| Unless things change, Japan is finished, and what we need to deliver change is a revolution in the way workers are trained. I founded Business Breakthrough (BBT) as a foundation for shared knowledge, a platform based on everything I believe in after my many years in business. BBT's mission is nothing less than the development of business leaders who are able to contribute to the international community. |
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How We Started
At the age of fifty-one, I quit the consulting firm I had been with for twenty-three years. I found myself in my mid-forties not really sure what more I wanted out of life, but with a growing conviction that making a real contribution to society was important to me. I thought that if everything I had learned over the years about management and problem solving could somehow find application at the international level, or in the community, in corporations and even in schools, many more people could benefit from this knowledge. Thus, shortly after leaving my job, I started focusing on reform issues from the standpoint of people in Japan; the culmination of those early efforts is this new, education-based business. |
Why Education?
In order to compete on an equal footing in the world of business today, it is essential that one have a strong understanding of world-class management structure, thinking, and analytical tools. Unfortunately in Japan today, it is clear that a total rethinking of management training and development practices, from the new hire to the president, is needed to help companies adapt to a new way of doing business.
I was at the top of a major international consulting firm for many years. I have seen first hand the changes wrought in American business from the time before Bill Gates introduced Windows to the world in 1985 (let's call it “B.G.” for “Before Gates”), to the “A.G.” (“After Gates”) years after this major paradigm shift. I have also worked with business leaders and politicians the world over, and this experience has given me a strong understanding of what is needed to succeed in the coming age. Again, Business Breakthrough (BBT) was founded in the hope that this experience, in the form of a shareable knowledge platform, can be of some use to the Japanese business community. |
Building Problem-Solving Skills, Not Rote Knowledge
Even today, teaching based on rote acquisition of facts and figures is pervasive in Japan's schools. Education still focuses not on discovering an answer for oneself, but on memorizing a set of prepared answers, or perhaps on arriving at a prepared answer faster than someone else. Once employed, young workers are trained on-the-job by senior employees. In the fast-changing environment of business today, however, rote memorization just isn't enough, and when it comes time for those senior employees to change the way they think, or the way they do things, this on-the-job style of passing along knowledge can actually stop innovation in its tracks.
This is why, at BBT, we have created a learning framework that focuses on an understanding of today's economic order, approaches to issues facing individuals and corporations, and methods for resolving those issues. We also place an emphasis on providing methods to help students improve their problem-solving skills versus concrete, real world situations.
Today, real business opportunities lie in the destruction of old ways of doing things. The truly successful business leaders of the past twenty years have all been mold-breaking mavericks. The real success stories have also been very person-specific: the successes of Amazon, or Google, or Dell Computer, have all begun with the unconventional business models created by their founders. Another recent trend in business is that old, established companies find themselves at as high a risk for sudden collapse as anyone else. This needs to be felt and understood not just as an issue of corporate social responsibility, or of corporate governance, but a risk that pervades our IT society as a whole.
It's understandable, then, that people who have nothing but the old models and structures to work with find themselves at a loss in the face of this new reality. What they need is an opportunity to improve their basic problem-solving, conceptualization, and logical thinking skills, and the chance to be exposed to real-world management case studies interpreted by real-world experts. |
Toward a New Vision of Two-Way Distance Learning
BBT develops and operates business management training programs built on Internet- and satellite-based distance learning |
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