Kenichi Ohmae: Business and corporate strategist who developed the 3C's Model.

Kenichi Ohmae made his mark twenty years ago with his book on corporate strategy. It is still a collection of good sense and clear advice, even though some of the examples may now seem a bit dated.

Successful business strategies, he says in "The Mind of the Strategist", do not come from rigorous analysis but from a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational.

Having written what many people regarded as the bible of corporate strategy, Kenichi Ohmae moved on to the changing shape of the world of business.

His thinking on these issues has been nicely brought together in his latest book, which he has called 'The Invisible Continent'. The Invisible Continent is the world in which businesses now operate, which is like a new, just discovered continent.

In the Invisible Continent there are four Dimensions:

1) the Visible Dimension - physical things to buy and make

2) the Borderless World - inevitable globalization

3) the Cyber Dimension - the Internet, mobile phones

4) the Dimension of High Multiples - exaggerated values put on some stocks by the stock market

But Ohmae has bigger concerns on his mind than business. He worries about the governance of the new continent, about a new sort of Cold War, fought by businesses rather than governments, and about the education of our citizens for this new world.

Biography:

Kenichi Ohmae is a business consultant, social reformer, author and journalist, adviser to governments and business entrepreneur, he has a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - and is a motor cycling enthusiast. For a period of twenty-three years, Dr. Ohmae was a partner in McKinsey & Company, Inc., the international management consulting firm.

Kenichi Ohmae is Japanese and lives in Tokyo but he is instinctively global.

He has written over one hundred books, many of them on Japanese public policy issues. Only half a dozen or so have made their mark in the West but these have been hugely influential, not least in explaining Japan to the rest of the world.

He now resides in Tokyo with his wife, Jeannette, and two sons, who share his spare-time interest in music, sailing, marshal arts, motorcycles, and scuba diving.

Bibliography:

• 1982, The Mind Of The Strategist: The Art of Japanese Business
• 1990, The Borderless World, rev ed: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
• 1995, The Evolving Global Economy: Making Sense of the New World Order (Harvard Business Review Book)
• 1995, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies

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