Biography

Kenichi OHMAE

2005 ranking: 16

Described by the Financial Times as "Japan's only successful management guru," Dr. Kenichi Ohmae (b. 1943) is an acclaimed Japanese management strategist renown for his work on globalization and the borderless economy. Bright does not begin to describe Ohmae's intellectual powers. He is a concert playing flautist, a nuclear physicist, would-be politician, McKinsey consultant and much more.

A graduate of Waseda Unversity and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ohmae joined McKinsey consultants in 1972 after the completion of his PhD at MIT. He spent 23 years at McKinsey where he cofounded its strategic management practice, eventually leaving to stand for the Governorship of Tokyo in 1995.
Ohmae is also the dean of two private schools in Tokyo: Isshinjuku, which studies public policy, and Attacker's Advantage, which studies Entrepreneurship. He is also the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public and Social Research.

In his recent book The Invisible Continent: 4 Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy (2000) Ohmae examines the relationship between old economy "Titans" like IBM and new economy "Godzillas" such as Dell and Cisco and identifies four basic forces influencing the new economy. Ohmae's latest book is
The Emergence of the United States of Chunghwa (2003) in which he predicts that by 2005 Taiwan will politically integrate with China in the so-called "United States of Chunghwa".

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