Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the Rules for Borderless Business

Hiroshi Mikitani left a banking job to found the company that would be Rakuten - one of the largest e-commerce companies in Japan. This book briefly goes over his biography and then spends most of the time detailing what he believes a modern business needs to do to succeed. Japanese culture is very regimented. People expect to put in long hours and work their way up at a big company. He sought to break with that culture. Part of the break was requiring business to be conducted in English rather than Japanese. He aspired for the egalitarian nature of the English language rather than the hierarchical requirements of Japanese.

Alas, a lot of his business advice came across as somebody "speaking Silicon Valley" with an accent. Many of his examples are also quite dated. He mentioned the purchase of "buy.com" as a way to break into the American market with a familiar brand. Alas, that was later re-branded Rakuten.com and has recently been closed down. Kobo e-readers were seen as a great platform due to social connectivity. Alas, those are also a very distant second to Amazon's kindles. (And these days, people are just as likely to read on their phone or tablet.) 

There were also a feeling of many inherent contradictions with Japanese culture. One example he gave was of people arriving late to an 8am meeting due to elevator congestion. His solution was to have the elevators only stop on a few floors, while encouraging employees to use stairs for the intermediate levels. This seems appropriate with a regimented work environment. However, a more Silicon Valley approach would be to reschedule it to later in the day and let people trickle in when they want to. He also managed to save time in meetings by sending out details in advance. That seems like fairly standard "good meeting practice". But perhaps it is more of a challenge in Japan.

This book may be quite useful for the Japanese entrepreneur trying to break through the cultural challenges. For those outside of Japan, there are some interesting tidbits. He talks of the concept of making very small improvements continually. He also emphasizes that customer focus extends to vendors and other "customers" of the company. However, other concepts are repeated so often they are now trite. Agility, fast failure and social media all seem like last years concepts. It feels there is a mixture of age and culture that combine to make this book not very relevant to today's world.