I was pleasantly surprised with how flexible and flat the organizational structure at GLOBIS is.

After graduating from an undergraduate program in Japan, I worked as a business development manager for a textile company located in Kansai and then as a Senior Consultant at a recruitment firm located in Tokyo. I decided to do a full-time MBA at Keio University, at which time I did an internship at the pharmaceutical company Abbott, and after graduating I joined GLOBIS as an employee. Except for the internship, my entire career has been doing sales or sales strategy, so joining GLOBIS doing content development was quite a drastic change in my career.

Although I knew about GLOBIS from my time at Keio, I gained familiarity with the CEO Yoshito Hori through a podcast where he was a guest speaker. The topic of the podcast was disruptive innovation in Japan and Hori discussed how he was able to disrupt the traditional and rigid industry of education within Japan. He then went on to lay out his vision for expansion on a global scale. This piqued my interest, and I wanted to be part of such a fast growing, innovative company.
Another reason would be my interest in the specific job. My job would entail creating and improving business cases and creating teaching materials for GLOBIS classes. The best part of my time at my MBA was reading the business cases; each case had its own story, its own unique issues and usually ambiguous solutions. To be able to be part of the creation process for the cases was something that was very alluring to me.

I was pleasantly surprised with how flexible and flat the organizational structure at GLOBIS is. I have previous experience working at a domestic Japanese company, so I was expecting a similar rigid working environment, complete with strict unspoken rules and a strict hierarchy. However, after joining I realized that my coworkers are incredibly friendly and helpful despite any sort of rank or age gap. Everyone I have spoken to was friendly and no one seemed to be too busy to be unapproachable. There is zero pressure to stay late because your manager is in the office, and there is no resistance when taking holidays or sick days. Additionally, as an American I thought I would feel out of place, but that wasn’t the case at all. There is quite a large community of friendly, non-Japanese workers within GLOBIS.

My current position is in the FGO, which stands for Faculty Group Office, which handles faculty communication and content development. Within the FGO group I am in two teams, the Global team, and the nano-MBA team. In the Global team I help with the creation and development of business cases, I also help with the editing and improvement of current GLOBIS cases. Additionally, I help with other content development, including the creation of the syllabus, teaching materials and teaching notes.
Within the nano-MBA team, I help with the content development of the English side of the online nano-MBA program. This includes the questions, the mini cases, the script for the videos and other related contents.

So far, I’ve been in GLOBIS for around a year and a half doing mainly content development and moving forward I would like to continue doing this. I believe that GLOBIS’s teaching materials are world-class, but I believe one day GLOBIS’s cases could be on the same level as HBS and other top business schools. I hope one day to be part of the content develop team whose teaching materials become the gold standard for MBA programs.

One of my biggest struggles when joining GLOBIS was the freedom I was given. In my previous sales related jobs, I was given very clear quarterly financial targets. I was also given various KPIs on the week, the month, the quarter and the year. While this added pressure to my job, it also made it very clear about what I should be doing at any one time.
However, in GLOBIS, I have much more freedom to choose how I should spend my time. This really forced me to constantly think about my own job, and to think about what projects should I be starting that could benefit GLOBIS as a whole. Every time I’ve mentioned a new idea or project to my manager, the response is almost always “I think you should give it a try, if you need any help don’t hesitate to ask”. I feel like this freedom is indicative of how GLOBIS views its employees, not as salaried employees but as autonomous professionals.