IdeArbitrage brings over 20 years of experience in international project planning, design, strategic planning and portfolio management, with work spanning from North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia.
Creating new value by transposing ideas through space and time. Read about IdeArbitrage
Contact jim.takasugi@IdeArbitrage.com
Congratulations to Jimi Yamaichi, whose lifelong work to preserve Japanese American history was recognized by the Government of Japan in the 2011 Conferment of Decoration. Jimi received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, for his work in Santa Clara County.
Established in 1875 by Emperor Meiji of Japan, the Order is awarded to those who have made distinguished achievements in international relations, promotion of Japanese culture, advancements in their field, development in social/occupational welfare or preservation of the environment
Details of Jimi’s accomplishments can be found here.
As a long-time carpenter and builder, Jimi Yamaichi collaborated with Jim Takasugi, architect, in realizing the following projects:
The New York Times recently published an article about House+House Architects’ solar powered, sustainable home on the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico. Located in the remote fishing village of Cabo Pulmo, this home is universally designed to provide access for everyone. Featuring a 165-foot long sculptural ramp weaving through lush gardens to facilitate wheelchair access to the second floor, the new home is thoughtfully integrated into the desert landscape.
Congratulations Steve and Cathi on another thoughtfully designed and beautifully executed house!
(Previously, the award-winning architects Steven & Cathi House of House+House collaborated with us on the design for La Vista Golf Club and Hotel in Chiba, Japan)
Technology industry pundits claim, and most of us hope, that Apple will continue to create many great products after Job’s departure.
But unfortunately the odds of this outcome are not good.
Jobs clearly had the vision and innovative ideas, but Apple was successful because Jobs was uniquely positioned with critical decision-making authority to implement ideas to execution, to simultaneously address business excellence with technological and operational excellence.
Without a single leader with decision-making authority that Jobs had, today’s typical corporate governance structures lack the ability to integrate all these dimensions and the discipline to make difficult decisions, to determine which great ideas they are not going to pursue, to prioritize. “Lead from the front” as Cisco management often says. This is easy to say, but hard to do in actual practice in a large scale corporate environment.
The corporate Board of Directors (BOD) and shareholders are too often singularly focused on the short-term financial performance. This has the double whammy effect of 1) taking the critical decisions-making out of the hands of the innovators and technologists and placing them with the financial analysts and 2) overweighting the immediate returns over the benefits from addressing the longer-term macro market shifts.
“God is in the details” to quote Mies van der Rohe. Jobs also obsessed on the details because the greatest ideas and plans fail due to lack of focus in working out the details and operational glitches. Operational plans are too often addressed after business strategies have already been laid, and operational decisions come as an afterthought. Instead, operational strategies should be advanced simultaneously with business strategies. The dynamic nature of business, the speed of market shifts and completion do not allow for doing these in a linear sequential manner.
To quote Mies again, “less is more” and “form follows function” People often mistake the pursuit of product design as mere desire to produce beautiful objects. Just as mathematicians pursue the most elegant proof of a theorem by achieving the result with the fewest number of steps, so too should the pursuit of the most elegant product and product experience. Thanks to Jobs, Apple products are not just beautiful but elegant in this sense.
Internal process gurus charged to sort through these complexities often fail because they are more focused on the processes than the resulting products, and have become their own worst enemy by creating additional layers of bureaucracy. In the mean time, the market opportunities have moved on.
Jobs’ greatest asset was not necessarily his vision and innovative ideas, but his unique capacity to deliver great products by navigating through today’s complex corporate structures.
Tokyo 21 Oct 2011
Japan, in my opinion, is perhaps the best example of how a country and its people adopt and adapt foreign ideas and put them to good use in their own way, often improving on the original. Being a dual citizen of Japan and the United States, I’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand over the years. My current trip to Tokyo is a great opportunity for me to see this in current form.
It’s well established that Japan has benefitted over the centuries by borrowing foreign ideas, selectively adopting the best of breed available at the time. Japanese written language, governance structure and Zen form of Buddhism are just few examples of adaptation of Chinese and Indian imports. Japanese arts and crafts owe much to the Korean artisans of the past.
View of Mount Fuji from Harajuku, part of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō series by Hiroshige, published 1850
This is not to say that the Japanese do not have original ideas or innovation of their own. As an architect, I appreciate the fact that an idea born in Japan, Ukiyo-e, has significantly influenced Western Art. In fact, Ukiyo-e has defined a different way of representing 3-dimensional space than the western perspective created in the Renaissance period. Visit the home studio of Claude Monet in Giverny and you’ll see numerous original Ukiyo-e hung on his walls.
What enables the Japanese to rapidly assimilate foreign ideas is their open-mindedness and imagination to abstract and apply concepts to their own environment.
So what is going on in Tokyo today?
Tokyo has always been the lifestyle trend-setting capital of Japan. You might see glimpses of Paris, New York, Amsterdam and other foreign capitals of the world represented in parts of Tokyo. Tokyo districts like Harajuku for fashion and Akihabara for commercial technologies set the trend for all of Japan to follow. Needless to say, these two districts were high on my itinerary.
Akihabara
The first phenomenon that’s different from my last trip to Tokyo is the recent infatuation with the iPhone. Riding on the crowded subways or having dinner with my friends in Tokyo, it seems Tokyo-ites have fallen in love with the iPhone. The folks I met generally fall into two categories: either they have an iPhone or they want one. Within a week of the new iPhone4S announcement, many are already using it. Its cousin, the iPad, is everywhere in Tokyo as well. I love my iPhone, but in Japan, it is a lifestyle defining platform. More than once, I’ve heard their sentiment on how much Steve Jobs will be missed. The entire first floor of the institution of tech geek and gadgetry, Yodobashi in Akihabara, is all about the iPhone 4S and its endless racks of accessories, as far as my eyes can see. My friends at Nihon Cisco and KDDi claim the recent surge in smartphone popularity is causing a sharp increase in demand for additional internet infrastructure.
Carpenters shaping huge timber beams with power tools
Walking in the back streets of Meiji-Jingumae district, I came upon a small construction site. Upon closer look, there were carpenters shaping huge timber beams, presumably replacing some centuries-old counterparts in a neighboring shrine. What was very dismaying to me is that the carpenters were using powered planes to shape the huge timbers, not the traditional hand planes that the carpenters used for centuries.
The Japanese Saw (nokogiri 鋸), the Japanese Plane (kanna 鉋), and the Japanese Chisel (nomi 鑿) define the essence of Japanese carpentry and elevate it to a state of art, if not Zen. “This is sacrilege!”, I thought. Is there no respect for tradition? Such is the new landscape of idea arbitrage.
Harajuku - early morning scene
Harajuku seems to have lost a bit of its former edginess in fashion. The outlandish kitsch outfit has become mundane. And speaking of kitsch in general, the commercialization of kitsch and in some respects idea arbitrage is part of “Zakka” (雑貨) lifestyle.
Wikipedia definition: “Zakka (from the Japanese ‘zak-ka’ (or ‘many things’) is a fashion and design phenomenon that has spread from Japan throughout Asia. The term refers to everything and anything that improves your home, life and appearance. It is often based on household items from the West that are regarded as kitsch in their countries of origin, but it can also be Japanese goods, mainly from the fifties, sixties, and seventies… Zakka has also been described as “the art of seeing the savvy in the ordinary and mundane”. The zakka boom could be recognized as merely another in a series of consumer fads, but it also touches issues of self-expression and spirituality. “
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai's most famous print, the first in the series 36 Views of Mount Fuji
Ideas transported across great distances and time….’Zakka’ is just another manifestation of idea arbitrage.
One of the key elements of Globalization as practiced by multi-national corporations today is their corporate tax strategy. It’s no secret that most multi-national companies pay little or no domestic income tax on their profits through off-shore tax strategies. In fact, multi-national companies almost certainly need to adopt such practices just to stay competitive. And most countries offer tax and non-tax incentives to compete for multi-national investments. Take a look at any multi-national global footprint and you’ll see the influence of tax incentives.
Is it “fair” that corporations escape paying their share of tax? Given a tax holiday to repatriate off-shore cash at significantly reduced rates as proposed under the Hagan-McCain bill, do we expect corporations to invest the sudden infusion of cash in domestic spending and increase domestic hiring, or as before, simply redistribute the wealth to corporate shareholders?
Corporate decisions are based on shareholder value, the bottom line, as long as it is legal. In the global economy, “fair” is a word that is becoming increasingly ambiguous and not much relevant. Such is the landscape of global business today.
WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 13, 2011 6:05pm EDT (Reuters) – An overseas corporate profit repatriation tax holiday could boost consumption and U.S. tax revenues even if companies decide to return cash to shareholders, according to a new study published on Thursday. The report, from the nonpartisan New America Foundation and co-authored by Laura D’Andrea Tyson, an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, is the latest in a series of analyses judging the pros and cons of the corporate tax break. A repatriation holiday would allow companies to bring offshore profits back to the U.S. at a tax rate much lower than the statutory 35 percent corporate income tax. The growing list of competing studies pits businesses with large pools of profits abroad against detractors who worry a repatriation holiday will encourage companies to hold profits overseas until the political winds shift in their favor. In 2004-2005, corporations had a repatriation holiday allowing them to return profits to the U.S. at a 5.25 percent tax rate. Analysts studying this tax break generally agree that proceeds were used by companies to buy back shares and that the holiday ultimately cost more than it collected in tax revenue. The New America Foundation study said firms that will spend their repatriated cash face two choices: spend it internally or return it to shareholders. Both choices will grow the economy, the report said. In all, the spending could increase gross domestic product by $178 billion to $336 billion and will add 1.3 million to 2.5 million jobs, the report estimates. When companies return cash to shareholders, it will likely be wealthy Americans who will benefit and start spending, the report said. About $581 billion in after-tax dividends will be distributed to U.S. shareholders. “Based on the distribution in equity holdings among U.S. shareholders, this consumption will be skewed toward higher income U.S. households, but it will nonetheless stimulate aggregate demand,” the authors said. Tax revenues generated from repatriated cash could be used to finance job creation measures “such as the creation of an infrastructure bank,” like the one proposed by President Barack Obama in his jobs bill, the report said. Democratic Senator Kay Hagan applauded the study on Thursday in a statement. Hagan has sponsored a bill with Republican Senator John McCain that would tax at 8.75 percent corporate profits returned to the U.S. Firms could reduce the tax rate to 5.25 percent if they expand their U.S. payrolls by 10 percent in 2012. Businesses would face a $75,000 fine for every job cut during the holiday period, under the Hagan-McCain bill.
Click on the image to see a visualization of the shift in global GDP’s from 1CE to 2015. The slide show uses “equal area cartograms”, otherwise known as density-equalizing maps. The cartogram re-sizes each country according to the variable (in this case, the country’s GDP) being mapped.
Notice that the current Emerging Countries, such as India and China, are really a reemergence of these two countries from several centuries ago. What are the fundamental drivers of these shifts over time?
The Winners and Losers in the next economy will be determined by the lessons learned from the past and how we apply them to the next business model.
(density-equalizing map source: http://www.worldmapper.org/index.html)
IdeArbitrage takes great ideas developed for a local market and implements them globally. IdeArbitrage accelerates and capitalizes on outcomes by connecting great ideas with critical expertise and support.
How does a foreign company optimize Global and Local opportunities, find reliable and trustworthy support infrastructure, including:
Specialized subjects that can benefit private and commercial clients, as well as students and educators:
Understanding and applying new technology transforms our home, businesses, environment, and lifestyle. At Cisco Systems, I was exposed to innovative technology that radically transforms the office, home, and industries including education, health care, financial, sports/entertainment, retail and commercial. Technological advances include mobility, cloud computing, network security, building management to name a few. These new “disruptive” technologies should be incorporated into every planning and design solutions.
2. Globalization:My role at Cisco Systems has focused on the new drivers of Globalization and their implications for new business models. The Next Generation Office is built on new global drivers including emerging market opportunities, talent pools, and enabling technologies.
3. Green Design:Clearly, current energy dependencies on non-renewable resources can not continue without significan negative impact to our environment and our well being. Efficient, sustainable homes and workplaces must be achieved through energy efficient design strategies, techniques and technologies.
How do we achieve balance between Mind, Body and Spirit in our personal environment, at home and at work? Design our built environment in harmony with nature is essential to maximizing our quality of life.
This balance can be achieved through thoughtful, integrated solutions that focus on all aspects of a balanced lifestyle. The solutions therefore must address not just the physical environment (e.g. architectural/ interior/ ergonomic/ green/ accessible design), but lifestyle dimensions including nutrition, physical and social activities.
