Japan Leadership Experience: Why Leaders Go to Japan with Katie Anderson

Brad & Patrick: [00:00:00] For me, it’s like going to my Gemba. Like, that’s, that’s the Gemba for me, and why have I never been there? Like, I need to be there. I need to see where everything originated. I need to see the culture. I want to talk to the people. I want to have a deeper understanding when, when I’m talking about, you know, these different concepts with team members here in the US, I want to be able to really understand, uh, how that concept originated, where that principle came from, and the importance behind it.

Josef Procházka: When I look back 10 years before Japan, you know, I rarely had impact on my customers, processes, business, whatever. Just, you know, I was happy with the invoice I was sending, you know. That, that was it. And then, having this context of the Japanese leaders and Japanese companies, it shifted my approach, shifted my optics towards my work.

Katie: Welcome to Chain of Learning, where the links of leadership and learning unite. I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast, Katie Anderson. One of the questions I’m often asked is, “What is your Japan [00:01:00] leadership experience all about?” In this special episode, in a different format than usual, I’m bringing you the voices of some of the global leaders who have joined me in Japan, and who have all been guests here on Chain of Learning, to share the reflections on the experience and the impact it’s had on them, their teams, and organizations.

And as of November 2026, I’ve hosted 10 cohorts with over 160 global leaders from over 20 countries across six continents, in industries as diverse as healthcare, manufacturing, biotech, government, energy, mining, and technology. Their roles range from senior executives to managers, internal change leaders, and external consultants.

Some come as individuals, others come as an intact leadership team, or consultants bringing their clients to go see and accelerate their impact together. All are on a mission to learn about the essence of what makes companies like Toyota so impactful. So, what is the [00:02:00] Japan leadership experience actually like?

And what are some of the key learnings that have transformed how participants think? Rather than hearing it from me, I’ll let the leaders who’ve experienced it firsthand share some of the insights they’ve brought home.

Jill: The very first hour we spent at the Toyota Museum was defining quality as love. And then at the Toyota supplier that we visited the next day, they said, “Quality is trust.”

We don’t talk like that in North America, so I, you know, you absorb that and you think about it, and you realize that the relationships and the experience people have with, with one another is so important there, that quality isn’t the product. Quality is the impact you’re making on the person using the product.

You mull over that for a week, and it’s, it’s very profound.

Josef: I remember how they talked. He didn’t talk about KPIs. He didn’t talk about basically anything else than [00:03:00] people and creating energy, and this is something that, you know, was absolutely new to me. People are the center. You know, we work with people.

People are, are the treasure of the company. They are not the cost. I’m like, I’m, I’m missing something here. You know, I’m missing the big picture because through- throughout my career, my 10 year of career of consultant, I never touched that topic.

Katie: During the immersive week in Japan with me, you get to see that a culture of improvement and operational excellence is not just about how people work or how to improve processes.

It’s about a leadership philosophy and how they really live a company ethos like, “Happiness is our purpose.” How they embody the concept of respect for people and developing people as the foundation for an organization that delivers results for their customers. Going to see can drop your understanding from the head, that intellectual knowing, to the heart.

A healthcare chief executive officer who came with his entire leadership team [00:04:00] is the one who shared that phrase, that it dropped from the head to the heart, and also that their time in Japan learning together and reflecting on their own leadership was the catalyst for their executive team’s entire approach to lean in organizational transformation.

He called it the highlight of his life, and that it brought everything down to earth and made it real. Here are some more takeaways from past participants.

Isaac, Patrick, Brad: And he said, “Happiness is our purpose, and let’s create a good company.” And they talked about it at the beginning of the day, and we went through the training session.

We did, you know, the site tour, the Gemba visit. We had a wonderful lunch. And it was at the very last part of the day, we were at a, a board, um, on, uh, in their factory, and they were showing off their Kaizen, uh, and their improvements. At the end of the day, he asked the plant manager what the vision and purpose is, and he responded verbatim, “Happiness is our purpose.

Let’s create a good [00:05:00] company.” I just loved how that was translated throughout the entire organization there at Ina Foods.

I remember talking to one gentleman who was working on a, a press at one of the plants that we visited. Um, and it wasn’t full, uh, it wasn’t heavy manufacturing either. We also visited, uh, a healthcare, uh, industry.

We visited the school. We also went to the bullet train, and that was super amazing. So it wasn’t just manufacturing, but I just remember this one individual that was running one of the presses, and, um, I asked him, because he was running the press, and so I asked him, you know, “Who does your, your changeovers?”

Or, “Who, who takes care of your equipment for you?” And he was like, looked at me weird and was like, “I take care of it.” And I was like, “Really? So you do all the changeovers, you do all the maintenance, you do everything on this piece of equipment?” And he’s like, he just didn’t, it was, it’s almost like he didn’t, it didn’t make sense to him why I would be asking this question.

And, and then the, the, the team leader said they feel like these machines are their babies. That’s the way he explained it. Like, “This is my baby. I take care of this like [00:06:00] it’s my baby, so it runs smooth. It’s t- well taken care of.” Just the, the, the level of, uh, just respect that he had for his equipment and, um, it, and that paid off, right?

I mean, their equipment runs like a champ, so.

Was struck by, uh, Mr. Eguchi from Panasonic on our trip and how he talked about the, the law of half, uh, one over two, half, and the idea of 1,000% conviction of the leader. The notion really quickly is that a leader can have, uh, 100% conviction, and then when that translates down to the next level, it turns into 50% conviction, and so on, all the way down to the organization.

And it’s hard to really create that alignment and organizational conviction unless the senior leader starts with 1,000% conviction. So anyway, it’s a, it was a, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1,000% conviction and, and maybe how that needs to be reflected from the senior leader in [00:07:00] 1,000 ways.

Katie: This concept of conviction and the seriousness that leaders need to have on their vision and how they show up has made an impact on so many others.

And while the site visits and talking with Japanese leaders are powerful, some of the greatest insights come from the learning that happens in the space between, together. The daily facilitated reflections, conversations on the bus, sharing meals together, and of course, a highlight is the bonus exclusive opportunity to spend the whole week with Mr.

Yoshino, sharing meals, chatting on the bus, and in those reflections

Elisabeth & Pennie: Really nice memory of Mr. Yoshino that Tracy and I got to spend a good chunk of a week on a bus back in 2019. He’s just a, a rare human, and what an incredible presence. That was, that was a joy.

You know, we spend a lot of time with these leaders.

They are pretty much hand-selected. Where are they at in their lean [00:08:00] journey? What have they been doing? How have they been applying the work? And we want them to go to the next level of leadership in this work. I’ve heard so many different things, like leadership should only be trained by leadership people, and this should…

CPI should only be trained by CPI people, and equity, and da, da, da, da. The reality is, for things to be successful, CPI and leadership need to go hand-in-hand, right? EDI and leadership need to go hand-in-hand. And I think that this is so key, the i- the immersion that happens, what is seen in the organizations, the hands-on learning that they get, also the learning from the other organizations that are with you as well, the networking and collaboration, has taken some of our teams to the next level

Katie: And while of course, I endeavor for you to have a great experience, and actually not just a great experience, the greatest experience, the trip of a lifetime, it’s what you do with it when you return home that’s the real return on investment.

It’s how you take the Chain of Learning into the [00:09:00] chain of impact

Patrick & Shawn: The, the, the payoff, the ROI is, is massive. It has been in my company and, and for the, the companies that I work with, because I’ve brought a lot of that to them and, you know, been able to really show them, uh, where some of the principles came from, the tools, the background, and some of that, and it’s been just a, a game changer for me, so.

Ultimately, it felt like a, a trip of a lifetime from a lean practitioner standpoint, right? It’s like going to the source, really going to the Gemba, right? Go and see for yourself where lean started. Uh, and I really liked the, the sort of following the Toyota value chain, as well as seeing some other companies and like, what’s the secret to, to this lean thing?

How do they make it seem so easy? And I’d say one of my big takeaways, right, is we talked about coaching takes time to grow and build that whole conversation with someone. And the same thing from a lean standpoint is it, [00:10:00] it takes effort and time, and it’s not like Toyota just, you know, overnight became a lean company.

They’ve been doing that for forty, fifty, a hundred years. And so kind of the takeaway for me from the trip and, and something that you helped us explore is what artifacts of the lean culture are because of the Japanese culture. And then therefore, kind of my takeaway was, okay, how do we leverage the, the key principles in our culture, not try and become Japanese, but what are the things that, say, in the culture of Genentech or the culture of Accuvel or more broadly, are those cultural elements, and then align lean to that.

Um, because a lot of the things that we saw in Japanese culture have direct connections to how lean is practiced. But, you know, when we read the literature and we look at all the books, we [00:11:00] don’t see that at all. No one starts off with like, “This is the Japanese culture, so this is why they do these things in, in the lean framework.”

Katie: After seeing and hearing how these Japanese leaders really put people first, not just talking about it, but actually doing it, living it, being it, a senior leader who joined me in Japan, who came from a mining company in Brazil, rethought his whole company’s approach to the concept of respect for people.

They changed how their leaders talked about metrics across the company, from the front line to the executive team, and instead put people metrics before quality, cost, and delivery. And in three months, their people engagement scores went from about sixty-three percent to over eighty-five. And a manufacturing leader based in Europe, who came on the Japan Leadership Experience with his site leader and an external consultant, came back focused on how he would ask more questions and create more space for reflection.

Told me that within months they saw [00:12:00] operational numbers they’d never seen before because he saw that people were finally feeling safe to try. And he reflected it took them seeing this in action in Japan to really understand, not just from the head, but in their hearts, about how to show up personally to create this culture.

I intentionally design and facilitate the program to take you on a learning journey.

Brad & Patrick: Yeah, it’s part of the journey, and it’s, it’s not just the, the five or six days of going and doing stuff in Japan. It’s the preparation and the forcing function of, “Okay, I’m, I’m gonna read these books to prepare. I’m gonna do some thinking.

I’m gonna prepare questions for these different sites and these different leaders.” That’s a really important part. So it, just the curation of the whole experience that is really, again, you’re sort of the lighting the fuse of learning and, and reflecting that that fuse will go on for a long time. But it’s, it’s a never-ending journey, and so the, but it’s, it’s sort of [00:13:00] a supercharged part of it.

I can’t say enough about the forced time to, to think about this stuff and reflect and, and really focus on learning instead of just the busyness of the day. We’re all victims of the urgent rather than what’s important, uh, so how do we, how do we flip that?

I did pull out my, my study book, uh, that I was given, uh, my workbook during the, the study trip, and, um, I actually refer back to this frequently because there was so much that came out of the trip.

I mean, just so many amazing lessons learned. I’m, I’ve considered myself a, a lifelong learner, and this trip was so impactful for me because, uh, obviously I, I coach and train people on the Toyota Production System and, and on Lean and, but me personally, I had never been to Japan. So I was thinking, like, it’s, for me, it’s like going to my Gemba.

Like, that’s, that’s the Gemba for me, and why have I never been there? Like, I need to be there[00:14:00]

Katie: How often do you have time to step away from your daily and weekly responsibilities to focus on learning? There’s power in stepping outside the familiar, immersing yourself fully in a new experience with like-minded yet diverse leaders, putting yourself in the beginner’s mindset to gain new perspective and insights about the leader you want to be and the impact you want to create.

Nick Kemp: I think leaders need this because leaders tend to be extremely proactive, that they have something always going on their mind. They’re, they’re ambitious. You know, if someone says, “I need a break, I’m stressed, I’m sick,” you’re gonna have a, “But, oh, okay,” to their employees. But rarely-

Mm …

Nick Kemp: as a leader do you take time off.

You kinda have this tendency to push through. Yeah. So I think you providing this opportunity to say for a week you’re going to put aside all these roles, you’ll have a new [00:15:00] role essentially as a student participant, and then see what you’ve, um, studied or see a different- Mm … way of doing things to what you’re doing in your home country.

Yeah, it must be, uh, well, we know the impact it has. Mm. Uh, it’s sort of life-changing. It’s transformational. I think it’s essential is what I’d say. Yeah.

Tracy: And that’s just so not how that works. It was just a very different cultural change that I remember vividly, and I had so many good experiences. I honestly could say that that was one of the highlights of my career, Katie, is going on that trip with you.

I mean, I’ve been doing this 25 years, and that was just incredible. I, I, if I could go every year, I would go.

Katie: It’s life-changing, transformative. It’s about understanding the essence, holding precious what it means to be human

I mean, I was exposed to these wonderful companies in Japan that talked about [00:16:00] joy and talked about love and talked about work and harmony with life.

You know, that just really touched me. And I thought that, you know, we, we’ve got to get better. So I think the change has been that I am doing everything with love. And I want to create an environment that, where people feel safe, where they experience abundance, and all of those things. And it starts at the top.

It starts with the leadership team, and I am blessed with a leadership team that understands that we, we’re gonna model good behavior, but we also have to create an environment that allows everyone to be their best. And that is challenging sometimes, but it’s also worth it. Once you do that, the results start to come.

Jill & Shawn: And now, you know, after spending a week there, that’s how I think about it. And it took a while for that to resonate. But once you go through the tour and you see, you see it applied and [00:17:00] people thinking like that and, and planning with that in mind and designing their processes and designing their lives to have a positive impact on other people, it really just sort of sinks in and, and becomes how you think about things.

So it’s really, like, wouldn’t it be wonderful to just surround people with that feeling of safety and caring and support? And, like, that’s 5S to me. It’s so profound, and when you see that at work in Japan, when, you know, the trains run perfectly and the… And everyone knows where to stand, and there’s no, like, sort of…

They don’t… They care so much about their daily experience that they don’t have chaos, and they don’t have, like, they care enough to say, “Well, if you stand here and I stand here, we won’t bump into each other, and won’t that be great?” You know? Uh, so all these micro-experiences through the day that are just so organized, but so kind.

You get to [00:18:00] realize it’s rooted in kindness, and it’s rooted in caring for one another, and it’s like, that’s what I got out of Japan, is like, that’s why we’re doing this, and I’m just so much more able to describe it. And good workplace produces good products, right? And the idea that your products will change, but your workplace and the people you’re building and the systems you’re building and the culture you’re cultivating, that will nurture you and sustain your company for decades.

I love the long-term thinking we saw. Like, and again, the p- the power of thinking beyond, you know, the next five years, the next three years, the next one year, and thinking about the role you’re having, the fact that you as an individual will not always be here, but you want your company to be helping other people in the long term.

So what… It shifts, again, it shifts your thinking and shifts what you spend your time on.

It really is about the people. I mean, even Toyota, what’s, what’s the [00:19:00] quote, right? “We make great people.” ”

Katie: We make people so that we can make cars.”

There you go. And so, you know, and that’s like plastered all over the place, and that was kind of an aha as well, that, yeah, we happen to make, you know, cancer-saving drugs, but what we’re doing is developing people, especially as leaders, and the, the manufacturing of the medicine is not secondary, but is the outcome of that great activity.

Katie: All the voices you’ve heard today have been guests here on Chain of Learning. Thank you to each and every one of them, and to everyone who’s joined me in Japan, many of whom invested their own money to make the experience happen. And to the companies and leadership teams who know that the investment in their leaders and team members will create even greater impact after they return.

This is really a global Chain of Learning that we’ve built, and are building, united in an experience in Japan together. Chain of Learning is not just a phrase. It’s the [00:20:00] meaning and impact that comes out of our connection together. If you’re curious about investing in your own leadership growth, I invite you to join me on the next leadership experience, either as an individual or as a team from your organization or with your clients.

I’d love to host you on the learning experience of a lifetime. Carpe diem. Learn more and apply today at kbjanderson.com/japantrip. And I’ve put the links to all of these guests’ full episodes in the show notes, plus a link to more testimonials on my YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in to this bonus episode of Chain of Learning.

And as always, thank you for being a link in my Chain of Learning. I’ll see you next time. Have a great day.