On November 11, 2018, “Future is Here: Global Leaders on the Changing World” lecture series, welcomed Masahiko Uotani, President and CEO of the Shiseido Group. In his lecture “146 Years of Shiseido: Continuous Growth, Change, Globalization and Future Development”, Masahiko Uotani reviewed Shiseido’s resurgence journey and shared his success story of corporate development.
With more than 30 years of experience in marketing and management both in Japan and abroad, Masahiko Uotani joined Shiseido in April 2014, the first president hired externally in the company’s 146-year history. Prior to joining Shiseido, he served as President and CEO of Coca-Cola Japan, and Kraft Japan, Citibank and Lion Group successively.
In his lecture, Masahiko Uotani compared Shiseido to “a sleeping beauty” and defined his mission as “to wake up the sleeping beauty”, which is to rejuvenate Shiseido and further enhance its global impact. Uotani discussed the company’s development from aspects of new strategies, corporate culture reform, leadership principles, and business policies.
The name "Shiseido", meaning to be born and flourish, was from I-Ching “all things are born and flourish from Kun and Yuan”. Masahiko Uotani emphasized that Shiseido's entrepreneurial spirit is "to create universal products". After talking with 65,000 front-line staff of the company, Masahiko Uotani learned that the main problem for Shiseido was that too much attention was paid on product, development, culture and organization internally. Therefore, he raised the concept of “customer first”, which is embodied in product branding through implementing a “high-end brand priority” strategy, increasing marketing investment to enhance brand influence. At the meantime, he took into consideration the company's medium and long-term development. He expanded investment in innovation, raised awareness of cultural diversity, and deveoped more personalized services by taking advantage of the rapidly developing information technology. He also contributed to company’s organizational reforms, proposing a matrix framework of "local action with international vision” to make management flat and flexible.
Masahiko Uotani also emphasized that his principle of leadership is people-oriented, and that talent is the source of innovation. Therefore, in addition to weighing the interests of shareholders, the company’s management policy should do more to balance the interests of employees, shareholders and society (including consumers and partners), thus maintaining the innovative ability of the talents.
In his dialogue with Min Zhu, Masahiko Uotani took his own “conductor-type” leadership style as an example, emphasizing that communication is one of the most important abilities of managers and that managers should identify problems through Q&A with their employees. He also reviewed the impact of the rapid development of e-commerce on Shiseido in recent years, and looked forward to Shiseido's vision for the future, which is committed to "creating a better world."
In the Q&A session, Masahiko Uotani shared and exchanged opinion with the audience on the following topics: Shiseido's upcoming global M&A strategy, ways to ensure the manager's leadership among staff, external conditions of Shiseido's success, stress management as a leader, and the transparency of Shiseido’s management.
At the end, Dr. Min Zhu summarized the core view of this lecture-“the principle of leadership is people-oriented”. First, the company's healthy development is based on an appropriate governance structure, and relationships among employees, shareholders, consumers and partners must be coordinated. Second, we must closely follow the needs of our customers and the pace of the times. Lastly, the core focus of leadership is people.
“The Future is Here: Global Leaders on the Changing World” Lecture Series is organized by Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance (PBCSF) and National Institute of Financial Research (NIFR), inviting world-renowned leaders and academics to share their views on the frontier trend of world development.
