job!
But once these women come to work as a Taskaji-san they gain respect from
their customers, who are amazed by their job. Their self-worth, which is low at
the beginning, improves immensely. As a housewife, we don’t have the
opportunity to be appreciated so much. I see a big change in them. They have
a new responsibility in their everyday lives.
They become so happy and they
grow. They start to brighten. Their eyes sparkle. It’s really inspiring to me. I want
to support these people and now it’s part of my motivation. I can feel that being a
Taskaji-san has brought good to their lives. They say, “Thank you for creating
this service. This work really changed my life”.
What about adversity? How did you overcome it?
The secretary job was stable. TASKAJI is entrepreneurial, more uncertain. My
parents and my husband told me that I was crazy not to get a more stable job.
Why take the risk after graduating from GLOBIS? But it was so much fun. More
than logic, it was my feeling. I was quite sure that TASKAJI would be successful,
but I realized there was a risk. Still I had the economic support of my husband at
the time. So, if I failed, it would be okay. That was a very important part. It was
the same for Wada. She has a good husband and he could support her if it didn’t
work out.
There have been times when I have thought about quitting TASKAJI because I
needed a good income and TASKAJI was not enough. Wada and I are paid last.
My economic situation became very bad one year after joining TASKAJI.
So, I
took on a part-time job for 18 months. I did secretarial work for a consulting
company owned by a GLOBIS friend. It was a very good deal.
I worked four days a week for TASKAJI, and weekends and one weekday for the
consulting company. It was a good balance and I could survive.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
Now the company is growing, and we are stepping up from seed stage to series
A.
We would like to make our service easier to use and expand the user range.
Since the company is growing we have been hiring more staff and are becoming
a bigger group.
I know we will have more difficulties according to our growth,
but I will take care of them.
Minori Tanaka
Tanaka, an experienced international manager, cares deeply about making an
impact on the world and helping others to succeed. Cheerful and disciplined, she
seems to still feel the need -- instilled by her grandparents -- to achieve every
day.
What are you doing now?
I work for Evonik, a German company in Japan. I am responsible for the
management of a global project to migrate internal operation system liaison
between Japan and other countries.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I am from a very traditional Japanese family. We all had to sit at the dinner table
and talk. No TV, except the sumo tournaments on NHK because my grandfather
loved them. Every evening would ask me the same questions: “What did you do
today?” I would say “The usual.” “Ok,” he would say, “did you do your best?” I
would say, “yes.” Then he would ask: “Why do you say you did your best when
you didn’t do your best?” I really felt pressure to do something special each
day.
My hometown is a very small place, a village in Gifu, central Japan. The village
had no high school, so when I was 15, I moved 30 kilometers to live in a
dormitory. I was on my own and have been living like this ever since. I studied
English literature at university and took a job in the export division at Matsushita
Electric. Eventually, I moved to Tokyo to work -- some foreign affiliated
companies were always looking for bilinguals, although I do not consider myself
bilingual. When I was growing up, our village did not have even AM radio. I
wanted to listen to NHK, but could not, so I think my accent is strange.
I do have a mentor. I met her 20 years ago on the train in Nagoya. She could not
lift her bag up to the overhead rack. I helped her and noticed that her accent was
similar to mine. We found out that we were from the same village. She is now in
her 80s. We always write by airmail. She has lived in more than 30 countries.
She married a US diplomat and so I called her before going abroad. She gave
me advice on how to live in Germany and Singapore.
How did your MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has
it changed over time? What led to those changes?
People often say that I am off-spec. You know, the specifications are here, but
you are way over there! That’s me!
I first heard of GLOBIS from my partner at the time. It was several years ago on
a beautiful Sunday morning. He was reading the Nikkei Newspaper and he
called me over to look at an ad. There was a photo of Yoshito Hori (founder and
president of GLOBIS) with an announcement for the GLOBIS business
program. He said to me, this guy is good; he is really someone to watch. Later,
he bought a GLOBIS MBA Management book, the first one, on business
management. He told me this was one of his most important books and that I
should leave it alone.
Several years later, after we separated, I wanted to change my life, to restart
everything. I saw an ad for a GLOBIS open campus on marketing and strategy
and I went. It was fun, and everyone was very friendly and warm. I thought this
was the place I should study. There were several reasons I decided to go to
GLOBIS. The people are warm and very supportive, but the school is also
flexible and convenient for someone working full time. That was very important,
but I also wanted to find a new network of friends, new people from an entirely
different circle. Another reason was that I was inspired by this statement by
Hori-san: The purpose of my business is not to earn money, but to contribute to
society. Profit comes after we are recognized properly as providing value. I
decided to start a society-recognized business school.
The first day of my first course, I remember that I was 15 minutes late to Critical
Thinking and everyone was sitting down. I went in and walked to the front and
sat right in front of the professor. I wanted to show him – Gil Chavez – that I was
ready to learn; that I was there to do my best even though I was late. During the
break, he told me he had never seen any student do that before – come in very
late and sit right in front of the professor. I asked him recently—he has been
teaching at universities since 1998—and I am still the only one who has ever
done this. I do not know why I did it. It was just that one time, but maybe I
needed to do it, to show to everyone and myself that I was ready to do my best.
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome this?
I was lucky!
Yes, before GLOBIS I was lucky because Evonik chose me, one of
only a few Asian employees to be transferred to the German headquarters.
When I moved there, I did not know the language, so after work I studied and
learned it well. With beer, I can speak German! I felt so lucky. I was flexible and
could go to Germany. I had no family.
And then after graduating from GLOBIS, I was sent to work for two years in
Singapore. I was very excited to go there but found it very difficult. It was so
hard. Many expat assignees similar to me quit. I had a hard time every day, but I
wanted to be the first expat to make it through the entire two-year assignment. It
was tough because it was so disappointing -- getting what I thought I always
wanted – another shot at being an expat – and finding it so hard. I struggled to
sleep at nights. Late one night I decided to take action. I sat up in bed and made
an Excel spreadsheet of the dates and crossed them off each day. I also began
calling the senior management for advice and encouragement. And every
morning I got up and prayed and was determined to say good morning to
everyone in the office. I made a point of saying it my boss, too. I had to smile. I
had to make others feel good, too; to make them feel that it was a good morning.
Anyway, I finished my assignment and when I came back to Japan from
Singapore, I was rushing to find an apartment in Tokyo, when I was told I had to
go to Germany for ten weeks of training. After coming back again, I was told that
I had to go to a different part of Japan: an industrial area on reclaimed land. I
fought back. I wanted to live in Nagoya so that I could go back easily to Tokyo
where many friends live and work. I had to stand up for myself, to take care of
myself.
I always wake up early – often 4:30 am and feel happy. I think every morning is a
great morning because I am alive. I am still here, and I am determined to make
every day the best day that I can. We are here. Let’s do something! I have felt
this way ever since I was a young girl. Eventually we all die, and life is fleeting.
Maybe I saw many funerals in my hometown, when I was a child.
Every morning I pray. I keep a photo of each of my grandparents. I pull out the
photos and say good morning. Then I pray in my own way: Being thankful for
being alive. After that, I know that no matter what happens, I will be ok. I will do
my best.
When the Great Hanshin Earthquake occurred in western Japan in January
1995, I was living alone in Osaka and at that time I thought I would die. I was
sleeping and then everything lifted up and dropped. A friend called to check on
me and then the phone line went dead. Nothing. I walked to work to be with
people. I remember walking along Midosuji, the boulevard in central Osaka. I
wanted to see people. For the first few days, most of my customers phoned me
to check if I was safe and still alive, without asking about their imported cargo in
Kobe port. Then one customer did call about his cargo. All cargo had
disappeared in the earthquake. He asked, where is my cargo? How will you
resolve this? I handled this kind of work for the next four months.
So, every morning now, I get up and go to the window. It’s not Buddhist. It’s not
Shinto. It’s just me. And I pray, bowing in the four main compass directions. I’m
just happy to be alive. We all have to die eventually and every morning we
should wake up and say, I’m still here! And so, I can go on. I know I’m still here
and I have my grandparents watching over me. I can remember as a child
sleeping with my grandparents. I was really close to them.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I work really hard and do not take long vacations – only two or three days at a
time. But I am happy and doing what I want to do. I hope to be sent abroad again.
Yes, I am very disciplined, with strong willpower.
Still, I think about people and how they feel. I always want to remember that. I
have not achieved my kokorozashi yet. I am still trying, struggling. I keep it with
me in my purse. It is the original paper that I read at graduation. Maybe I need to
rewrite it now, but I look at it a couple of times a month. I said I wanted to be able
to inspire people as an HR person and enable them to become the best that they
can. Maybe it’s actually not HR. Maybe it’s more about leadership, encouraging
the team to be better. I always wanted that for my GLOBIS classmates, too. I put
together the slideshow and the music for the first graduation. I should have been
studying more, focusing on my reports, but simply I wanted to do it. They are just
the best people, the best friends.
The photo on my Facebook profile is with a boy I met in India. It was a tour
organized by GRA, an NPO set up by Hiroki Iwasa, a GLOBIS alumnus. GRA
supports the production, export and development of agriculture. Hiroki’s
hometown was devastated by Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on
March 11, 2011.
During my assignment in Singapore, I found his books at
Kinokuniya bookstore. He and I had taken a class together at GLOBIS, and I
bought one of his books and read it through on the same day. His book
described how he overcame his desperate situation after the disaster.
I was
deeply impressed by him and his team’s persistent efforts and devotion to their
hometown.
A few days later, I turned on the TV and was surprised to see Hiroki on an NHK
World program.
I immediately sent a message to him, “Hi Hiroki, I bought your
book, and today I saw you on TV.
Look forward to seeing you again.” He
suggested that we meet when I returned from Singapore. We went with his team
to Tohoku (East Japan) in spring 2015.
Japan will continue to suffer from natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods
and tsunami. We cannot control nature. I believe that we need to live well
together with nature. “Minori, you can learn something from nature,” was advice I
often heard from my beloved grandparents before they passed away many
years ago.
As for the future, I don’t know. I was talking to a friend about the next generation.
What should we do for them? How can I repay all the kindness, support and love
that I have received? I am considering adopting a child. I want to, but I am also
working very hard and would love to be sent abroad again by my company. I love
traveling, too. Right now, it is only short trips in Japan, but I get to see many
good people.
For the rest of my life, I promise to contribute to the success of
the younger generation not only in Japan, but also in other countries. I am most
grateful to my parents who raised me to believe that anything was possible. I
have no doubt that I am happy because I was born.
David Villagómez
Villagómez lived an adventurous life in Japan that included skydiving and
BASE jumping, while maintaining his responsibilities at the Ecuadorean
Embassy and studying at GLOBIS.
After completing his MBA, he
entertained a variety of options, before deciding to continue with the
Ecuadorean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and returning, for a few years at
least, to Ecuador before his next foreign assignment.
What are you doing now?
Right now, after having been the deputy chief of mission and consul at the
Embassy of Ecuador in Tokyo for the last three years and a total of five and a
half years in Japan, I have just returned to Ecuador. I’m currently the Officer in
Charge of Italy, Holy Seed, Greece and Concurrent Countries, at the
European Directory, and North American and European Under Secretariat, at
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Before coming back home, I was hoping to be
assigned to the Ministry of Tourism, as I was in charge of tourism promotion in
Japan. Nevertheless, because of the new government -and particularly a new
Minister of Foreign Affairs, career diplomats are now being asked to come
back or to stay at the ministry. The authorities wish to re-establish what has
been missing for a long time.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family?
Who do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
My family was constantly moving because my father was also a diplomat.
After having been Ambassador to India for almost five years, he is now
Secretary General of the Permanent Commission of the South Pacific (CPPS,
in Spanish), which is “the maritime organization that coordinates regional
maritime policies, in order to adopt concerted positions of its member states
(Chile,
Colombia,
Ecuador
and
Peru)
in
international
negotiations,
development of the Law of the Sea, international environmental law and other
multilateral initiatives.”(http://www.fao.org/fishery/rfb/cpps/en.
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations).
Food and
Fortunately, this lifestyle
was very enriching for all my family. It was very intense and required us to be
extroverted and social, to adapt to any situation, to live in many societies
without being seen as an outsider.
That required talking like those around
you, thinking like them and even trying to look like them.
We lived in many
places: Bolivia for two years; the U.S. for four; Nicaragua for a while; followed
by Spain and Peru, two years each; as well as Belgium, for a total of seven
years in two different periods.
My father also had postings back in Ecuador over the years.
When I was in
college, my father was posted in Ecuador, so I did all my studies there.
Around the time I graduated, he was again posted to Belgium, so I
accompanied him there to do a master’s degree.
I went back to Ecuador to
work, doing many different things, until I came into the public sector, eventually
finding myself in the same domain as my father.
When I started university, I thought my forte was numbers, so I studied
economics in Belgium.
But this turned out not to be the case, and so when
we went back to Ecuador, I switched to international relations and languages.
It was not until I came to live and work in Japan that I realized I should learn
more about how the world works from a business point of view.
This is why I
took the GLOBIS MBA.
I did not necessarily view the MBA as directly affecting my work.
Of course,
my Ministry always appreciates efforts to learn more in specialized topics, but I
mostly felt that, since the world is now mainly moved by trade and economics,
I needed to gain a better understanding of these.
It has definitely helped my
work and I have even received a few calls from organizations interested in
knowing if I would like to switch my job and join them.
This means people are
looking at me and thinking of including me in their business.
People have
noticed my skills and that’s a very rewarding feeling!
I never really had a mentor.
I have always been a self-learner, teaching
myself how to do things on my own, doing what other people told me I could
not achieve. But, if I had to choose one influential person, it would most
definitely be my mother.
My father is a role model and very respectable, but
he is a little bit higher up, kind of distant.
We have an extremely good
relationship between us, but when my brother and I were growing up, he was
a little further away than my mother.
through everything we did.
She basically guided my brother and me
We traveled all the time and she was the one
person that we could always depend on, as my father was b u s y most of the
time.
My mother also attended receptions—she had to—but she was
always there for us. For her, my brother and I came first.
When I was a kid, I was quite accident-prone:
I fell from a second floor
once; broke bones I don’t know how many times. When we were in Madrid,
I was 11 and had a really big accident -- three months in the hospital, three
weeks in a coma… I was even declared clinically dead for three whole
minutes!
Where we lived, there were few parks for us to play in, so we had
a plastic basketball hoop inside our apartment.
One day I was playing with
my brother and jumped too soon and hit the hoop.
I bounced off of it and
hit my head against the wall, causing internal bleeding. It was just a horrible
episode.
It got to the point that my mom would freak out whenever I called
her just to say hi. She was always worried something bad had happened.
How did your MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has
it changed over time? What led to those changes?
One reason I chose GLOBIS was the flexibility of its schedule.
Another was
that GLOBIS does not take a strict, one-directional approach to teaching and
study. Students have the freedom to organize their studies according to
interests and skills. Another influential element was the people I met during
the two open classes I attended.
I really enjoyed meeting them, so after that
I thought there was no reason to continue looking around: “ This is where I
should be!”.
At the time, I was also considering spending a lot of money to
attend the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, where I would have gone for a month
vacation. I t was either the World Cup or an MBA. They were almost the same
cost.
The World Cup would have been just fun, an expense, while the MBA
would have been an investment. As it turned out, the MBA -- the investment–
was also a lot of fun!
Many people asked me about the GLOBIS MBA.
it helped with my job.
me.
I’ve always told them that
But then they ask me if the program actually changed
A friend of a classmate, who died in a snowboarding accident, once
asked me: Did the MBA change you as much as it changed Rico (Enrique
Velez)?
My answer was that it did not, probably because my own
kokorozashi was already established.
Later I thought it did change me in
some ways; learning how important personal relationships can be and how
much the human angle affects everything -- business or family.
It made me
understand how much everything is influenced by our ability to meet people’s
needs.
That is one of the biggest lessons I took from the GLOBIS
experience: People, people, people….
My kokorozashi hasn’t really changed from when I first defined it but has
actually broadened.
When I entered the program, my aim was to someday
become an ambassador of my country.
job and I’m proud of what I do.
That remains unchanged. I like my
With time I have grown and become much
better about doing it and doing it passionately. There is no need for me to
change, or at least not now.
I want to do the best I can projecting Ecuador to
the rest of the world, so that people can know and understand its values,
tourism, products, and people.
You cannot measure how the bilateral relations between Japan and Ecuador
have grown.
Some things cannot be quantified.
You can share numbers
about how trade has increased, but for the overall relationship it is difficult to
define an objective.
It’s vague.
There will always be something more we
can do: New discoveries about how we can work together; new things to do
and exchange between the two countries. This intrigues me, appeals to my
curiosity.
What else can we do?
What else do I have to learn next?
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome this?
In my life, I have indeed failed completely, as for example the case with my
first university studies in economics.
competency.
It was not solely because of
I was young, had just come out of high school and was
completely free. I felt like I was walking on water. All my worries revolved just
around having a good time.
Incredibly though, one thing changed my life. When I told my parents, I was
doing badly at college, my father sat me down and told me that what I was
doing would get me nowhere; that I was wasting my time. But, instead of
grounding me or getting mad, he sent me on a trip, saying I needed to see the
world.
I would need to live on very little money for an extended period of time,
to see what was out there, not just what was in front of me.
He sent me to
India, where he later would go to be the Ecuadorean Ambassador for almost
five years.
You could call that karma!
In the end though, he gave me more money than he said he would and
provided me with a lot of facilities to get through the challenge.
Still, I fulfilled
everything my father had set for me to do; came back with a lot of money left
over; presents for everybody and having traveled most of India and Nepal on
my own.
More importantly, I saw the world was a lot more complex than the
easy life I had been living. I got to witness so many people living on so little,
and this was just in one country.
That opened my eyes!
I chose India because my girlfriend at the time, who was from Belgium, wanted
to go there. She only stayed briefly with me in Goa and Mumbai, and then
went back to continue with her studies.
That was for the best, as I was able
to go out on my own and truly accomplish my purpose for being there.
India
was not what I expected it to be, but it certainly was one of the best and
biggest adventures of my life!
I was 18 or 19, trying to decide what I wanted to be. Experiencing the world in
such a raw and brutal way really helped. I met so many weird and wonderful
people. The experience completely changed me. It was a true turning point. I
always think back to what my father did. If he had been from another
generation, he would have just snapped at me. But, being the intelligent,
composed person he is, he calmly told me that I needed to take this trip. I will
always be grateful!
My father is a really well-known personality, both in Ecuador and abroad, but it
has never really crossed my mind to try to compete with him. He has done his
own thing. He worked in a way that I somewhat disagree with, as he was living
to work, and not just working to live. I want to be myself and have my own life,
which means clearly separating my work from myself. Please don’t get me
wrong, though, I am very proud to be my father’s son. But, in regard to
professional responsibilities, I do my job the best that I can, but then I let it go.
If someone says to me by your age, your father had done this and that; I am
fine with it, because, as I said, I am not going to compete with him.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself
on the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I am motivated more by curiosity than anything else.
You know, I do a lot of
edgy stuff. Many people say is reckless and irresponsible to practice these
dangerous sports, especially given my past medical history. But, in spite of the
suffering I may have caused my parents, I still do them to show people that no
matter what might have happened in the past, if you believe in yourself and do
things responsibly, you really can accomplish anything and the chances of
getting hurt are much slimmer.
Before coming back to Ecuador, I would have liked to get involved in tourism,
because currently there is no clear national promotion policy for Ecuador
aimed at the Asian market as a whole, let alone Japan. I would have indeed
liked to share all that I saw and learned during my time in Japan with the
people working at the Ecuadorean Ministry for Tourism, so they can see how
the Japanese market should be approached.
In my Foreign Ministry, Japan is considered a difficult country, so very few
people want to be posted there.
Taking into account that, firstly, I volunteered
to go to Japan to learn the language and, secondly, that I was posted there for
a whole term (even a little more) of five years, my willingness to go to hard
places should give me the right to choose my next destination.
If this is the
case, I would like it to be Paris. I already speak French; Paris is a beautiful city.
And I love France as a whole. There are many international institutions and a
lot of very interesting international relations topics, such as climate change
and others, being handled there.
My Japanese adventure came to an end in June 2018. The entire experience
taught me a lot about Japanese society and, in general, the Asian continent:
How to approach people; how to relate to them, and how to engage them
business-wise, all the while respecting their values and cultural differences, to
make long-lasting relationships.
Even though now I do not speak the Japanese language one hundred percent,
I do believe I have a huge advantage over other people, especially many
diplomats, in the sense that having lived in Japan and studied in the GLOBIS
MBA Program, I feel ready I can successfully tackle any challenge that may
come my way.
Arigato gozaimashita!
Chris Zhang
Zhang came to Japan as a university student and stayed on. Remembering his
first years in Tokyo has become a great supporter of others who are new to the
country. Since completing the program, he has taken a more senior role at a
smaller company, requiring him to use the skills he acquired at GLOBIS to
manage and motivate others.
What are you doing now?
I am vice president of sales for Hanergy Japan, a Chinese company making
solar solutions—flexible, lightweight solar panels, different from traditional
silicon-glass based panels. They are a little expensive right now, and there is still
low market awareness.
Lightweight panels started being mass-produced around 2016. The core
technology is from Silicon Valley.
The great thing about the panel is that it can
be used in many ways for a lot more things, for example a panel that looks like a
simple folder can charge your tablet. You can unfold it in the sun to charge your
mobile device.
The panels can be wrapped around light poles rather than
placing a panel atop the light.
Our dream is to develop 100-percent solar cars. We have a prototype already.
Another application is to cover a drone with them, and once the drone goes up, it
can stay up for 30 days.
Could you tell me about your background, growing up, your family? Who
do you feel influenced you the most – did you have a mentor?
I am 39 now and have lived in Japan for 19 years. I was born and grew up in
Shanghai. I tried to obey my parents and do my best to get into the top junior and
senior high schools, and a good university. I studied a lot, but I also played
basketball in junior high school. We could watch NBA games on TV and Yao
Ming was a star. Everybody wanted to be like him, so we all played basketball.
I have strong parents. My father was a diplomat, and my mother’s job was to be
the wife of a diplomat. They were posted for about 10 years in Western
Africa—Togo and Ghana.
I stayed in Shanghai and went to school. I lived with
my older sister and my grandmother. I was very young, and the higher salary
that my father received was very important. It helped support me when I came to
Japan to study.
When my parents came back after serving all those years in Africa, they did not
want their big boy to go so far away, but I wanted to study overseas. The U.S.
and Australia were my first choices, but my parents were quite strong about it
and so Japan became the choice.
There was another reason. One of my best friends from junior high school had
gone to Japan when he was 18, and he told me a lot about it. Back then the
media was saying the Japanese dislike the Chinese. But he said the people
were very kind. He also said the food was very good and the technology was
great. At that time, Shanghai was 20 years behind Japan. This was very different
from what we were hearing.
So I came to Japan and studied at a language school for 18 months and then
went to the Yokohama campus of Musashi Institute of Technology (now Tokyo
City University). Looking back, everything was new for me—the technology, the
fashion, the food. I still think Tokyo is the best place for food in the world; it is so
diverse.
After university, I went to work at UKC, a Japanese semiconductor company.
Then I left for Foxconn, to work as a sales chief selling components to Japanese
makers of laptops and other consumer technology. I did that for four years and
then moved to Huawei, in the telecommunications industry for three years. We
were in charge of the Softbank account. That was good, but I moved to Jinko
Solar to help open the Japan office in Tokyo. I grew the team from four to 30.
From there I went to Hanergy, which has amazing potential.
How did the MBA help with your career, with your personal mission? Has it
changed over time? What led to those changes?
About seven years ago when I was still at Foxconn, I thought that an MBA would
help me make a step forward in my career, a way to move up the ladder. I
researched English programs because I wanted to do something new and meet
more internationally minded people from different countries. I needed flexibility,
so I could continue working. So, I joined a GLOBIS open campus trial class. It
was fun. At the time, students from GLOBIS’ first international class were on
campus and some of them came to the trial class. I met them, and it felt very
good.
After enrolling I had a great time with other students, but I was so busy and had
so many business trips – half within Japan, half to China. I had to take new
customers to visit our factories. As a salesperson, I had to go. Most clients
wanted to stay and drink, and I still had to write a GLOBIS report in the morning.
It was too difficult. I stopped attending classes for a while. I wanted to continue
and felt I could handle it. I wanted to close the deal and graduate, but I needed to
take time off.
It was too much to do my job well and go to GLOBIS to meet more good people
and study. I set a target of one year and I managed to come back in about that
time.
At GLOBIS, I was impressed with how students and alumni want to try
something new. Many did not just get a better job or a promotion but went
beyond their comfort zone to take risks. Some even started their own ventures. It
seems quite different from Japanese culture.
I started in 2011 and finished in 2016, so I met so many great people. In classes,
you cannot be sure where someone is from, or how old they are, or where they
are in the program -- just starting, or about to graduate, or even if they are a
professor! Everyone’s background was so different and that was the
purpose—to broaden my network. After graduating, I joined Go-en Net, an
alumni group. It was a chance to meet even more great people from an even
broader group. One of my fellow members sadly passed away in early 2017 in a
snowboarding accident.
Rico Velez was very bright. He spoke to everybody and paid them respect. It
showed his heart. He was straightforward. He would just say and do what he
wanted to. It was so impressive. At GLOBIS there is a lot of diversity and many
people can do or say what you cannot do. You get energy from seeing them
and being with them. It helps you to be braver and take chances yourself. He
really helped me that way.
After 20 years, I am kind of settled here in Japan. I married a Chinese woman in
October 2016. We are thinking about staying here because once you have
children, it is difficult to move overseas. I am enjoying life in Japan.
For some of the full-time students, maybe this is their first time in Japan. I want
to be a big brother to them all, not just the Chinese students, but for the Chinese
it is maybe most important. I can take them to a good place to drink, drive them
somewhere and show them around. They are in a tough position. It is so tough
to get all those credits in one year and this is a new, different country. I want
them to enjoy their life in Japan. I can share my experience and help them.
What about adversity, or failures? How did you overcome this?
I think it makes people more confident when they get a track record -- if they say,
I am going to achieve this, and they do. But there is always failure before
success. Once you achieve real results, you will have more confidence. I am a
salesperson. You often fail, and it is tough, because competitors are always
there.
At Huawei, we had a team of four and achieved $250 million in sales for the
Softbank account. We made such strong sales, but I ended up quitting. A new
boss had come in. I did not do anything wrong or bad, but for whatever reason,
we had bad chemistry. After one year, I did not get a big bonus, and he moved
me to marketing. I did not communicate well with him. It was a good lesson for
me. Even though I was doing a very good job, I should have focused more on my
boss. I am a salesman, so I was focused on sales and customers. That was a
mistake. My teammates liked me. My customers liked me, but I could have done
better. I might have been seen as too powerful, I don’t know.
I did not want to
do marketing, so I looked for a new job.
I became head of Japan sales at Jinko. I had to deal with HR issues constantly. I
was not allowed to do the HR evaluations because HQ managed them all. You
are the head of the office and everything that goes wrong is your fault. It was
very tough. There were miscommunications. It was a new organization, and
everyone had a different background. HR would hear rumors, and you were
constantly wondering who is trying to undermine you. Maybe some people think
they should have your job. People would come in and quit suddenly. Maybe they
could not do the job, or they did not like the organization. There was lots of
pressure.
And now I am at Hanergy Japan, we have only four people now. They are all
back office, but I can build it. I will build it.
Where do you see yourself going from here? Where do you see yourself on
the Kokorozashi Awareness Framework?
I want to help people to start using renewable energy. I want to transform the
energy industry and help the shift to renewable. For about four years, I did not
have any particular mission. I just wanted new things to do, to take a positive
step toward promoting myself up the ladder. I never had a role model and just
focused on what I was doing.
For now, I want more challenges. The solar industry in Japan has a timeline, and
until 2020, most of the development is focusing on megaprojects. They want to
do solar energy as a financial investment. I want to make it for a different
purpose. It is not just for making money. It is to make a shift to a more beautiful
planet, and a good environment. I want potential clients to try different
applications, not just to make money, but to do some good while they are doing
it.
Chapter 3: ACTIVITIES FOR DEVELOPING
KOKOROZASHI AT GLOBIS
Progress in the development of each student’s kokorozashi is a priority at
GLOBIS. We believe that taking steps toward a defined objective far in the future
assists students in opening their minds to the possibilities in their career. Simply
stated, developing a kokorozashi, even if it is not definitively planned out, assists
students in clarifying who they are, and what their expectations and desires are
in life. It allows students to plan their careers better, while remaining flexible and
open to serendipity.
Continuously rethinking one’s life narrative is supported by research as a way of
maintaining motivation toward and achieving long-term goals. With this in mind,
at GLOBIS University, we provide several opportunities for students to develop
and enrich their kokorozashi both inside and outside the classroom. In our
curriculum, we offer three courses for developing personal mission: “Leadership
Development, Ethics and Values,” “Entrepreneurial Leadership,” and “Keiei
Dojo.”
We have already touched upon “Entrepreneurial Leadership,” so let us focus on
the remaining two. In “Leadership Development, Ethics and Values,” (LEV), the
focus is on self-reflection. Students consider what is their ideal image of a
leader; the expectations others have of a leader; their individual values, and
ethical criteria. Students also take a 360-degree evaluation to understand better
how others see them. At the end of the course, they create a self-development
plan to execute during their study at GLOBIS.
In “Keiei Dojo,” the focus is on developing personal power and character.
Students are required to read one book for each of the four classes. The books
currently include How to Win Friends and Influence People, the business classic
by Dale Carnegie, Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, and Yomeigaku -Wang Yangming’s Neo-Confucian philosophical and metaphysical expatiation,
which highly influenced the thinking of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration.
Students and faculty consider each book together as a group, sharing their
opinions, and challenging each other to reflect on how they can become better
individuals and develop their personal power to lead and influence others.
For activities outside the classroom, we have a series of sessions to help
students to rethink and articulate their kokorozashi. The annual schedule (Fig.
10) of these sessions in the full-time program is synchronized with the courses
that students take.
Fig10
In the kokorozashi development plan for full-time students, there are primarily
two types of sessions: The President Session, and the kokorozashi discussion
and presentation sessions.
The President Session is held once a year with students, after they have read
two books written by Yoshito Hori, president and founder of GLOBIS School of
Management, Dear Visionary Leaders who Create and Innovate Societies, and
My Personal Mission. The students come prepared with any question they would
like to ask Hori. During the three-hour session, students and Hori speak frankly
about many things including career planning, starting a business, dealing with
adversity and success, and developing their kokorozashi, so that they may
ultimately become leaders who create and innovate society. The objective of this
session is to provide students with the advice and perspective of a successful
entrepreneur who was once in a position similar to theirs.
The kokorozashi discussion and presentation sessions for the full-time program
are held three times during the year. This format differs from the part-time and
online programs, because the full-time students are focused on full-time studies
that are usually completed within one year. However, in essence, the concepts in
the different program sessions are the same.
The concept of the sessions is based upon four elements that assist in the
conceptualizing and articulation of the kokorozashi: 1) self-reflection, 2)
self-expression, 3) group discussion and peer advice, and 4) presentation.
Students repeat this process many times during the sessions.
Self-reflection is a key element of kokorozashi development because our
experiences influence the development of our skills, values, and outlook.
Understanding what we like, what we are good at, and what we value is the
foundational step in developing our kokorozashi. Before a life plan can be
successfully developed, the person must bring their life into focus, giving
meaning to the events that they have experienced up to the present. Students
are asked to make life-line charts that track their happiness and satisfaction
levels during significant events in their lives. The chart must also include
unhappy experiences, which are useful in determining the motivations for their
kokorozashi.
Self-expression is required so that students become better able to put into words
what they are thinking about for their kokorozashi. Students usually have a
vague sense of what they wish to achieve when they join GLOBIS. They also
may be unaccustomed to explaining their emotions and motivations for whatever
they are thinking of as long-term goals. Putting into words these vague concepts
enables them to refine and define what they are thinking. It may take several
attempts to process their thoughts into the right words; overcoming the boundary
between imagining and explaining. During this part, students are encouraged to
articulate their emotions repeatedly.
These sessions also often employ group work in which students share
pre-session assignments regarding their values and kokorozashi. The pre-work
engenders a higher-level discussion in the group because the students have
already wrestled with their ideas, allowing abstract concepts to be seen with
greater clarity, while gaining objectivity from constructive peer feedback.
The presentation element brings all this thinking and rethinking together.
Students are required to present their kokorozashi for three to four times during
the program. The objective of the presentation is to effectively communicate
kokorozashi in such a way that it creates empathy with the audience, generating
support and a willingness to assist the presenter in achieving the stated goal.
Presenters must explain succinctly what their kokorozashi is and why it is
important. For some students that do not have a clear image of their personal
mission, this presentation can be very difficult to prepare, but this effort
encourages students to deepen their thinking, and enables the expression of it to
others.
The first occasion to present kokorozashi is at orientation soon after entering the
program. Without much guidance, students share their kokorozashi in one
minute. This marks the start of their journey in developing and communicating
their personal mission.
Many students have difficulty at this point, struggling to put into words what they
aim for in life and why. However, through this effort to give voice to their
kokorozashi, students can begin to deepen their thinking.
For the full-time program a reflection session is held before winter break, four
months after entering the program. In lieu of a second reflection session, the
full-time students have the opportunity to make a 10-minute presentation of their
kokorozashi at the end of May -- nine months after beginning the program and
just before their term for internships begins.
This 10-minute presentation focuses on two points: The ultimate value that
achieving the kokorozashi will bring to society and the motivations of why the
student will persevere in pursuing this goal. The first point helps students to
focus by imaging the contribution to society their kokorozashi will achieve. The
second enables the students to communicate how the personal mission is
important to them. Students usually have very special stories behind their
kokorozashi. These unique stories and the emotions that presenters share, is
often profoundly moving to many in the audience, creating a memorable and
emotional bond between the presenter and audience.
One objective of the presentation is to make the audience feel empathy with the
presenter’s kokorozashi and to have a sense of the results that the mission will
bring about -- as if it has been achieved.
It is common to hear listeners speak
as if the kokorozashi has already been reached: “Wow, when did you start this
business? How can I buy this product?”
Through this process then, students can really sense the ultimate value they
may provide to society, and this should become a motivator for them to continue
the pursuit of their kokorozashi despite challenges.
The timing of the sessions for part-time and online students is different. Their
programs are usually completed within two years. A reflection session is held
near the end of each year. This allows the students in the respective programs to
come together with their peers and review their development and kokorozashi.
As mentioned earlier, developing a kokorozashi is related to what is often called
a personal life narrative – the story that we all keep in our head that explains our
present motivations and future hopes. This type of narrative when developed
clearly with a deeper understanding of the past and future of each student and
how they have come to this point in the present – standing directly in front of an
audience of faculty and classmates, expressing their desires and motivations to
do something important and good -- can be a profound experience. Many
students plumb the depths of the meaning of their lives, welling up with emotion
and shedding tears as they present. Their kokorozashi may tell a story of deep
feelings and meaning, of how they have become who they are and how they
plan to become the person they want to be. In this sense, the kokorozashi is an
overarching personal narrative that enables the presenter to give purpose and
meaning to happy and tragic events -- to define a hero’s tale in their own terms.
Research into personal narratives and the placement of meaning upon events
by individuals strongly indicates that this can be the initiation of self-fulfilling
prophecies. One of the core functions of the kokorozashi is to provide a map for
the future -- enabling the individual to place stars in the night sky by which they
may navigate toward dawn and a welcoming shore.
At the graduation ceremony, students deliver a 30-second sound bite regarding
their kokorozashi to all gathered -- faculty, classmates, family, and friends. This
presentation completes the kokorozashi development at GLOBIS, but by no
means is the process finished. We consider this the first step toward the
realization of their kokorozashi after GLOBIS. The students now embark on a
journey that is as uniquely individual as they are, but with a greater sense of
control, confidence, and clarity of vision as to where it is they wish to go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Embarking on any project requires walking in the footprints, at least at the start,
of those who have come before you. Completion of that project requires the
assistance of so many along the way who help you often without any personal
gain. For both our predecessors and supporters, we are forever grateful.
Although we cannot name them all, we will try to name many and hope those not
named can recognize in them their own contribution.
First, we express our deepest gratitude to this book’s most important benefactor,
Yoshito Hori, the founder and president of GLOBIS University, whose vision and
kokorozashi gave us the platform, the freedom, and the inspiration to begin,
continue and complete this book.
We thank Yoshihiko Takubo, dean of the GLOBIS Japanese program and Keiko
Murao, the Japanese program’s deputy dean, for their guidance and advice
regarding the kokorozashi concepts introduced in Chapter 1. We truly follow in
their pioneering path.
And we must acknowledge our indebtedness to our colleagues and staff who
supported us in this effort, Karl O’Callaghan, who offered expertise as an editor,
and insight as a graduate of the MBA program; Tsuyoshi Shimada, who advised
on the layout and content of the final digital product; and the members of the
marketing and president’s office teams at GLOBIS International School, who
worked tirelessly with us in developing the interviews and bringing a cohesion to
the book that clearly would have been missing without their support.
We also thank Teruaki Nakatsuka, CEO of JATCO, for his willingness to be
interviewed as a non-GLOBIS leader following his kokorozashi.
We also should thank Enrique “Rico” Velez, who is mentioned in some of the
interviews. He was a dedicated student and friend, helping others well beyond
the classroom, including spending many days with Trent Messec, a fellow
GLOBIS alumnus who died of cancer in late 2015. Velez was an inspiration to
many and continues to be. He died in a snowboarding accident at Nozawa
Onsen in Nagano Prefecture in 2017. The message to us is clear: Talent and
passion are essential, but the only currency we have in life is time: Spend it
wisely as we never know how little we may have. Velez’s graduation speech can
be found online.
Unreservedly, the most important contributors to this project are the GLOBIS
alumni who allowed us to interview them and who, along with their thousands of
classmates, past, present, and future, are also the most valuable asset of the
GLOBIS MBA Program.