The Principles

Reinventing strategy & leadership in a collective world.

Two traditions, two blind spots

In Japan, priority has long been given to the quality of execution. Visitors are amazed by Shinkansen trains running three minutes apart at 200 mph with almost no delay, or by the repeated perfection of service across Tokyo's thousands of restaurants. This passion for perfection in operations — monozukuri — rests on great discipline and gradual, low-risk improvement (kaizen). Deviating from long-established rules is nearly impossible, even when those rules have little meaning.

But Japanese firms traditionally do not focus on strategy and marketing — words that don't even translate cleanly. The result, despite world-class engineering, is often a blurred value proposition, inconsistent customer perception across regions, and slow responsiveness. The press named it the “Galapagos syndrome.”

In Anglo-Saxon companies, strategy and marketing are recognized core competencies — defined centrally by a small group around the CMO and CEO, advised by global agencies and consultants. The trade-off is the mirror image: limited room for local adaptation, demotivated regional actors buried in reporting and control, and an inability to turn good local ideas into global ones. This is why disruptive newcomers so often grow while large structures deny or stall.

Why the old roads are running out

In a fast-changing, global world, ignoring strategy and global marketing has reached its limits. Manufacturing quality is no longer enough to win — most global companies have copied Japanese production principles, and the edge has thinned. The ability to grow revenue through a clear value proposition, good design for the price, unmet-need fulfillment, and strong branding now matters more than ever. The top-down model struggles just as much: established positions are challenged every day.

The third road in practice

The third road combines the advantages of both systems and removes their flaws. I practiced it as a leader at Nissan and Toyota, and it worked far better than anything else in my career.

At Nissan, as head of product strategy and planning, we built product-planning teams in every region and shaped strategy with them. Each region then led a given product, even when it had a global role — the Qashqai in Europe, the Infiniti G35 in the US. At Toyota, a team of regional marketing executives played the role of the CMO collectively: we defined the brand promise, priorities and tools globally in what we called the Brand Action Meeting (BAM), then assigned each action to a region as leader or co-leader.

In both cases there was a real, focused global strategy — unlike the Japanese model — but it was built starting from the regions, unlike the Anglo-Saxon one. Headquarters facilitated and coordinated rather than decided everything. Heavy control and systematic reporting became unnecessary, even counter-productive. The results spoke for themselves: Nissan launched successful global products; Toyota shifted to a coherent, valuable brand focus.

Vision, opportunities and brand promise are decided collectively. They form a frame — defined together — inside which there is wide room for opportunity, improvement, and disruption. Each action has an entity leader and is developed transparently, so others can follow and adapt in real time. Buy-in is total, because the agenda and the actions are owned by the operations themselves. Reporting is light, and exists for sharing best practice, not for control.

It works better for two reasons. First, the strategy is richer, because it draws on everyone. Second, you get full involvement, because contributing to a strategy — and being free to adapt it — multiplies the strength to succeed. For any company that wants to stay relevant in the 21st century, this is the most natural way to embrace strategy and marketing while respecting its own culture.