With a boldness experts say established firms would do well to imitate, Start Today's Maezawa says he'd abandon his online fashion business rather than try to undercut rivals with lower prices and wages if he starts losing to such competition.
"I want to create new value by doing something people haven't done before," said Maezawa, whose Zozotown shopping site had nearly 1.9 million active members as of February.
"If competition heats up in terms of price and labor conditions ... I would let the imitators do it and develop a new innovation."
HURDLES AHEAD
Success when firms are younger and nimble is easier than producing similarly dynamic growth as the organization expands and ages, so many firms now winning plaudits and investor attention will have to fight to maintain a growth trajectory.
Finding a successor to current dynamic CEOs could also be a problem, experts say.
"There's a risk (that they will stall), but their management is always saying they must avoid that and doing management calisthenics to shed fat," said Shinji Higaki, a portfolio manager at Fidelity Worldwide Investment in Tokyo.
Like their stodgier corporate brethren before them, thriving Japanese firms are stepping out overseas and betting on growth from Asia in particular to offset a mature domestic market.
Takeshi Niinami, CEO of Japan's No.2 convenience store chain Lawson Inc, longs for a corporate jet to help execute what he termed "a mission to seek opportunities in Asia".
"We CEOs need to be constantly travelling abroad. For that, a private jet - not one of the big 2-3 billion yen ones but a small 200-300 million yen one - to jet around Asia would be enough," Niinami, who plans to operate 10,000 stores in China by 2020, up from 355 outlets now, told Reuters in an interview.
Mobile social gaming firm Gree Inc, which last year bought U.S.-based online games network OpenFeint Inc, aims to quintuple its global users to 1 billion in 3-5 years and is looking to Asia for longer-term growth, said CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka, dubbed Asia's youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes in 2009.
These executives know they face a tough balancing act to maintain unique appeal developed at home with adaptations to local tastes in markets where competitors may be already entrenched - Fast Retailing's Yanai, for example, has already had one taste of failure in an earlier foray abroad.
"Japanese that go overseas and do things the Japanese way are limited in what they can accomplish," said Niinami, a Harvard Business School graduate parachuted in from Mitsubishi Corp to run the chain after the trading house took a major stake in 2002.
"Japan's technology is advanced, but you need to leverage local employees who really understand the cultures of these places to tell you what is appropriate for that country."
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