Sanpo-yoshi Communication

President's Column] Seeds of Opportunity

This year has been a difficult one due to high resource prices resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The exchange rate, which at one point exceeded 150 yen to the dollar, has calmed somewhat to around 140 yen (as of November 15). Nevertheless, everything still remains expensive. It is difficult to predict what will happen next year and beyond.

Despite the chaos that followed the Corona disaster, some of our clients have performed well. The reasons for their strong performance vary from company to company, but those companies that focused on overseas markets (especially exports) seem to have done relatively well even in the wake of the Corona disaster. This may be due to the deep-rooted popularity of Japanese food overseas, but as an outsider, I do not know the details. However, I do have one regret.

In fact, before Corona, a proposal was made by a younger person in the company that we should work on a cross-border EC support business. We should have tackled it right away, but we did not know where to start, so we had been the subject of research. Finally, we recently met with a consultant who is knowledgeable about cross-border EC, and we just started preparations a few months ago. I regret that if we had started a little earlier, we might have been able to help our clients in this time of Corona disaster and the strong yen.

Professor Kranboltz, a psychologist at Stanford University, proposed the "Theory of Planned Contingency" after concluding from a survey of the careers of successful business people that 80% of their turning points were due to chance events that they did not anticipate. In these unpredictable and chaotic times, companies and individuals are not necessarily in control of their own situations. If we stick to our sense of purpose of what we want to do, we may miss unexpected opportunities that come before us," Professor Kranbolz pointed out.

It seems that the theory of planned contingency, in which one does not set a clear goal but focuses on the events in front of one's eyes and considers one's career, is attracting attention. I have come to believe that it is sometimes necessary to operate a business from such a perspective, where one has curiosity and interest in all things and tries various challenges without being overly focused on one's own goals.