second year on the military project, I decided to stay in Japan instead of returning to California. I gave notice and left my job with the military. I thought I would eventually go back to live and work in America, but Japan seemed to be the perfect place for me to use what I knew and for what I had to learn. It was the early ’90s, the time of the economic bubble in Japan, and there were consulting opportunities helping Japanese companies expand overseas. As someone who loves art and design, I appreciated the minimalist aesthetic that I found in Japan. I also was attracted to the focus on groups and teamwork and the lack of overt conflict. I knew I had to learn how to function as a member of a group and learn about harmony. I had to give up my more confrontational style. And there was one more reason, which may have been the most important: I had met Hitoshi Ohashi, who would become my life partner.
I had no permanent job but I soon found consulting work with several organizations that were expanding in the United States, including Nissan, Hitachi, and NEC. I eventually added non-Japanese organizations such as AIG, the European Union, IBM, Intercontinental Hotels, Gap, and UBS to my client list.
After a year consulting in Japan, I started teaching part-time at a nearby university. I didn’t know it at the time, but that institution, Keio University, is considered one of the best in Japan. More Japanese CEOs graduate from Keio than any other university in Japan,1 and Keio ranks ninth in the world for the number of alumni holding CEO positions in Fortune Global 500 companies.2 Eventually I was appointed to a full-time position and became the first tenured American full professor in the faculty of business and commerce.
When I left twenty-two years later, I gave my final lecture to three hundred people and the president of Keio University spoke to the group about how much I contributed to the university. I had to pinch myself—was he really talking about me? What happened? How did I do it? Work was working just as I had once dreamed it would.
I had learned how to make my life better and have a positive impact on the lives of the people I worked with. No one knew how much I had suffered in the past and how much time I had spent learning this different way.
I am still surprised when others tell me I am an inspiration. I didn’t expect that, nor did I seek it out. I never set out to share some profound message with the world. In fact, I never set out to have any message at all. I was just trying to figure things out for myself. After all the time I spent learning about myself, doing so much research, and experiencing so many ups and downs, I had somehow developed a way of working that others were interested in.
This approach starts every day by focusing on what you want to create, a way of working that begins with the question that is the title of this book: What Do You Want to Create Today? This is the approach you’ll learn in these pages. We’ll begin in the same place I started: learning about yourself.
Ken Sasaki was serious when he told me he wanted his life at work to be better. He was only thirty-seven and had what many would call success. Most people would think Ken had it made. We were sitting on thousand-dollar chairs around a huge mahogany table in the executive boardroom on the thirty-ninth floor of a new skyscraper. But Ken, the president of a large insurance company, wasn’t happy.
He had an idea of what he wanted work to be, but this certainly wasn’t it. Being a senior officer of this big international company looked good, but the way he saw it, work was one set of problems after another. It was late-night conference calls, inquiries from governmental regulating agencies, conferences with analysts to explain why profitability was up or down, streams of emails from headquarters all marked urgent. Some days things did slow down, but on those days he was bored and didn’t know what to do with his time.
He told me he disliked the people he worked with too, even though he had hired most of them. He described many of them as too conservative or incompetent. In his opinion, his boss was the worst of all. Ken called him a “control freak,” and even though his boss was in Singapore, Ken considered him a micromanager. Ken sat across from me, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Work’s got to be better than this.” It was as if there were a dark cloud hanging over him preventing him from seeing clearly. I knew exactly what Ken was talking about. I had been very much like him.
Do you know anyone in this situation? I’ll bet you do.
A Common Problem
There was a time when I would have been shocked by what Ken said, but not anymore. I meet people like him every day: bankers, lawyers, doctors, professors, entrepreneurs. They all have professional, respected jobs with good incomes—jobs that people around the world aspire to. But in their cases, the work isn’t working out the way they want. They’re too busy, they’re hassled, they don’t like their bosses, they’re not challenged enough, there’s too much pressure, they’re not learning enough.
Put simply, work isn’t working and they are not having the kind of lives they want. As you can imagine, they had all worked extremely hard, done well in college, and achieved a lot in their professional lives. Yet they could not escape a reckoning with their own sense of disillusionment.
Most were worried about what else they could do or what new actions they could take. In many cases, these successful professionals spoke in terms of confinement and fear. They say they “keep busy in order not to think,” “can’t sleep,” “can’t escape from worrying”; they “want to do something else”; or they love their job, it’s their boss they hate. Others say they like the work, but it’s the clients/the vendors/the employees who are driving them crazy.
I do not tell them to change jobs. That’s not the answer. What I see over and over is that when these people change their jobs, within a year they’re having the same kinds of problems in the new job as they had in the old one. Unless a person deals with the hard questions of who they are and who they want to be, the complaints start all over again. If you change your job without changing yourself, the result will be greater anxiety, unhappiness, and the same problems you tried to escape from.
I don’t tell them to take a vacation either. That’s the ultimate short-term response. I have clients who leave every weekend for time in the countryside or a long holiday at an expensive resort. “Work is hell,” they tell me, “so I need to escape.” As pleasurable as these places are, their trips are not so much for enjoyment as they are for forgetting the week. Why not develop a more satisfying way of working?
I also don’t tell them, “Do what you have to do and the hell with your family.” We all need people to support us, and we have to consider the impact of our decisions on our loved ones. Nor do I say, “Your boss is a jerk.” We have to learn how to work with many different kinds of people. Part of our job is handling the boss, the clients, and the people with whom we work.
What I do tell them is that work can be a whole lot better. The first message I delivered to Ken (and hundreds like him I meet as an executive coach and conference speaker) was a tough one: The underlying problem lies within you. It starts with you, not anyone else.
It’s not an easy notion for many people to accept. Can you? Let’s find out.
I ask people the same questions I have asked myself. I ask them about the kind of life they want at work. I ask them to imagine what that would look and feel like to them. I ask them if they want to be having the same conversation with me a year from now. I ask them if they can let go of some of their ideas about what work has to be. I ask them what action they could take to break down some of the barriers to the kind
