Breaking Down Barriers: Why Corporate Japan Needs More Foreign CEOs

During a Tuesday talk with a group of HR managers here, Jean-Francois Manzoni, president of the International Institute for Management Development, was asked how many foreign CEOs lead significant Japanese firms.

"We were only able to locate two," Manzoni said. He was talking about Christophe Weber at Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Jean-Marc Gilson at Mitsubishi Chemical Group.

In an interview, the head of the Swiss business school stated, "It's unlikely that the ideal number of non-Japanese CEOs is two." He was in Tokyo for the Global Management Dialogue, an annual Nikkei gathering. Co-organizing the event was IMD.

"If you look at Switzerland, a significant proportion of CEOs are non-Swiss," he stated. Indians are in the leadership of several US IT companies. He said, "Just look at the panelists at this forum; many are CEOs who were born abroad." Two such examples are Ilham Kadri, the CEO of the Moroccan chemical company Solvay, and Jakob Stausholm, the Danish CEO of the Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto.