The Growth Zone

Let me ask you a direct question. Are you an entrepreneur — or are you a careerist? Most salaried employees are careerists. Their decisions are filtered through a specific lens — what advances the career, protects the position, avoids the wrong kind of visibility. The incentives are different from an entrepreneur’s. The risk calculus is […]

Toshifumi Suzuki died last week. He was 93. And if you have spent any time in Japan, you have felt his work every single day — even if you never knew his name. He was the man who built the konbini. Not just as a business — as infrastructure. As a part of daily life […]

A reporter from The Telegraph in the UK contacted me for my views on the challenges of market entry in Japan. What follows is my manifesto — a set of principles I believe apply not just to Japan, but to any market, anywhere in the world…

I run a monthly, private CEO Roundtable for my best clients and business leaders in the community whom I choose to invite and share the discussion summary with my community. During the May 2026 CEO Roundtable, we discussed “Strategy on Your Own Terms.” Strategy failures are rarely caused by insufficient data or inadequate frameworks. What […]

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is moving to raise the thresholds required for activist shareholders to propose resolutions at company annual general meetings. This is not a technical adjustment to securities law. This is protection — for incumbent boards, for mediocre capital allocation, for the status quo that suits the people already comfortable inside it. […]

Honda just announced its first net loss since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — in 1957. Let that sink in. Nearly seventy years of profitability, and this is the year it ended. The company cancelled three EV models it had been engineering for years — writing off up to two and a half trillion […]

Today’s episode hits close to home for many of the CEOs I work with. Almost every week, I’m in a conversation with a senior leader who tells me the same thing: “Steve, my sales team is underperforming — and I don’t know what to do about it.” They see it in the behaviors. They see […]

Today I want to talk about strategy. Specifically, I want to talk about a mistake I see leaders make constantly when they set strategic goals — and I’m going to use a somewhat unusual teacher to make my point: a flight instructor from the early days of jet aviation. Bear with me. This is going […]

Today I want to talk about one of the most common — and most avoidable — crises I see in foreign companies operating in Japan. A CEO is preparing to move on. Maybe he’s been recalled to head office. Maybe she’s found a compelling opportunity elsewhere. Maybe it’s simply time. And when that moment comes, […]

On March 11, 2011, the ground under Japan moved. You know what happened next. The earthquake. The tsunami. The Fukushima nuclear plant. The world watched Japan face one of the worst compound disasters in modern history. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, a Swedish clothing retailer had to figure out what to do with its Japan operation. H&M's acting CEO in Japan — a man named Hans Anderson — called headquarters in Stockholm. He needed instructions. He needed a plan. And headquarters told him: "We don't have one."