Many companies send middle or blossoming upper management from the head office to take on the Representative director role in the Japan entity. The challenge is that many of those people don't completely understand the implications of the role much less the person going. In the June CI lunch we will have John Dorff of […]

Understanding politics even in one's own language is sometimes a chore, sometimes a bore. For those of us who live in Japan, though, this challenge is exponentially greater and not just because of the language and culture: it truly is a black-box here even for Japanese citizens (who at least can peer into the inner […]

The Internet is now the forth social infrastructure and continue to be evolved just from connectivity to digitizing the world. IoT is creating new economy connecting unconnected with people, processes and big data. We live in a generation of great change. Sharing economy is one of the new business opportunities leveraging the power of the […]

Sorry, this lunch has been cancelled.

With the global market trending towards sharing, it is fascinating to watch that trend and how it effects our businesses. We’ve got ride-sharing (Uber, Lyft), room-sharing (AirBNB), and a lot of resource sharing (freelancer.com) and many other new business models that seem to show the market going from “owning your resources, to sharing your resources”. […]

In business, when we think of “acquisition" immediately the image of a large firm buying a smaller firm to get into a national market, buy market share, or even kill potential competition. In the August CEO Insights, we will be talking about when it is right to buy a company, and when it is best […]

Earlier this year, once again, Japan’s LDP decided not to seek passage of a bill to legalize casino operations in Japan. The bill would lift the ban on casino operations and development. This was yet another disappointment in a long line of setbacks for those who would like to see casinos in Japan as a […]

Everyone knows the joke about the two things we must do in life, pay taxes and die someday. The good thing about paying a lot of tax is that can generally indicate you are doing well as a CEO. If you’ve been running any size organization for any amount of time, you will know that […]

Life is not just about knowing people, it's about knowing good people. There's no beating the quality of CEO Insights members and our guests around a table. As an executive, it can be lonely at the top and CI fills that void. As we close out and say "sayonara" to summer 2016, we want to […]

The past 30 years has seen a sea change in the willingness, some would say eagerness, of foreign firms in Japan to engage external stakeholders, including government officials and politicians and their staff. Indeed, senior executives in many foreign firms in Japan now see GR as a key element of their business strategy in Japan. […]