Abhijit Dubey is Global Chief Executive Officer for NTT Ltd and a member of the board of directors.
When I started my career journey with McKinsey over 20 years ago, I thought that the definition of business success was fairly universally seen as being about growth through innovation. Progressing toward my current role, I gained a valuable perspective on the rich diversity of business mindsets that leaders can tap into.
Our modern Western idea of what business success looks like comes largely from a Silicon Valley mindset. Often summed up by Mark Zuckerberg’s old “move fast and break things” mantra, it gave us a language of disruption, risk-taking, IPOs and quarterly results which has since spread far beyond the technology industry. More abstractly, it promotes logic-driven decision-making in which people aim to win over their peers’ minds.
As someone who started in Silicon Valley, my own career is deeply indebted to that mentality. And in upending any number of stale business models and rapidly reaching masses of end users, it has been extraordinarily successful in delivering the modern digital age. However, if business leaders want to keep succeeding as the world changes around us, we need to be open to other philosophies. My own experience is a good example, as years spent consulting for the Japanese telecoms giant NTT—and then moving to the business as the CEO of NTT Ltd—have exposed me to a very different set of cultural business norms.
Since the post-war period, the Japanese economy has grown and thrived with a more long-term mindset. Through rapid industrialization followed by a rich seam of technological innovation that echoes that of Silicon Valley, the Japanese technology sector succeeded by focusing on quality management, customer centricity, continuous improvement and often-lifelong relationships between companies and their employees. It is a business culture that seeks mutual trust, winning hearts as well as minds.
As a result, it thinks in terms of stakeholders, not just shareholders. While shareholders are a vital voice in business management, their focus is solidly on the rhythm of quarterly and annual outcomes. Stakeholder thinking, meanwhile, might be as specific as the needs of a town where a business is building a new location or as broad as planetary ecological impacts decades down the line.
That’s an important difference to the Silicon Valley mindset. From billion-dollar multinationals to single-office outfits, it’s becoming rare for businesses to operate without publicly articulating a sense of social purpose. The big questions now go beyond products and profitability. What do you stand for? How are you improving the planet? What are you doing to ensure that there will still be an economy to sell into in 30 years’ time?
Those are questions that I believe the Japanese approach of operating with many stakeholders in mind is notably well suited to answer. And, of course, I’m far from the only person to have observed that the Silicon Valley model needs to adapt: In 2019, the Business Roundtable in the United States redefined its “purpose of a corporation” and urged companies to understand that success is dependent on inclusive long-term growth.
This contrast reappears when looking at the two approaches from different angles. In Silicon Valley, seeking competitive differentiation is about developing new intellectual property and thus creating a defensible position in the market; in Japan, it is about improving quality, creating a longer-term uplift across the business’s offerings. In Silicon Valley, change operates as creative destruction, clearing away existing value to make room for more profitable strategies; in Japan, a through-cycle mindset dominates, building strength during upturns to enable investment in change through downturns.
Thinking about this contrast I am, in spite of the resonances that the Japanese mindset has with today’s big challenges, called back to the proven power of the Silicon Valley strategy. Decarbonization calls for rapid industrial transformation, and we know which approach delivers change at speed. More purposeful models need to disrupt old business assumptions, and we know which approach gets straight to the heart of established industries. The future demands new behaviors, not just new technologies, and we know which approach effectively creates new categories of consumers.
Patient, long-term thinking, then, has to go hand in hand with innovative risk-taking. The Business Roundtable wasn’t just talking about ecology but about the economy as a whole. Likewise, this combination is a persuasive offer for everything a business does.
Too often, we see the Silicon Valley approach invest heavily in what could be the next big thing, only to move on if it doesn’t deliver huge results within a year or two. Those bets would be managed better by seeing them through, with the holistic patience of Japanese business philosophy, just as that long-term outlook benefits from an attitude that can plant the seeds of success early and fast. Ultimately, in this philosophical contrast, one mindset shouldn’t trump the other. To me, holding to this dual focus is more powerful and can create more important results than either philosophy in isolation.
The future is not an easy place for businesses right now. We cannot assume that long-standing philosophies will succeed tomorrow as they did yesterday. Instead, we need to look outward to approaches we can adopt and build them into something new and better.
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