Strategists will master the world of business
Why I decided to become a strategist
In this final chapter, I would like to tell you how I came to choose my current work and describe my approach to corporate strategy going forward.
As I mentioned at the beginning, when I got my first job I had only a high school education. My standardized score in high school was in the low 40s, I did not go on to university, and after graduating I did not even get a job because I was aiming to become Japan's karate champion. I was spending my days with no connection whatsoever to the world of corporate strategy, the core of this book.
But even karate, which I had resolved to master, ended in failure at age 20 when I realized I lacked the talent. In my early 20s I did not get a job and spent my days working part-time.
It was only as I approached my late 20s that I finally got a job at a TV commercial production company.
Until my 30s I worked as an advertising producer, starting with commercial production, but in 2005 I read a translated book titled “The Collapse of TV Commercials: The End of Mass Advertising and the Start of Marketing 2.0,” and felt an intense sense of crisis. I felt that as long as we relied on revenue from TV commercial production, our work would eventually disappear.
The book argued that the internet, which was developing rapidly at the time, would drive out advertising such as commercials, and it was treated as a negative topic not only at the company I worked for but across the entire advertising industry. Driven by this sense of crisis, in 2007 I attended a one-week marketing seminar held overseas.
At the time, I could not clearly distinguish whether marketing meant advertising for sales or market research. I only recognized that marketing was an activity encompassing advertising, and I was thinking merely of reconfirming advertising's position. However, this marketing seminar gave me a major hint.
The instructor was a world-famous marketer, and the lecture style was unique. Rather than simply listening to the instructor, it was a workshop format in which company executives took the stage to define their issues and marketers solved them. Participants could not focus only on their own company's issues; they had to think about other companies' marketing strategies. I had never been so exhausted.
However, while listening to companies' issues and learning the marketers' solutions, I was able to put together the broad framework of my own company's future strategy.
It is now common sense in the advertising industry: a method called “communication design,” in which PR, commercials, web content, events and so on are not developed individually but all combined organically. I thought it would generate synergies more easily than one-off measures like simply running ads, and that, for example, the response to commercials would increase.
I immediately returned to my company, devised a scheme to integrate all the divisions, and developed an integrated solution. As a result, we became able to win orders for a variety of advertising products through the sales team's efforts, without each business selling individually.
Sales improved dramatically, but at the same time, new problems emerged.
Even when advertising produced a temporary effect, cases frequently arose in which opportunities for long-term benefits were lost due to problems with the quality of the client company's products and services or its management (organization, finances, etc.).
No matter how good the advertising strategy, there is no point in providing the service if the goods don't sell. So I decided to study marketing strategy methods once again, and even more advanced ways of thinking, and to rethink our company's services.
In 2008, I enrolled in an MBA program to learn management from scratch. It was the Japan branch of an overseas business school, with classes only on Saturdays. But a lot of assignments were given every week, so on weekdays I studied hard after getting home late at night. It was not unusual for me to go to bed around 4 or 5 a.m.
However, in September of that year the Lehman Shock dealt a major blow to the world economy, and from the following year its aftermath began to cast a shadow over our company. Until then the company had been growing steadily and was just starting preparations for a stock listing when, in 2009, sales plummeted.
When the economy goes into recession, advertising is the first thing to be cut. Dark clouds hung over the entire industry, and many of our peers went bankrupt. I worked desperately to turn things around, but I realized how extremely fragile the advertising industry is in a recession. I was made painfully aware that survival required fundamental measures.
However, from the urgency of the recession and my MBA studies, I found one solution.
That was the fusion of strategy consulting and an advertising agency. I thought companies would be revitalized by unifying the strategy to win with the tactics to put it into action. First, develop a basic strategy scheme and formulate the corporate strategy. Next, produce the products for executing that strategy (websites, commercials, recruitment videos, events, promotional tools, internal tools and so on).
To use a battle analogy, products are like weapons. Conventional advertising production would be carried forward as communication design that connects people, and should transform into comprehensive services in the form of marketing strategy and corporate strategy.
In 2010, while the economy had still not recovered from the shock of the Lehman collapse, I completed my MBA. Then, to test the service I had been developing, I consulted the company's president at the time. However, the president did not understand my proposal at all. He had always preferred entertainment-oriented work such as commercials and seemed to dislike corporate strategy.
Some employees supported me, but the creators on the front lines strongly opposed it, saying, “We don't want to become a consulting firm.” Sales kept falling and the new service was not accepted: I was stuck with no way forward. Around the same time, many employees who felt uneasy about the company's future due to poor sales left.
Generally, a company would scale down its business and try to return to its roots, but with the market itself shrinking, only companies with room to spare would survive.
I decided to go independent. Anticipating that some employees and clients would come with me when I left, I proposed a financial solution to the company in the form of a “business transfer.” In other words, I would buy part of the company's business. Clients and employees are part of a company's assets, so if I had simply taken them with me, I risked violating the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
In 2012, together with just two employees who followed me, I founded Strategic Partners Inc. Most of the capital disappeared into the business transfer funds and we were steadily running out of money, but this is how Japan's first “company combining an advertising agency and a consulting firm” was born.
Today, our company provides strategic support to many companies, from listed corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises. Looking back, my encounter in 2005 with the book “The Collapse of TV Commercials” has led to where I am now. Triggered by the shock of reading that book, I have pursued all kinds of study, gained many insights and met many people, and continue to develop new schemes and services.
I am neither a famous executive nor a success story, nor am I from a renowned consulting firm. Having only managed to start a business in my late 40s, I sometimes worry whether I am qualified to discuss corporate strategy.
But if there is one thing I can be proud of, it is that I have long observed corporate strategy from the “fringes” of marketing, namely TV commercial production. When I was at the commercial production company, I was truly “a frog in a well that knows nothing of the great ocean.” I had opportunities to produce commercials for major companies and to receive international advertising awards, but they only satisfied a small sense of accomplishment.
Even so, there is another view: “The frog in the well knows nothing of the great ocean, but it knows the blueness of the sky.” A poet friend taught me this phrase a few years ago, and I take it to mean that “even from a small place, you can understand part of the world.” I am proud that it is precisely because I worked in commercial production that I was able to appreciate the wonder of corporate strategy, and at the same time notice the “sense of something off” in the world of corporate strategy.
Why is there no such job as “strategist”?
Today, there is no such profession as “strategist.” Yet throughout history, strategists have demonstrated their power, from Zhuge Kongming, who made his name from the end of the Later Han dynasty into the Three Kingdoms period in China, to Yamamoto Kansuke, who served Takeda Shingen as military strategist in Japan's Sengoku period. Ours is an era of incessant business warfare. That is exactly why we need strategists to support business.
One could think of consultants as strategists, but consultants who support companies are different from strategists. A consultant's job is to solve the client's management issues and devise strategies for increasing the client's sales. A strategist, on the other hand, thinks through the plan to win: not only the strategy but also the tactics.
I still practice martial arts, and if I compare this world to martial arts, I think it is “mixed martial arts.” Boxing and judo have restrictive rules. But in a real fight, there are no rules. Even a world boxing champion may lose if taken to the ground.
In that sense, consultants don't know tactics and advertising creators don't know strategy. A strategist, by contrast, needs comprehensive abilities.
Even in mixed martial arts, though, each fighter makes full use of their original discipline when entering a fight and seizing victory. I myself come from video production, and I have solved a great many strategic issues through video production.
I predict that in the future, people who have excelled in various fields, such as consultants, advertising creators and those with management experience, will step into the ring of corporate strategy to test themselves and make full use of their abilities.
The strategist's mission my father taught me
This is a bit of a digression, but let me tell you about my father as we think about the role of a strategist.
A little over 30 years ago, my father left his salaried job and ran an ironworks. Ironworks were busy everywhere at the time, and my father's made good money building balconies, staircases and the like for buildings and houses. Business was going well, and our family gradually became well-off.
However, as time went on, major building-materials manufacturers began mass-producing such fixtures in factories. Small local ironworks had no way to compete with cheap, mass-produced products. And so many ironworks disappeared from the town.
My father's ironworks was no exception, and it quickly fell into financial trouble.
My father tried various measures to rebuild it, but the strain took its toll; he developed stomach cancer and died at the young age of 46. I was 16 and had just started high school. I had entered a technical high school intending to take over my father's ironworks, but it closed soon afterward, and that wish was never fulfilled.
“Business failure can even decide a person's life.” This is what I learned from my father's death. I imagine there are quite a few executives who, like my father, develop illnesses serious enough to cost them their lives because of the stress of running a business.
I entered the world of advertising at 25 and, after many twists and turns, now work in corporate strategy. Was it my wish to have saved my father that unconsciously led me to this work, or did my father guide me here? I can't be certain, but I can't say it is unrelated to his death.
Today, executives face a wide range of issues. I believe that solving those issues makes society better. I tend to get fired up because I see my father in the executives of our client companies, but at my core is the conviction that “I will never let any company lose.” I believe this is a strategist's mission.