Kenichi Ohmae, Globalisation Visionary

For poets and philosophers to discuss the irrelevance of national borders is not new. But when a grounded-in-business strategy guru broaches the subject, some very busy people must pay close attention. And they did, in 1990, when Kenichi Ohmae published The Borderless World, his defining book on the future as he envisioned it-a global future with a global market.

To Ohmae's mind, the nation state is not just a mere legacy of circumstances long past, it is interventionist in its very conception, and so ought to be rendered obsolete by the very market forces that drive us all towards ever higher value generation. The exchange of value amongst fellow human beings, goes the argument, is optimised best by freeing economic agents from the hoary impositions of nationalism. With the Internet having already enabled spontaneous free associations that defy geography, Ohmae's worldview is fast gaining force. And with it, the global demand for a good hard look at how the planet is currently carved up.

And to think that the man is a nuclear engineer-the subject of his PHD from MIT, acquired after a Master's degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Ohmae's first job was designing a reactor for Hitachi, after which he joined McKinsey for a 23-year stint as a strategy consultant.

In the latter role, Ohmae grew famous for his emphasis on intuitive strategising, an art to do with the "state of mind", in operation with the classic rigours of the analytical method. And no analytical framework is complete without due attention to each of the 3 CS: Corporation, Customer and Competitor. It's no ordinary attention that he seeks for them either. In The Mind of The Strategist, he recommends "the daily use of imagination" and "constant training in logical thought process."

How do Ohmae's thoughts on strategy go with globalisation? "Creativity, mental productivity and the power of strategic insight know no national boundaries. Fortunately for all of us, they are universal." Needless to say, Ohmae isn't seen as a source of inspiration in large swathes of the world, especially where the nationalist paradigm has acquired monstrous proportions. To the globalisation guru, however, it's just another challenge. "It is hard to let old beliefs go," he empathises, "They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them." But the world, really, is one.