Ken Mori
Managing Partner, Roland Berger Japan
After graduating from the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Tokyo, Ken Mori worked for an American strategic consulting firm prior to joining Roland Berger. He also holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at The University of Chicago.
He has rich experience in such areas as strategy development, alliance support and corporate revitalization in the machinery, electronics, automobile and other manufacturing industries, as well as for public institutions. He has also been involved in numerous global consulting projects and is the Asian representative of the Machinery, Electronics and Materials Group within Roland Berger.
Message
The current state of global economic chaos, originating in the financial crisis that emerged in the United States, shows no signs of abating anytime soon. At the same time, the challenges of the natural environment, the economic shift toward the world’s developing countries and other issues continue, as they have in the past, to place a heavy burden on countless numbers of companies. The question naturally arises, therefore, of what types of plans and actions corporate entities can and should adopt under such circumstances.
To begin, it will be vital to cultivate the caliber and fiber capable of mounting effective responses to the conditions at hand. Toward that end, we suggest adopting a thorough approach to day-to-day “visualization” – that is, maintaining a constant, real-time basis grasp of where specific companies stand in relation to the changes in the external environment. Working from that foundation, it is then vital to establish systems enabling fast and flexible moves in reaction to the shifts.
Rephrased, the demand is for leaders capable of clearly defining the directions to be followed on a timely basis, together with a so-called “thinking workplace” capable of devising optimum actions in response to the ever-changing business arena. Yet another must is the ability to put together slim and tenacious organizations capable of standing up to whatever changes appear in the distance, while moving ahead with systematic cost cutting.
Keeping these factors closely in mind, our daily discussions with clients from various different fields of business generate the persistent sensation that the sort of confusion characterizing the current times also provides a steady stream of lucrative opportunities for clear-headed thought. In this connection, it is our impression that after surmounting the fierce appreciation of the yen during the first half of the 1990s, and then riding out vast bad debt workouts and the collapse of the IT bubble, the majority of Japanese companies took advantage of the competitive edges that they achieved in the past as the power base needed to reap the benefits of stable growth.
As a result of that saga, however, many of these firms have grown increasingly numb to the need to often undertake bold and major changes in how a company is run, while also lapsing into a lethargic stance with regard to the creative thought process itself. Today, more and more Japanese companies stand at crucial crossroads demanding
