Jody Ono
[Part 1 explained that understanding and cultivating your own worldview is the heavy lift in personal leadership development. Here in Part 2, we look at how worldview weighs in at organizations.]
Organizations aren’t individuals, so they don’t have worldviews in the pure sense. Still, their norms and management practices do make assumptions about the world, people, and society — and these may or may not keep pace with social change.
Japanese companies are in a time of transition in which worldview and its associated assumptions may be decisive. Long practiced in stakeholder capitalism, well versed in social contribution, Japanese companies have a potential head start in re-imagining their role in a beleaguered world seeking to recalibrate.
Review from Part 1: The consequence of worldview
Your worldview is the lens through which you perceive the world and all that’s in it, especially people, others. Deeply personal and unique to you, it consists of fundamental assumptions that you make every day, in all your interactions. A simple example: living in Tokyo, to get downtown you assume “I’ll take the train.” You don’t doubt that a) the train will be running and b) get you to your destination; you “know” this about your world based on experience and learning, as in a mental model or heuristic. Alongside practical assumptions like this one, you also make profound ones about the world such as “generally speaking, the world is a snake pit” and about human nature such as “people are mostly hard-working.”
Understanding your own worldview is a form of self-awareness that liberates you to be more intentional about how you see the world and people, to adjust and update your default settings as you choose. As a leader, to develop, deliberately, your personal purpose, values, vision and more. That foundation empowers you to make more intentional judgements, decisions, and choices and to align these with the direction you identify as right for your people and organization. In doing so, you elevate your leadership to rely more on resolve than on reaction.
Worldview in organizations
Organizations cannot be said to have worldviews in the same sense. But the worldviews of individuals shaping them — certainly those of founders and top decisionmakers — become operative in organizations’ purpose, vision, values, and more. Think of Anita Roddick at The Body Shop, Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA, Steve Jobs at Apple, Eiji Toyoda at Toyota, Konosuke Matsushita at Panasonic, Dee Hock at Visa International, JRD Tata at Tata Group. These leaders’ views of the world and people, right along with their personalities and capacities, influenced the companies they built or led. (Leadership class exercise: Have students try to discern leaders’ worldviews at work in these examples.)
Discussions of “management worldview” and mental models appear in scholarly work on leadership and organizations. We see references to worldview in journals of all stripes: history of ideas, computing, terrorism, literature, military studies, and more. Economic historian Douglass North describes the relationship between mental models and institutions as “an intimate one.” (See D. North, 1994. “Economic Performance through Time,” The American Economic Review, June, Vol. 84, №3, pp. 359–368.)
In what follows we’ll indulge in some generalizing, responsibly. We respect detail yet we resist the reductionist reflex that our ever more specialized world imbues in us. Leaders must dare to generalize at times in order to form a perception of the big picture. In the realm of leadership development, disciplined generalization and even speculation are access routes to imagination and envisioning.
KPI: Society
Let’s consider worldview in the context of Japanese companies. This is an instructive application because more than a few Japanese companies are in a time of transition. Although we cannot say for sure what they are transitioning to, we can generalize about what they’re transitioning from.
Japan’s stakeholder model of capitalism, exemplified in the worldview and work of Eichi Shibusawa and other iconic Japanese industrialists, has shaped norms, behaviors, and management practices within its companies since the late 19th century. The central tenet of Japanese capitalist philosophy is that private sector actors shall make ongoing contributions to society, and the primary role of profit is to enable these. Japanese companies are famous for their long-term view; Japan is home to the largest number of 100-year-old-plus companies.
From just after WW2 until recently, you could draw a straight line from Japan’s post-war economic growth to the nature of the social contribution expected of companies. In accordance with the prevailing worldview, companies would innovate to make useful products to modernize daily life while providing gainful employment for heads of households. Financially secure families would weave the fabric of a more affluent society where shared values, norms, and priorities would be duly served.
The way it was put into practice, this social mandate created features of Japanese companies such as: a) long-term employment relationships; b) job rotations assigning employees to various divisions of the company every few years; c) high value placed on seniority; d) one worker can earn sufficient compensation and benefits to sustain a household, not just an individual.
These features made implicit but powerful assumptions about people, work, and way of life:
· The company’s success contributes to the economic and social development of Japan and its people
· Employees can and want to make long-term commitments to their employers. Although implicit, this assumption reinforced the traditional division of labor between men and women and solidified the position of the Japanese male as the ideal worker
· There is little variance in individuals’ aspirations: everyone aspires to the same life path (education, job, family, retirement)
· Individuals aspire to a career within the organization, and not outside of it
· The company decides whether and how to develop employees
Worldview in transition
Japan’s approach to rapid economic development was successful in creating innovation, employment, and distributed wealth. The philosophy of Japanese stakeholder capitalism, in particular the mandate of social contribution, is laudable and worth preserving, even exporting. Most Japanese companies display a deep and long-term commitment to society.
The problem lies not in the model but in the assumptions, at least in terms of worldview. In running their companies’ daily affairs, many Japanese managers, particularly at mid-levels, are still using practices based on those outdated assumptions that no longer reflect the realities or speak to the aspirations of Japanese society, particularly of people under 40. As individuals they may not espouse those old implicit assumptions at all, but inertia in management has them working from them nonetheless. To borrow my metaphor from Part 1, outdated assumptions can weigh down management like a ball and chain.
In fairness, given Japan’s overall success, it’s natural that managers would take their cues from precedent. But here’s one way to characterize the state of transition Japanese companies are in: You can no longer draw that neat straight line from the zeitgeist of Japanese society to the nature of the social contribution expected of companies. What was a 2D line has become 4D installation art. Getting a clear read on what “social contribution” means today will take intentional worldview updates.
Making worldview explicit
As diversity and globalization deepen in Japan, the range of desirable and achievable lifestyles is widening. Social, environmental, and political currents are moving economic activity farther into the realms of renewable energy, social impact investing, sustainable and regenerative business models, integration of AI and IoT in meeting the challenges of the super-aged society, and other newer ways of doing capitalism as we advance in the Anthropocene. Covid-19 accelerated the move to more flexible workstyles (finally) in Japan, and people began to discover that they could live better working remotely from a larger, newer, or greener home outside the densest urban areas. Intriguingly, Nikkei Asia reported recently “It is perhaps telling that Marx’s “Das Kapital” is booming in Japan.”
These, and other developments in society, are excellent clues to the nature of social contribution that Japanese companies can make going forward. To seize this opportunity, companies will need to be robust in their worldview, making explicit and intentional their updated assumptions about the world and people, and articulating how they believe the world ought to be. For example, they could now assume:
· The company’s success contributes to sustainable prosperity of countries and people around the world
· People advance in their careers through ambition and performance and not according to their demographic attributes
· Households may prefer to have multiple sources of income
· The aspirations of people are wide-ranging, as are lifestyle and work-life balance preferences
· People feel motivated when they feel empowered to steer their own development
The push for sustainability in business and investing also is helping Japanese companies to refresh their management worldviews. The SDGs, for example, offer them a framework for re-imagining their social contributions. Many are using it and the task is inviting much-needed questioning, re-framing of outdated concepts, and re-phrasing of now-quaint formulations. Like companies everywhere, Japanese companies are still learning what sustainability means and entails for them. They are building better habits of transparency and voluntary disclosure in order to make the move from ESG reporting mode to integration of ESG into business plans and processes at the origin. Very critically: Japanese companies must professionalize their communications to speak with confidence, conviction, and concern for the global community.
As the vanguard of Japan’s model of stakeholder capitalism, Japanese companies have track record on their side. The central role of social contribution in Japanese business philosophy should position them well to emerge as global ambassadors for 21st century capitalism. They can provide more and much-needed leadership on how the stakeholder model can help align corporate success with the cause of creating a more sustainable society. With timely and savvy messaging, they could display fluency in the Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics and other instruments.
Leading with worldview
It is not the job of a leader to offer a ready-made worldview for others to swallow whole. Rather it is to elicit a response of motivation and engagement that aligns or rhymes with individuals’ personal worldviews, as a channel through which to generate action towards better performance and more substantive well-being. As part of this task, a leader should challenge others to understand their own worldviews and to cultivate these continuously based on experience and, even better, learning.
Leaders should learn to know when a refreshed worldview is called for. If you sense that the assumptions underlying your organization’s purpose, vision, values, and “best practices” are outdated, or no longer reflect the aspirations and concerns of the societies they serve, do some worldview-level thinking. You should do so as individuals, in the ongoing effort to self-develop, but also as leaders in collaboration with a diverse set of thoughtful colleagues. Let worldview lend gravitas, not dead weight.
Big shocks — natural disasters, deep recessions, violence, civil unrest or war — rock our worlds and worldviews. Especially as we struggle to extricate ourselves from the global pandemic, organizations might ask questions like: How do we see the world and our role in it? Is the world how we believe it ought it to be? How do we see individuals — employees, colleagues, all our stakeholders? What is the precise contribution we stand to make, if our vision and strategy are successful? Are we delivering value not just that customers want, but which they view as part of building a better future?
Any kind of organization can benefit from this exercise. Universities: What is your take on your students, their aspirations, and the world they will inherit? Nonprofits: What basic assumptions do you make about the world you wish to improve, about the people you strive to serve? Governments, political parties: What have your policies/platforms been taking for granted about your constituents and the lives they lead, but should perhaps no longer do so?
To close this two-part series on worldview and leadership development, let me go old-school. Many high-quality perceptiveness checks, competency analyses, personality tests, case studies, and bias assessments are available and helpful. Yet the most effectual leadership development exercise I’ve found, the one I’ll always push the hardest, is fearless contemplation of the human condition.
Jody Ono is dedicated to helping people to characterize and express their leadership as a personal practice, an endeavor to which she has applied herself in policy, business, and academic spheres. For five years, as faculty at Hitotsubashi ICS, Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo she taught leadership development to MBA students from some 20+ countries and in executive education programs for Japanese and global companies. Currently, she serves as an Outside Director for Mabuchi Motor Co., Ltd. and is collaborating on leadership development projects with Global Perspectives KK, Japan.
Earlier, based at SITE, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden, Jody worked with international teams on talent development in emerging economies, including in the launch of new economic policy think tanks in Russia and central and eastern Europe. Subsequently, at the Bush School of Government, Texas A&M University, TX, USA, she developed the newly founded Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics, and Public Policy. With the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library as counterpart, she coordinated executive policy and business leadership awards programs before joining the Center for Leadership Excellence, Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets, as an instructor.
Jody is a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (MPP ‘03), New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (MA ‘93), and American University’s School of International Service (BA ‘89).
