Kenichi Ohmae

Kenichi Ohmae is one of the world’s leading business and corporate strategists. He is known as Mr Strategy and has developed the 3C’s Model. For a period of twenty-three years, Ohmae was a senior partner in McKinsey & Company, Inc., the international management consulting firm. As a co-founder of its strategic management practice, he has served companies in a wide spectrum of industries, including industrial and consumer electronics, financial institutions, telecom, office equipment, photographic equipment, industrial machinery, food, rubber, and chemicals.

Ohmae – voted by The Economist as “one of the worldï’s top five management gurus” – changed the landscape of management strategy in The Mind of the Strategist. In this compelling account of global business domination, Ohmae revealed the vital thinking processes and planning techniques of prominent companies, showing why they work, and how any company can benefit from them. Filled with case studies of strategic thinking in action, Ohmae’s classic work inspired today’s managers to excel to new heights of bold, imaginative thinking and solutions. Ohmae believes that successful business strategies do not result from rigorous analysis but from a particular state of mind. “In what I call the mind of the strategist, insight and consequent drive for achievement, often amounting to a sense of mission, fuel a thought process which is basically creative and intuitive rather than rational,” he says. He uses theoretical knowledge from the various academic scholars and puts them in its place – “a place distinctly secondary to creative intuition in the tool kit of the successful strategist.”

The 3C’s Model is a strategical look at the factors needed for success. The 3C’s model points out that a strategist should focus on three key factors for success. In the construction of a business strategy, three main players must be taken into account: The Corporation, The Customer, The Competitors. Only by integrating these three C’s (Corporation, Customer, Competitors) in a strategic triangle, a sustained competitive advantage can exist. Ohmae refers to these key factors as the three C’s or strategic triangle.

In one chapter of The Mind of the Strategist, there’s a list of things to avoid, things to concentrate on. Tunnel vision is one of those things to avoid: don’t get too fixated on the road you are on; there may be better alternative routes. Then there is the peril of perfectionism: sometimes it’s better to do something that’s almost right rather than wait for the perfect solution and miss the strategic opportunity. All businesses are simple once you get to know them. Banking, for instance, looks horribly complicated to the outsider, but, boiled down to its core, it is nothing more than getting in money cheap and lending it out at as expensively as you can. Strategy, he insists, is a question of attitude more than numbers.