Presentations Day 1

 I found all of them a quite fascinating. Atsuko and Shiori (Asakura) talked about the global leader which is very practical. I used to think that the Global standards are American standards, since they have so much share in the Global business. However, it turns out that it is not that way. we need to be social, create shared value, be logical and ownership which is universally applicable. Shiori had done great job, bringing images to visualize those elements which made listener easy to understand.  Moe talked about the negative thinking is not always inferior and keeping them in appropriate ratio is important to the success. With clear wording and images, I surely thumbs up to her presentation. Kenta showed us three types of leadership styles. Especially the last one, Servant Type is very new to me. Recognizing these styles, I think it is much easier for leaders to see the benefit & problem of their

style and they can keep such problems in mind. Sayaka talks about Starbucks which, I was always wondering why the people working there seems so happy all the time. The answer is, it seems, this company actually treasure it's employee and created an environments that they likes to belong.

Mao mentioned the populism, in which too strong leadership will not always eventually lead to preferable outcomes. I agree with his view since, I think, it is true that populism sometimes become stronger than their contents of proposal which make public to become irrational at their decision making. Sumire talks very confidently about the modern leadership.  The new thing for me, was the "Flex Time Schedule." She showed us a graph showing that the more we take time on somethings, we pay for their work, the effectiveness will eventually fall at one points. I think this study can be used in various parts of our living. It is set time to your work, if you want it to have effective. Overall I think I had learned a lot things from today's presenters. Again thank you!

The fate of big companies

In all over the globe, we see companies that used to dominate the market has shrunken and merged by other companies or declared bankruptcy. It seems that there is a trend that the bigger they become, the more likely to fail.

In recent example, a major technology company "Kodak" which had more than 80% share of camera and film sales in 90s, applied bankruptcy and end the 130 years of camera and film production. After this happened many people says that they fail to keeping up to the digital world, however, people engaging in management and leadership research claims that the structure is the point to argue for that failure.
John Kotter ,who is a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that an over going complacency or self-satisfaction have became the barriers to shifting organization. They overlooked minor problems and had little urgency to the situation when their rival companies begins to appear and with the hierarchy created by development of companies and let them to cause tragic.


So, what I learned from this example. I think there will be two things. One is to take problems into opportunity and do not ignore them only because they are minor one.We should not also have complacency to ourselves. As we already learned in Chapter 3 “Optimism and Reality” quotes from Nicolich saying “we need to look at adversity and see opportunity”, we should not escape from those problems or situation of disaster.

The other one is the importance of communication between people and less hierarchical relationship between people. As the example shows, the solid hierarchy relations prevent the delivery of ideas, solutions, we need to have employee to have place to voice up or ,if possible, to have less hierarchy inside organization. The latter one is very unique to big companies, because the bigger companies it grows, the more manager will be remote in nature.