Hiroshi Mikitani

Twenty-six years ago, Mickey Mikitani quit his position at the Industrial Bank of Japan – an unusual move in the traditional world of Japanese corporate culture. Even more surprisingly, he left not to join another large institution but to pursue an idea he had for an e-commerce startup.

Today, from humble beginnings with just six employees and a single server, his idea has mushroomed into Rakuten (meaning optimism in Japanese), a business ecosystem with 31,000 employees and revenues last year of about $15bn.

In conversation with IMD President Jean-François Manzoni, Mikitani describes his journey; and how an e-commerce startup grew into an online giant, spanning internet services, fintech, and mobile.

Authors

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Jean-François Manzoni

Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance

Jean-François Manzoni (JFM) is Professor of Leadership, Organizational Development and Corporate Governance at IMD, where he served as President and Nestlé Professor from 2017 to 2024. His research, teaching, and consulting activities are focused on leadership, the development of high-performance organizations and corporate governance. In recent years JFM has also been increasingly focused on finding ways to ensure leadership development interventions have lasting impact, particularly through the use of technology-mediated approaches, and on closing the growing managerial “knowing-doing gap”, i.e., the gap between what managers kind of know they should be doing and the extent to which they actually behave that way in practice.