There is a particular kind of clarity that only comes from being somewhere. You can study Japan's business culture from a textbook, memorize Hofstede's cultural dimensions and write a perfectly reasoned essay on collectivism versus individualism. But none of it lands the same way as sitting in a Tokyo boardroom and watching a presenter take three minutes to carefully consider a question before answering it.
Understanding the significance of deliberateness turned out to be the most valuable lesson from this year's MBA international study trip, one of the signature experiential learning opportunities built into the Desautels MBA, which took our cohort through Tokyo and Kyoto for a week of company visits, briefings, and cultural immersion. Here is what we saw, and what it means for anyone trying to do business in the modern world.
The operating system beneath everything
Before any of the company visits, our group sat down with David Hackett, Administrative Director of 涩里番's MBA Japan program, for a cultural orientation. His framing stuck with me for the rest of the trip: "Think about everybody else all the time."
That sentence is not a platitude. In Japan, it is the actual operating system of corporate life. The cultural concept of Wa (鍜�), or group harmony, shapes everything from how meetings are structured to how capital gets allocated. Decisions move through consensus. Commitments are made slowly and honoured absolutely. Long-term relationship health consistently outranks short-term gains.
Japanese firms are not slow because they lack urgency. They are slow in specific and strategic ways, because their optimization horizon is generational.
Trust as strategy: Deloitte
The visit to Deloitte, one of the world's largest professional services firms, made the cultural subtext explicit. Our host, Kotaro Watanabe, a Financial Advisory Partner and global leader for industrial products, introduced what he called the Trustworthiness Equation: credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, divided by self-orientation. Raise the numerator. Minimize the denominator.
In a high-context environment where relationships precede transactions, the moment a counterpart senses you are optimizing for your own interests over theirs, the relationship is essentially over. There is no recovery clause.
Kotaro was also careful to add a nuance: healthy competition still matters. Trustworthiness and competitiveness are not opposites, and the most durable firms in Japan have learned to hold both.
The innovator's dilemma, live: Nissan
If Deloitte was a lesson in relationship economics, Nissan, one of Japan's most storied automakers, was a lesson in existential urgency.
Chinese EV manufacturers entered the market without the legacy infrastructure, dealer networks, or institutional inertia of decades of dominance. They moved fast, priced aggressively, and captured market share in ways traditional automakers are still scrambling to respond to. Nissan's answer is a heavy pivot toward AI integration and software-defined mobility, an acknowledgment that the car as a mechanical object is becoming commoditized, and that the real competitive ground is the intelligence embedded in it. This is a classic Innovator's Dilemma scenario: the threat did not come from a competitor doing the same thing better, but from a different direction entirely, using different assets, aimed at a different definition of the product.
Hearing executives speak that candidly about an industry-defining threat is exactly the real-world exposure you hope to get from a trip like this.
Governments as strategists: The Canadian Embassy
Our visit to the Canadian Embassy offered a different kind of MBA lesson, one about how nations consider competitive positioning.
Japan sits at the centre of Canada's Indo-Pacific strategy, and the briefing made clear why. As global supply chains fragment and trade tensions rise, Japan represents something rare: a technologically sophisticated, politically stable, democratic anchor in Asia. The Embassy is simultaneously leveraging deep trade ties in agriculture and natural resources while exploring new collaboration in AI, clean technology and security, a reminder that the challenges shaping corporate strategy are also faced by governments.
Building for scale: DAZN
The briefing at DAZN, a global sports streaming platform, was a masterclass in what "global" means when building a digital platform.
The company operates a 'glocalization' model: centralized global tech infrastructure for cost efficiency, combined with fiercely localized content acquisition. What works in Japan does not work in Brazil, the platform layer can be global, but the content strategy cannot.
The insight that stayed with me was less about technology and more about human capital. Despite the explosion of AI content tools, DAZN made a point of saying that high-quality photography and videography remain critically valuable. The reason is strategic, not sentimental: software platforms can be replicated, but talent capable of capturing the emotional truth of a live sporting moment cannot.
Diamonds and stones: Broadcom
Broadcom, a global semiconductor and infrastructure software company, was the most direct conversation of the trip.
Their portfolio management principle was memorable: keep diamonds, throw away stones. Invest in technologies generating durable returns, and cut funding to anything underperforming or non-core, regardless of sunk costs. They also made a compelling case for open-source innovation over closed R&D silos: networked ecosystems consistently out-innovate closed ones, and the companies that win capture value from their differentiated position within a broader ecosystem.
Their internal cultural mandate, be comfortable being uncomfortable, is easier said than done. But sitting across from the people who live it gave the phrase real weight.
Ecosystem economics: Rakuten
Rakuten, Japan's largest e-commerce and internet services company, showed what a digital ecosystem looks like when it is built with genuine intentionality.
The "one-app ecosystem" model, bundling e-commerce, fintech, telecommunications and media under a single platform creates switching costs that go beyond the monetary. Rebuilding your entire digital infrastructure somewhere else. That is a powerful moat.
The more culturally specific insight was around Nemawashi, the Japanese practice of building consensus through careful pre-alignment before a decision is formally made. In theory it slows things down. In practice, execution is far smoother because resistance has already been surfaced and addressed. The challenge is calibrating how much is enough without it becoming a bottleneck.
110 years of customer focus: Morita
The final visit was to Morita, a Japanese dental equipment manufacturer and company more than 110 years old. A Shinise, meaning a long-standing business that has survived wars, depressions and multiple technological revolutions.
The question that naturally arises with any long-standing business is: what does it take to survive that long? Their answer was not a complicated strategy framework. Treat customers as generational partners rather than transactional targets. Build products of genuine quality. Stay close to the people you serve. What Morita demonstrates is that differentiation does not have to mean being the most innovative firm in the room. Sometimes it means being the most reliable one, for long enough that reliability itself becomes the competitive advantage.
The takeaway
The through-line connecting eight very different organizations across two cities was this: Japan is a market built on a long-time horizon, and almost everything else follows from that. The consensus-building, the intimacy-first business relationships, the century-old companies still in operation, the reluctance to cut corners on quality, all of it reflects a society and an economy that takes the long view seriously.
The real strategic lesson, for business leaders operating anywhere, is not to copy the Japanese model wholesale. It is to understand what ambidexterity requires in practice: honouring the relationship capital and customer focus that sustain you while staying genuinely open to disruption, not just as a talking point but as a lived organizational capability.
Being comfortable being uncomfortable, as Broadcom put it. Keeping diamonds and throwing away stones. Building trust by lowering self-orientation. Surviving for a hundred years by treating customers as partners. While not uniquely Japanese ideas, Japan showed me what it looks like when an entire business culture takes them seriously.
That's the value of a trip like this: an MBA can teach you the frameworks, but it takes an experience like this to see them lived out in real boardrooms, by real people, in real time. It's one thing to read about strategy. It's another to watch it happen in front of you.
By Oreoluwa Alabi (MBA candidate at the Desautels Faculty of Management, 涩里番).
MBA at 涩里番 Desautels
Designed for the mid-career student who aims to move to a higher rung of leadership within an organization or the student who seeks to leverage a 涩里番 MBA to blaze a new career path in a new country.
