Shigeru Sekinada on Kearney's role in rethinking Japanese business
Shigeru Sekinada, Managing Director of Kearney in Japan, outlines how the strategy consulting firm is helping Japanese organisations rethink their business and regenerate their competitiveness, and how the Japanese way of doing business can serve as a role model for a brighter future.
The Japanese arm of Kearney has the goal of listing 20 large Japanese businesses that are in the top 50 globally by market capitalization, as well as founding 200 global ventures from Japan and ensuring that the 20 and 200 companies are internationally recognized role models for management by 2050.
We place great importance on nurturing talent capable of leading the 20 and 200 companies through creativity and innovation.
These leaders are expected to create a society capable of maximizing the number of employees, clients and consumers in a state of well-being while ensuring physical, mental, and social satisfaction. We also foster creative, innovating leaders while supporting Japanese enterprises and human resources to ensure they have the creative, innovative people capable of leading enterprises.
Working with clients
The uniqueness of Kearney has become clearer in this time of accelerated change. We are different from firms that aim for rapid expansion and employ a large number of technological or creative talents. As talent capable of crossing the borders between business, technology, and creative fields, we share a mission with external experts specialized in technological and creative fields to form a team that is the best for our clients.
Our focus is on essential rightness; the understanding of intrinsic issues for clients; the creation of new industries, businesses, products, and services; innovation centering on the strategic transformation of global businesses; and tangible results.
We move forward with our work in an agile yet careful way while understanding that “God is in the details” of each of the following processes: comprehending issues structurally, identifying intrinsic issues, setting themes in connection with bold creation and innovation, identifying feasible solutions, making decisions and execution.
Our final goal is for clients to be able to carry out operations using their internal personnel, without depending on external resources. In many cases, it is our goal to phase ourselves out within three to five years.
The success of our clients is our success, and we don’t provide unnecessary support. The management expertise and perspectives that each client needs vary greatly, and we are a human resources group that seeks such environments. Former director Tak Umezawa valued these high aspirations. Another former director, Masahiro Kishida, emphasized the creation of “natural teams” comprised of members with similar achievement mindsets. We have inherited these values.
To change Japan and the world, we have established a Kearney family, including current employees, Kearney alumni and external experts in the technology and creative fields.
Building a good environment for employees
Most of the domestic and overseas employees of Kearney, inside and outside Japan, are millenial-aged consultants, who joined the organization in their 20s or early 30s. I want them to be the people changing Japan and the world, leading both innovations at large enterprises and the creation of new industries and businesses in Japan. To achieve this, we need to change ourselves.
The average tenure of young consultants ranges from three to five years. I want to change this. I would like to foster creative, innovative leaders by arranging forward-thinking human resource systems and support measures to enable our talent to develop their careers over ten or twenty years without becoming burned out in five years.
The ambition of the young generation is not so simple. They do not simply want to contribute to the sales or profits of an organization. Rather, it’s important to them that companies contribute to society and work that brings physical, mental, and social satisfaction. This trait is common in the young generation globally, not only in Japan.
They are much more conscious of sustainable development issues, have language skills beyond their mother tongue, knowledge and expertise in IT and analytics, and a greater sense of globalization than my generation. The world will change even more if I am able to arrange an environment that draws out their potential – something I am trying hard to do.
Looking forward to a healthy future
Well-being is a critical keyword. From a global, long-term perspective, we are achieving higher levels of and objective happiness, even as the wealth gap widens. On the other hand, subjective happiness levels in Japan have not increased. There’s a need to recognize this incongruity between growing wealth and low levels of subjective happiness in order to focus in the future on personal well-being in order to lead lives with greater physical, mental and social satisfaction.
In such a future, the management philosophy of some Japanese companies can serve as a role model. In Japan, some companies proactively return profits to their accounts, clients, and society by, for instance, dividing profits among these three parties. This can positively stimulate many enterprises around the world if the leading managers of Japanese businesses believe in these concepts and act as good models in terms of market capitalization and well-being. I believe this will lead to an ideal future.
Japanese businesses have the potential to become management role models for the world, and we want to help them discover their potential. Our goals of changing Japan and the world and listing 20 Japanese large businesses in the top 50 global companies will be hard to achieve. Nevertheless, more clients come to us for help. This is because we work to identify creative, innovative leaders and support them together with our team members, who share our vision.