It's Not the How or the What but the Who

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Growth from Complexity

When my first book, Great People Decisions, was published in Japan, I worked with my colleague Ken Aramaki from Egon Zehnder’s Tokyo office on some country-level analysis. We mapped the potential of senior Japanese executives (that is, objective assessments from our search consultants about their ability to take on bigger roles and responsibilities, as measured by the indicators I listed in chapter 18) against their competence (that is, objective assessments on the eight leadership competencies I outlined in chapter 22), and then compared those scores to the average achieved by all executives in our worldwide database.

What we found was an incredible paradox. Japanese professionals had higher potential than the global ...