NEXT-GEN LEADERS FOR NEXT-GEN BUSINESS: Developing leaders for Japan’s new capitalism

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

MBA candidates at Hitotsubashi ICS (Hitotsubashi University Business School, School of International Corporate Strategy), who come from a diverse range of countries including Japan, represent some of the most high-potential and influential of the global talent in Japan. They arrive eager to lead in both business and society in Japan yet, once here, seeing the challenges, many come to wonder: Is there a path to success for me here?

Japan today is under increasing pressure to adopt new standards and norms - in ways of working, expectations around transparency, gender equity, financial management, energy transition, sustainability and more. As Japan’s time-honored business institutions work to bolster their relevance for the future, many on the ground are saying there is a wind of real change in the air; that domestic and global forces are aligning for accelerated organizational and social change in Japan.

High-quality leadership invites others to collaborate and engage in change. Highly capable leaders lead for and through change and its entailed complexities, the most challenging of which involve hearts and minds - even as they develop a next generation to surpass them in their achievements. Today’s business leaders are well aware of these challenges, as they look to the horizon and the inevitable passing of the baton to a new generation.

Japan’s new generation of business leaders: Who will they be, and how will they lead? This question fascinates us, and gave life to the Next-gen Business Leadership Roundtable.

We created the Roundtable to explore the nature and practice of business leadership - as distinct from management -Japan needs from its next generation. To foster open and candid discussion, they convened small groups that were diverse, cross-generational and multicultural, in a setting disallowing of rank or hierarchy.­ A unique strength of the Roundtable, and of this Paper, is their embeddedness in the Japanese context, its current realities and future challenges. Another is the diversity of its interlocutors, whose voices animate the writing.

While each discussion focused on its own theme, a number of major topics came through consistently as transcendent themes on which leaders for Japan’s future would need to focus:

1. Business culture: Participants felt that Japan’s businesses needed to evolve from the prioritization of consensus-based leadership in order to strengthen individual agency and promote leadership and initiative-taking at all levels
2. Diversity and inclusion: Rather than recruiting through narrow and traditional channels, and engraining executives with a common way of thinking, it was believed that Japanese companies would benefit from inviting a more diverse set of people, encourage different ideas, and opening access to business leadership to all
3. Labour market fluidity: Participants felt that the rigid employment market and hierarchal and age-based system of promoting people have been hindering success – they encouraged companies to embrace greater meritocracy and facilitate a generation shift in Japan
4. Clarified purpose: While Japanese companies have been ‘purpose driven’ in the past, participants felt that Japanese companies needed a refreshed reason to lead, well aligned with the needs and expectations of today’s global society and ensure their sustainability long into the future

This Paper conveys insights and proposals for practice relating to these four major themes. To all who are invested in the future success of Japan’s corporate sector – young professionals, business leaders, corporate executives and advisors, entrepreneurs, educators, government and policy makers – we offer our findings.

Perhaps most of all, we hope to reach, inspire, and encourage the next generation of leaders for Japan.

Authors: David Ashton, Ben Fouracre, Jody Ono

ICS Faculty:  Jody Ono

Download the White Paper here