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Tokyo, Japan
Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for over 40 years, and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the most recent 17 years, Ron had established distributors in the United States and throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer. More recently, he's begun giving seminars in English and Japanese to people interested in his overseas travels and expanding business overseas. You can find him on LinkedIn.
Authored Comments
Philip - Thank you for your explanation. I fully agree with you and have a better understanding of your meaning of "leaderless". Your point about the leader bing for AI or even the organizations governance is very interesting, particularly in an international environment which I work in.
This was a great article. I'm partly in that world now, as I'm selling from three plants in different countries (Japan, China, Vietnam) and supplying to around 10-15 countries worldwide. The management system I'm in is Japanese, but it must go through those changes you mentioned.
One part of your article struck me. "...authority is not vested in positions and human capital is dispersed geographically. Organizations will begin to abandon traditional leader-as-pedagogue models for a leaderless, self-led, and empowered autonomous workforce". I fully agree that positions/human capital will be more dispersed, but I'm wondering if they will be "leaderless". I have a feeling there will be leaders, but they will be more on a project basis, and that person well be selected by the members of the project group to represent them. In any case, someone has to coordinate all these worldwide activities and each project group must be represented.