Japanese management has produced ideas such as Kaizen, Sanpo-yoshi, and Kokorozashi. GLOBIS uses them to help leaders carry principles from the classroom into decisions made across markets, cultures, and changing conditions
Japanese companies have spent decades giving the global market reasons to ask the same questions.
Why is this so reliable? Why does a company seem to get better at the same thing, year after year?
Toyota, Sony, Panasonic, and others built reputations that eventually became shorthand. It’s Japanese. Of course it works.
There are names for some of the habits behind that reputation: Kaizen, Sanpo-yoshi, Kokorozashi. They come from different parts of Japanese life and business. One concerns continuous improvement. Another asks what a business owes to the people around it. The third asks what a person intends to accomplish through their work.
But, passing any of these ideas from one generation to the next runs into a problem: the world changes.
A factory faces new technology. A leader encounters a new corporate problem. A company outgrows the market that made it successful. The ancient Chinese idiom kè zhōu qiú jiàn, or “carving a notch on a moving boat to find a lost sword,” captures this tension: to keep applying yesterday’s answer because it once worked is to mark the side of a moving boat and expect the sword to remain beneath the mark.
GLOBIS approaches Japanese management philosophy through that problem of inheritance: how do you learn a principle well enough to keep it, and know when you need to change it?
Tomoya Nakamura, GLOBIS University faculty, uses a concept from martial arts to explain the process. He holds three black belts and wrote two Harvard Business School cases on Eastern philosophy in management as a research associate there.
Nakamura connects shu-ha-ri with Otto Scharmer’s Theory U and with Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi’s work on organizational knowledge. How do you use something you were taught when nobody has given you the answer?
GLOBIS applies that question to the principles its students encounter.
Every student in GLOBIS's required Entrepreneurial Leadership course develops a kokorozashi, often translated as a personal mission or aspiration, writing it, revising it over time, and presenting it to class.
GLOBIS distinguishes kokorozashi from ikigai, the idea more familiar to Western readers: ikigai is about what gives a person meaning; kokorozashi is about what you intend to contribute through your work and who should benefit from it.
Also Read: What Guides Your Decisions When the Path Isn’t Clear?
A student can write a convincing mission statement in a classroom, then years later must decide whether to stay with a struggling company or take a job that pays more but leads somewhere they don't want to go.
GLOBIS keeps returning to the question. kokorozashi sessions bring together the university’s president, dean, and faculty. Career consultations revisit the idea after graduation. In the Visionary Leadership Program, participants write their own kokorozashi declaration during the Japan component and take it back to their organizations.
The statement gets tested by the life that follows it. Reiji Yamanaka, a GLOBIS faculty member and managing director of KIBOW Social Impact Investment, moved from Canon to GLOBIS Capital Partners, then a medical startup where his savings ran out when the venture failed, before returning to GLOBIS in impact investing. He describes his kokorozashi as cultivating entrepreneurs who change society through education and investment.
Also Read: How Reiji Yamanaka Found His Calling in Impact Investing
The merchants of Omi had a phrase for a business that should work for three parties: Sanpo-yoshi, or “good for the seller, good for the buyer, good for society.” In many Japanese companies today, particularly on issues like sustainability, you can see this principle in action.
GLOBIS professor Yoshihiko Takubo studied Japanese companies more than 300 years old with annual revenues above five billion yen, some with practices hard to explain through a conventional business case. Gekkeikan, founded in 1637, holds an annual Buddhist memorial service for employees who have died while working there. Yamato Intec, a cast-metal manufacturer, puts new hires through five years of factory-floor work no matter the job they were hired for.
These companies have been around long enough that business and community became part of the same fabric. Takubo calls this community coexistence value. Takubo calls this community coexistence value.
After the 2011 Thailand floods disrupted Toyota's regional suppliers, then-president Akio Toyoda traveled to the affected areas and committed to remaining in the region. The company had a supply-chain problem; the people in front of him had a different one. Sanpo-yoshi gave him a way to think about both: restore the business, and honor what it owed the people and communities around it.
Kaizen traveled furthest from Japan; its discipline of continuous improvement closely tied to Toyota and folded into management systems worldwide. In GLOBIS's MBA elective on Japanese management, Toyota cases test that idea against real decisions, from how knowledge moves through an organization to how the Toyota Way is taught across countries and functions.
AGC, the world's largest glass manufacturer, faced slowing growth in businesses like architectural and automotive glass. In 2019, CEO Takuya Shimamura began pushing it into new areas while still running the old ones. AGC did not abandon what it knew. It stopped if what it knew was enough.
That's a different problem from improving a production line: the old business must keep working while a new one gets built. It is also where shu-ha-ri becomes visible. First, you learn the craft, then you understand why it works, then you decide whether it can take you where you need to go.
Also Read: Leadership and the Legacy of Conviction: Shaping Kaizen and the Toyota Way
A kokorozashi can carry a career, sanpo-yoshi can shape how a company treats the people around it, and kaizen can become daily habit. Then circumstances change, and a principle learned in Japan may have to guide a decision made somewhere else. That's the problem of translation GLOBIS builds its approach around.
The Visionary Leadership Program puts participants through that process: online study, Japanese and Western management approaches, and an immersive program in Kyoto and Tokyo. They study cases including Sony, meet Zen priest Daiko Matsuyama, and work through Japanese leadership and decision-making. The Japan component ends with a Kokorozashi declaration participants take back to their organization; a February reunion checks how the mission held up.
Learn more about the Visionary Leadership Program
Program details are subject to change; check the program page for current dates.
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