On February 18th, Santiago Iñiguez, Executive President of IE University visited Tokyo to meet up with senior executives and IE alumni in Japan. Together, we celebrated publish of a new book, “Business despite Boarders” co-edited by Santiago and Professor Kazuo Ichijo from Hitotsubashi Business School ICS, a Japanese business school that was ranked as #1 business school in Japan by QS Global MBA ranking 2019.
The first session was a roundtable with a group of Japanese senior executives where Santiago and Professor Ichijo exchanged their opinions about developing future executives to do international business better in the anti-globalization mood. Professor Ichijo mentioned “When I first heard about IE Business School from Santiago, I was fascinated by the concept of this school. IE is totally different than the other top notch business schools, in the sense that IE is the institution of entrepreneurs, by the entrepreneurs, for the entrepreneurs. And its educational methodology is centered around the state-of-the-art blended methodology.”
Towards the anti-globalization mood, Santiago suggested “it is very important for corporations to further invest on talent development and clearly indicate that to the market in order to attract talents, because the recruitment market has been getting highly competitive under the anti-globalization circumstances and companies have been forced to invest heavily on the recruitment side.”
The session was followed by open discussion with the senior executives and a lot of interesting perspectives were exchanged among the participants.
The second session was held for IE community members (alumni, faculty and students based in Japan), in the cocktail format. Nearly 40 members attended this session and had a great time with Santiago, Professor Ichijo, journalists, and peer colleagues in the IE community.
Anti-globalization is a challenge for any corporations, but through the session, professors suggested that the businesses can be functioning as the hope to bridge the boundaries. Also, importance of humanities and emotional intelligence in the digital era was discussed. Traditionally, Japanese business people tend to be good at maintaining harmonies and reading atmosphere. Being good at reading atmosphere is now a great opportunity for business leaders, and it is a key that those leaders further develop emotional intelligence through diverse learning environment and unleash it to face an exponential level of business globalization.
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