Kenichi Ohmae biography and books

Article by: Vincent van Vliet

Last update: July 8, 2023

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) is a business- and corporate strategist in heart and soul. Kenichi Ohmae has also developed the strategic triangle model and he is known worldwide as “Mister Strategy”.

Kenichi Ohmae biography

Education

Kenichi Ohmae holds a Bachelor’s degree from Waseda University. He obtained a Master’s degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and his doctorate in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

Career

After obtaining his doctorate, he worked as senior design engineer for Hitachi. He worked there for a number of years and then joined McKinsey& Company consulting firm.

As a senior partner, Kenichi Ohmae established and developed a branch of the company’s operations in Japan. In his role as an advisor he became more and more interested in strategic management and he started to specialise in this area of expertise.

He has a wide range of skills and he provided services to companies across various sectors including industrial and consumer electronics, finance, telecommunications, food and chemicals. Kenichi Ohmae worked for McKinsey for 23 years.

In 1995, he ran for Governor of Tokyo but lost to Yukio Aoshima. He then focused on nuclear technology and in 2012 he became a board member of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Famous quotes

“Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.”
“It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.”
“In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the condition most favourable to one’s own side.”
“If patriotism is, as Dr. Johnson used to remark, the last refuge of the scoundrel, wrapping outdated industry in the mantle of national interest is the last refuge of the economically dispossessed. In economic terms, pleading national interest is the declining cottage industry of those who have been bypassed by the global economy.”

Books, publications and articles by Kenichi Ohmae et al.

2010. Toyota: Computer Chips vs. The Human Factor. Journal: New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 70-72.
2008. The Virtual Continent. Journal: New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 4-14.
2008. Fixing Japan May Break America. Journal: New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 39-41.
2006. The Impact of Rising Lower-Middle Class Population in Japan. Tokyo: Kodan-sha Publishing Company.
2005. The next global stage. Wharton School Publishing.
2004. Tomorrow’s World. Journal: Business Strategy Review – Bus Strat Rev, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 11-17.
2002. Triad power. Simon and Schuster.
2002. The china impact. Taipei, Common Wealth Magazine.
2000. The Invisible Continent: Global Strategy in the New Economy. Harper Information.
2000. The Godzill Companies of the New Economy. First Quarter. https://www. strategy-business. com/ex_libris/00112/page1. html. Consultado febrero, 10, 2000.
1999. Borderless World, Rev Ed: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. Harper Business.
1998. Strategy in a world without borders. Journal: Leader To Leader, vol. 1998, no. 7, pp. 17-23.
1995. The End of the Nation State. Free Press.
1995. Putting global logic first. Harvard Business Review, 73(1), 119-124.
1995. The evolving global economy: Making sense of the new world order. Harvard Business School Press.
1994. The borderless world: power and strategy in the global marketplace. Harper Collins.
1992. Rise of the Region State. The. Foreign Aff., 72, 78.
1991, 1982. The mind of the strategist: The art of Japanese business. McGraw-Hill Professional.
1990. The borderless world. New York.
1990. Sowing the seeds for globalization from a Japanese perspective. Journal: The International Executive, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 32-37.
1990. Beyond friction to fact: The borderless economy. New Perspectives Quarterly, 7(2), 20-21.
1989. The Global Logic of Strategic Alliances. Harvard business review.
1989. Managing in a borderless world. Harvard Business Review, 67(3), 152-161.
1988. Beyond national borders. Kodansha international.
1987. The traid world view. Journal: Journal of Business Strategy , vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 8-19.
1986. Becoming a traid power: the new corporation. Journal: International Marketing Review – INT MARK REV , vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 7-20.
1985. Managing innovation and new products in key Japanese industries. Research Management, 28(4), 11-18.
1985. Shooting stars in the land of the rising sun. Journal: Strategy & Leadership, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 32-38.
1982. The strategic triangle: A new perspective on business unit strategy. Journal: European Management Journal – EUR MANAG J , vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 38-48.

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Original publication date: 02/13/2009 | Last update: 07/08/2023

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Article by:

Vincent van Vliet

Vincent van Vliet is co-founder and responsible for the content and release management. Together with the team Vincent sets the strategy and manages the content planning, go-to-market, customer experience and corporate development aspects of the company.