Managing Key Competency: Powered by the Integration of Basic Knowledge, Skills and Mindsets

By Shigeru Sakai

This is a book about practical key competencies consisting of basic management knowledge, business skills and mindsets, assuming those who have just started working for companies, people who are thinking of starting up businesses and students interested in business as readers.

These key competencies are a selection of 52 business keywords, beginning with the letters from A to Z. Although each is a basic content in doing business, all the keywords are considered important management knowledge, skills and mindsets. It is becoming more important to appropriately choose, integrate and demonstrate these key competencies in various business situations.

Furthermore, I refer to theories and books that seem like classics, in modern fast-changing business environments. Picking the old brains is a shortcut to coming up with your answers. However, you should not simply take advantage of the wisdom as it is, but rather, modify it to suit your environments and use it in your own way.

This book can hopefully provide some useful tips on how to succeed in business, how to deal with problems or challenges at work and how to lead a meaningful life through jobs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669871545

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Copyright © 2023 by Shigeru Sakai.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/15/2023

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Contents

Introduction

This is a book about practical key competencies consisting of basic management knowledge, business skills, and mindsets, assuming those who have just started working for companies, people who are thinking of starting up businesses, and students interested in business as readers. Of course, its contents are also delivered to experienced businesspersons for reconfirming key competencies. I hope that I can provide some useful tips on how to succeed in business, how to deal with problems or challenges mainly at work, and how to lead a meaningful life through jobs by sharing my knowledge from my long-standing career at AIG and at IBM as well as my experience in supporting or managing start-ups.

These key competencies are a selection of fifty-two keywords, beginning with the letters from A to Z. Although each is basic content in doing business, all the keywords are considered important management knowledge, skills, and mindsets. It is becoming more important to appropriately choose, integrate, and demonstrate these key competencies in various business situations.

In the case of encountering some kind of trouble, for example, you identify the problem and pursue its cause by using problem-solving skills with a fact-based approach. Then, you come up with the solutions in reference to frameworks, occasionally with a zero-based approach, while communicating to stakeholders. You need some management knowledge and business skills in this situation. Under increasingly complex and fast-paced business circumstances, you are expected to think by yourself and find out your answers appropriate to the situations, taking advantage of your own key competencies.

Many of these keywords regarding key competencies are not new. Furthermore, to help you better understand some of them, I refer to theories and books that seem like classics, in modern fast-changing business environments. I think that the theories are still valid since there are unchanging things as long as people get involved in organizations or businesses. Picking the old brains is a shortcut to coming up with your answers. However, you should not simply take advantage of the wisdom as it is, but rather, modify it to suit your environment and use it in your own way.

Now, imagine that you are in a room. You have a filing cabinet with fifty-two drawers, arranged alphabetically. Each of the drawers contains nothing but a single note only with some hints written down on it. You will be carefully storing your own assets such as the experiences, knowledge, and skills from your business and personal life in those drawers. Then, please fill in the answers you think of yourself in reference to my memos and create your own fulfilling cabinet.

In addition, it may be necessary to extend the two-row cabinet to three or more rows. It is also important to make an inventory and unlearn old knowledge, skills, and mindsets. As tiny decorations, you may place a family photo on the cabinet or even a painting of your choice on the wall above it. In various situations, however, you need to appropriately manage your key competencies so that you can retrieve them at any time.

You can also see the vast expanse of the ocean from the large window of the room. There may be great opportunities out there while there may also be considerable challenges and risks ahead, depending on the winds and tides. Nevertheless, there is nothing to be afraid of. Believe in the key competencies you build up for yourself. By all means, open the door to your success and happiness and venture out into the hopeful blue ocean.

You try all things, you achieve what you can!

Round 1

A burning desire to be, and to do is the starting point from which the dreamer must take off.

—Napoleon Hill

a1.

Ambition

Business starts with ambitions. A lot of people have some kind of ambition in business, regardless of whether they work for companies as employees or start up new businesses as entrepreneurs. An employee may have the ambition to become a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) someday. A lot of entrepreneurs must have ambitions to list their start-up companies on stock exchanges. A researcher has the ambition to discover or produce something innovative that is worth the Nobel Prize.

What ambition do you have not only in your business but also in your personal life? Ambition means a strong desire to achieve something or become somebody. Having ambitions is also defining your own success and happiness. It leads to your personal growth by doing the greatest endeavors, getting the support of others, and leading people to achieve your ambitions. Ambitions are your driving forces and self-expressions of who you are as well.

Speaking of specific occupations, an astronaut, a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, or a professional sports player? Any occupation is OK. Besides jobs, any ambition is fine like mastering your hobby, achieving something big in your personal life, and becoming a politician to improve your country. You have great potential to be anything if you have a strong desire, and make up your mind to make the greatest efforts at all costs in the right way.

Don’t get disappointed in yourselves even though you are all at sea as to what to do. It is OK if you don’t have any ambitions at moment. Like other students or young people, after you go out into the world of business society, you will be able to find any ambitions of what you really want to do in your business while working for companies. You will have a lot of opportunities there to talk to your bosses and colleagues, or you will still get in touch with your old friends and alumni. I am sure that many of those encounters will enlighten you by stimulating your potential ambitions.

Another way of finding ambitions is to look back to your childhood. What did you dream of? What did you like when you were kids? There are, I guess, plenty of botanists or entomologists who once liked nature in their childhood. There are lots of kids who may dream of becoming such founders or CEOs of big companies as today’s business role models. There must be a lot of youngsters who are impressed by the doctors or nurses helping people during the pandemic and begin to have the ambition to work in the medical world. There are some of them who give up being clinicians, and instead become medical researchers in studying deceases or developing innovative medicines. Ambitions often change too. Those ambitions likely originate from curiosities and dreams today or in childhood.

It’s better to have ambitions earlier. Strong desires of ambitions will be big motivations to achieve anything in your jobs or businesses. It is not difficult to have ambitions. You just have something you want to do, or you want to become, as I mention earlier, not limited to the category of business. Having ambitions is the first step to your success and happiness. And if you can grow, manage, and demonstrate the key competencies as introduced here, you will get closer to your achievements.

However, if you only vaguely think of something you want to accomplish in life or your favorite jobs you would like to do someday, the days will just go by without accomplishing anything. As for one point in thinking of ambitions, by all means, envision what you want to achieve clearly. Burning desires with even clearer deadlines will drive your ambitions. If there are laws of success, I believe that one of them is to have more specific ambitions with specific deadlines. Ambitions are preferred to a little more concrete and bigger dreams than vague thoughts. Challenging ambitions are welcome always in your life.

So I recommend that you document those specific ambitions then, you make specific plans for what actions you need, and put the plans into action every day in order to achieve your ambitions. Let’s have time even for thirty minutes a day to take action and review what you need to do next. Daily checks in the form of documented statements will help keep you motivated as well. Once you can successfully get them on track, things will naturally move forward just as a rocket launched by explosive energy orbits in space. Now all you don’t give up and keep endeavoring, you will be able to obtain what you want to achieve.

Another point in thinking of ambitions is for what purposes your ambitions should be: Are they for money? Fame? Social contributions? Self-actualization or are plural purposes mixed together? Basically, anything is fine as long as you have good ambitions. Good ones are something like giving a positive impact on others. Ambitions with good purposes are desirable. But you can be a role model by showing the attitude of making the greatest effort to achieve something, even if your purposes are considered to be just for you, without disturbing others. On the other hand, bad ambitions are something illegal and immoral. These are out of the question. Bad ambitions have very selfish purposes like monopolizing profits without choosing the means to achieve the ambitions, only to have adverse effects on others.

Which ambition would you choose? Of course, it has to be the former. You must have good ambitions. Then, as I mention later in v1. Vision, it is desirable to develop your ambitions to the superordinate concept of visions that contain not only good purposes but also social goals or missions. You can say that it is an ambition with a view to contributing to society, particularly in starting up companies, you can pave the way with the visions that can be shared with your people as ideal images open to societies. Let’s get started with having ambitions.

b1.

Business Model

The business model is evitable in creating a business plan. In the case that you prepare for starting up a new business, the business model expressed on some kind of documentation will make it easy for your stakeholders to understand briefly what the business is like. Of course, business models don’t necessarily have to be written on documentation. It would be nice if the essence of how to make profits is expressed in the business plans or something. But if the business structures are a little complicated or if you need to visually appeal to the structures of your businesses, it is better to do so as an independent item. Besides business models, by the way, business plans are required for explaining the outlines of newly starting up businesses and organizations, the characteristics of products or services, the analysis of competitors in the markets, and marketing and financial plans.

Business models as I mention are not limited to the occasions where you create business plans for start-ups. They also hold true for coming up with strategies or understanding the flow of money in your existing business fields. For instance, if you are a marketer in charge of some product lines at a manufacturer, or if you are in a position of examining borrowers at a bank, business models are significant to see the essence of the businesses. In the former case, you re-engineer the business models by reviewing the product portfolios or the ways of selling the products, taking marketability and competitors into consideration. In the latter, you are not on the side of creating the business models but examining those of your borrowers. Lenders are concerned particularly about the flow of money.

Some people call a business model a concept. Both are almost the same, I think. It is better to say the business models rather than the concepts when showing the structures of the businesses and the compositions of the related parties including customers. More specifically, business models show what values are provided how, by whom, and finally who pays money. It is something like presentation materials obviously at a glance to figure out what the businesses are like. Above all, more importantly, business models clarify how to earn profits from businesses as well as show what value can be created for customers.

It is not so difficult to make business models. If you have your own business ideas that include how to earn profits from your businesses, you just write down the business structures by showing how and what values are provided to customers. If possible, it might be better to do so on one slide in Microsoft PowerPoint or something in order to capture the whole picture. When you don’t get clear images about your business models soon after starting to think of what they should be just for start-ups, you can find some references of successful cases such as Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix, Meta (Facebook), Uber, and many others. There are several types of main business models you can see as follows:

Platform

Subscription

Advertising-Supported Revenue

Freemium

Matching

Sharing

Consumables Business

Not many companies are adopting only one business model. Most successful companies are mixing plural models together to create their own businesses. Alphabet Inc., for example, has Google which is one of the largest platforms profiting from advertising revenues. The company also provides freemium businesses such as cloud services which are free under a certain storage capacity. Apple Inc. also provides a variety of products and services such as iPhone, Apple Music, iCloud, and so forth. They are not just products or services. iPhone has become a platform for communication. Apple Music is charged on a subscription basis, and iCloud is also a freemium model provided on the house under a certain storage capacity and charges when increasing the capacity. Those successful companies organically associate some business models.

These models can be applied to any new businesses you are deliberating as far as you are careful of whether or not you infringe on any business model patents or