Growth Zone explores dauntless leadership and dramatic business growth. Each episode delivers strategies and tactics you can use to drive growth in your business in Japan, and beyond. Hosted by Steven Bleistein, the leading authority on business growth and leadership in Japan.
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A CEO client of mine was fired. No performance issue. His results were outstanding. A regional VP sat down with him, said it was to talk about the future, and then told him he was out. The reason: “to make room for new blood and reduce headcount.” He found out later he wasn’t alone. Same […]
This week, Softbank Group CEO Masayoshi Son stood in a Tokyo hotel ballroom and told Japan’s top executives that AI is coming for them. He invoked the Black Ships from Japanese history — U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853 with a squadron of four gunships — as a metaphor for a […]
In February, Toyota announced that its next CEO would be Kenta Kon. He’s the company’s CFO, and for eight years he was the personal secretary to chairman Akio Toyoda. Some of the coverage outside Japan framed this as a family story. Akio Toyoda’s son, Daisuke, the founder’s great-grandson, was given a role at Toyota’s Motomachi […]
Japanese automobile manufacturer Suzuki just announced they are targeting Africa as their next major growth market. They’re calling it “the next India.” They entered India in 1983. At the time, the consensus said India was too poor, too complex, too far from the kind of premium market that serious companies were supposed to chase. The […]
A technology company CEO I know recently told me a story I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. His company was facing a crisis. Supply chain constraints — driven in large part by the AI-fueled explosion in chip demand — had caused component prices to triple. In some cases, product simply wasn’t available at […]
Last week I presented some of the most provocative ideas from my book, Rapid Culture Change, at my CEO Roundtable here in Tokyo. The talk opens with a trick: I read out a list of dysfunctions that sound unmistakably Japanese — and then I tell the room they actually describe a French utility. It’s designed […]
Japan’s government just designated 17 priority sectors for long-term protected investment — AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, shipbuilding, defense, and more. The headlines call it a return to Japan Inc. But what Japan is actually doing — whether its policymakers fully realize it or not — is attempting to build strategic resilience into the national economy. […]
Amazon employees are running AI agents in the background. Not to get work done. But to inflate their token consumption scores. Meta employees are doing it. Microsoft employees are doing it. The phenomenon even has a name now: tokenmaxxing. Workers gaming an internal leaderboard — burning through AI usage metrics that mean nothing — in […]
Japan’s government recently released its 2026 white paper on manufacturing industries. The headline finding: 60% of Japanese firms are now working on economic security measures, up from 40% the year before. That sounds like progress. It isn’t. Read the fine print. A large share of that 60% were merely collecting information on international affairs. In […]
I once asked an HR director a simple question. Two candidates. Identical resumes. One had never failed at anything. The other had failed so many times he’d lost count. Which one do you hire? His answer came without hesitation: the one who never failed. To him, it was obvious. He was wrong. Here’s what that […]
