Leadership Advisory Consultant Yoshiko Ogawa from Egon Zehnder and Bjoern Eichstaedt, Founder and Chief Editor of J-BIG and Co-owner and Managing Partner of communications agency Storymaker, are launching “Leadership Dojo” in 2026, an inspirational community for C-level executives in Japanese companies operating in Germany. In this dialogue, they reveal what it would take for those leaders to successfully navigate such rapidly changing times and why adult development is crucial in leadership positions across cultures. They discuss how their initiative aims to bring leaders born and raised in Germany and Japan together in a safe place to learn and discover more about their authentic selves and share their stories and experiences with each other. The first kick-off event, which is by invitation only, is planned on July 2nd in Munich with a keynote speaker.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: This year we are launching “Leadership Dojo”, an initiative we’ve been thinking about for almost two years now. It´s a space for C-level executives to step out of the noise of daily urgency and develop oneself by stepping into deeper clarity about who they are as leaders. Leaders can reconnect with purpose, recalibrate leadership identity, and cultivate the self‑awareness that fuels meaningful, lasting impact together with allies in this dojo for modern leadership.
Yoshiko Ogawa: That’s the reason for the name. Both of us know about Japanese martial arts. I did Kendo, you did Judo and do Aikido. In the martial arts world, a dojo is a sacred space where you practice together to become a better version of yourself. It’s not about comparison to others. It’s about improving compared to the you of yesterday. The dojo has this special feeling where you’re allowed to make mistakes, to be vulnerable, to ask questions without judgment. That’s exactly what we want to create for leaders from Germany and Japan.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: Before we continue to explain the idea in more detail, maybe we should start by introducing ourselves. I think our journeys provide personal context for understanding why we believe “Leadership Dojo” could help leaders and why we’re so passionate about this. So who are you?
Yoshiko Ogawa: I am a Leadership Advisor at Egon Zehnder, a leading global firm in executive consulting. We provide human answers to business problems. Concretely, we support CEO and C-level successions through executive or board searches, assessment and transformational development. I was born in Saga Prefecture in Japan, a very rural area, and I moved frequently during my childhood within Japan. That nurtured a natural curiosity about people to adapt to new environments smoothly. I wanted to understand why people behave the way they do, why they say one thing but not another. My curiosity expanded when I studied abroad in the US, where I was able to see Japan from a completely different perspective for the first time. After university, I joined IBM’s People and Organisation Strategy Consulting practice because I wanted to deepen my understanding of people by looking at Japan again from a different angle.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: And then Egon Zehnder recruited you?
Yoshiko Ogawa: After a while at IBM I provided a wide range of consultations, from business or organisational strategy to Human Resource Information System implementation to large Japanese corporations. However, over time, I realised that projects could only create a sustainable impact if there was a leader on the client team who was committed to lasting change. Otherwise, our hard work on power points or excel were sadly wasted. That’s when I came across Egon Zehnder. I had never heard of the firm before, as it focuses to support C-levels. I joined the Tokyo office in 2018 because I was inspired by their philosophy of “Leadership for a Better World” focusing purely on people as the key to driving business impact. I supported large Japanese corporations’ CEO and C-level succession management through assessment and development. Later, I married a German-American who works in Stuttgart, and I transferred to the Stuttgart office in 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, hoping that I could broaden my consulting skills and deepen my understanding of leaders across cultures by supporting European and German companies.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: What did you discover, and how does this connect to our project?
Yoshiko Ogawa: Alongside my regular work supporting European corporations, I noticed something fascinating. There’s a vibrant community of Japanese expats here and there are also many German CEOs and C-level executives working in Japanese corporations. Yet, despite facing remarkably similar challenges, these two groups rarely interact across organisations.
Earlier in my career, while working in Japan with corporations striving to become more globally competitive, I often heard Japanese stakeholders attribute challenges to their overseas subsidiaries. Later, working in Europe and viewing Japanese companies from German perspective, I observed the same thing in reverse. Both sides were describing the same issues. I found it difficult to ignore this gap. As someone who has worked closely with both Japanese and European leaders, I felt a strong motivation to create a place where leaders meet for learning and growing together. What about you?
Bjoern Eichstaedt: My journey was quite different but led to similar insights. I grew up moving around within Germany. Then my parents separated. My father moved to West Berlin, which at the time was inside the wall, in the communist sector. I stayed in Baden-Württemberg with my mother and sister and visited my father every other month on weekends. He was a medical professor who traveled the world for research, and once a year he would take me out of school to travel with him to South America, Australia, Asia. By the age of twelve, I had visited every continent except Antarctica. It was a strange, dual experience: seeing the world, but also frequently visiting a city surrounded by a wall. I became fascinated by separation and how things – and people – could be bridged. Experiencing my parents´separation at a young age, I was wondering why people so often struggle to get along.
When I was twelve, in 1987, I became the first child in my school to have a Nintendo console. I subscribed to a video game magazine that once a year had a ten-page report on the Tokyo Game Show. That’s when I realized much of the technology and entertaining interactive stories I loved came from Japan. Suddenly these Japanese company names appeared everywhere and I became curious about the country behind them
Later, I studied biology, specializing in neurobiology. This was the 1990s when the internet was emerging, and I was fascinated by how it enabled new forms of connection I made online pen friends who would record original English versions of The Simpsons, put them on videotape, and mail them to me in Germany. Witnessing these new possibilities for interpersonal connections. Eventually I realized I wanted to work in communication, to build bridges between people.
Yoshiko Ogawa: Your current job combines all of your early interests!
Bjoern Eichstaedt: I am co-running and co-owning Storymaker, a communications agency specialised in story development, content creation and communication. I started at Storymaker in 2001 as the company’s first trainee. I learned to work with technology companies and discovered that for example engineers are completely different from marketing people in how they communicate. I learned to bridge engineer thinking with marketing thinking initially.
Over the years, I have built up the Japan business of the agency. Japan was always my private interest. In 2010, my wife and I did our honeymoon to Japan. When I was there, I realized it felt more like home than in Germany. I felt Japan had this sense of community, of everything being connected. In Germany, people think very much from their individual self. There is a lot of space between people.
Yoshiko Ogawa: Yes that’s true. I often hear from Japanese expats in Germany that they have a hard time to build connections, get to know people and build this kind of community.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: I also realised that the Japanese expat community rarely interacts with German CEOs and C-level executives working in Japanese corporations. Another thing I noticed while working with German-Japanese corporations is that the headquarters and their subsidiaries rarely communicated with each other, but both sides blamed each other for the lack of understanding. Everyone on both teams was smart and experienced but something in between them prevented them from working efficiently and effectively.
Yoshiko Ogawa: I completely agree. Everyone brings intelligence to their work, but it is usually shaped by familiar environments and inherited values. Only through awareness and curiosity can they begin to shift perspectives and reflect on themselves and their surroundings.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: Indeed. Observing similar problems and miscommunication between German and Japanese many times motivated me to study these differences more. One concrete example was my initial confusion about Japanese expectations for German trade shows. From my perspective, those expectations seemed misaligned. It was only after visiting trade shows in Japan myself that I understood the context: Japanese trade shows are typically much smaller in scale. From the perspective, it is not obvious how large and complex major German trade fairs actually are without seeing it.
As I continued traveling and working on more projects with Japanese companies in some respects I found myself understanding Japanese companies sometimes better than German ones. This naturally led to a new goal: helping German business leaders learn from what I’d observed about the Japanese side.
Wanting to make Japanese business perspectives more accessible to the German-Japanese business community, I founded J-BIG magazine in 2020. By then, I had worked for about forty Japanese companies, but I rarely saw in-depth coverage in German media that reflected what I had experienced firsthand. So I wanted executives in Japanese companies in Germany to share their stories with the interested community. There is much to explore and many insights to gain: holistic thinking, interesting history, philosophy embedded in business, fascinating production approaches, a strong sense of community across the country and inside companies.
Yoshiko Ogawa: From my Japanese view you might be idealizing Japan a bit too much (laughs), but it is interesting to hear your perspectives about Japan. I believe that Japanese could equally learn from German people a lot. For example, German culture tends to focus on issues and people do not shy away from openly discussing about them. Whereas, people in Japan may culturally avoid admitting the existence of conflict until it becomes unavoidable. I like the German approach. It is pragmatic, and often segregates people and topics which may help find a better solution. The list would go on.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: You are right. One thing I learned from working with Japanese companies is the tendency to over-plan. I’ve seen companies plan in incredible detail for years, then rotation happens and the person planning moves to another position, and the next person starts planning again from scratch. Comparatively Germans tend to have a very efficient hands-on approach. I believe both cultures have their good and bad sides and could profit by understanding their different ways of doing things.
Yoshiko Ogawa: Right. But through our exchanges about similarities and differences of Japan and Germany, we both realised the important awareness lies in something deeper, didn’t we?
Bjoern Eichstaedt: Much deeper. Problem solving relies heavily on pattern recognition. Different cultures, different fields of expertise, even different times have different patterns of thought. Struggling with the unknown is only natural. Even extremely capable people can become highly inefficient when faced with challenges beyond their experience.
Yoshiko Ogawa: That’s the reason why modern leadership based on adult development is so important, especially for leaders.
C‑level executives operate under extraordinary and sustained pressure. Their decisions shape organisations, markets, and livelihoods – and the margin for error often feels vanishingly small. As a result, many leaders carry an unspoken expectation: not only to deliver flawless outcomes, but also to project certainty, confidence, and control at all times. Words, behaviors, and signals are carefully managed. Perfection becomes the implicit standard.
Yet this expectation is increasingly at odds with how learning, adaptation, and leadership actually work. Because today, the world is fragmented, and is harder to predict, and change is both rapid and nonlinear. Global crises, technological disruption, and the accelerating integration of AI have fundamentally altered the operating context for leaders. No individual –regardless of experience – can plausibly have all the answers anymore. And yet, the expectation of the “all‑knowing leader” persists in many organisations and in many leaders’ own self‑image. In such an era, progress today depends on curiosity, perspective‑taking, and the willingness to ask questions such as, “I may be missing something – can you walk me through it?” or “I could use another viewpoint here.” These are not signs of weakness; they are prerequisites for sound judgment. And still, many C‑level executives lack a truly safe environment in which they can ask these questions openly, test ideas, or admit uncertainty.
This creates a gap: between what modern leadership requires and what leaders feel they are allowed to show.
Redefining what great leadership looks like today is not easy. There are few visible role models, and even fewer spaces where senior leaders can experiment with new ways of being – without reputational risk. To make this shift, leaders need something rare: a trusted, high‑caliber environment where they can think out loud, challenge assumptions, make mistakes, and learn from peers who carry comparable responsibility. A space where saying “I don’t know” is not a liability, but a catalyst for better leadership. For many C‑level executives, this sense of community is the hardest to find – and the most valuable when it exists.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: That’s where “Leadership Dojo” comes in. And critically, it isn’t networking or installing knowledge in the traditional sense. It’s not about learning the “right” way to bow or the proper way to exchange business cards.
Yoshiko Ogawa: (laughing) Yes. It’s about learning to be comfortable with the unknown, whether that unknown is a different culture, a new technology, a changing market, or a different perspective on leadership itself. What matters is the bigger picture: navigating uncertainty with an authentic self.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: So as we launch the first “Leadership Dojo” event in early July 2026, what do you hope participants will experience?
Yoshiko Ogawa: We’re planning the first event for July 2nd, 2026, in Munich. The format will include a keynote speaker who will talk about how a company culture has shaped, elevated, and sustained business success and how it has impacted on people in the organisation.
Bjoern Eichstaedt: This will be followed by a round table where participants can get to know each other and share their own stories and experiences. Not as industry colleagues, suppliers, partners or investors, but as humans facing similar challenges. I’m really looking forward to this!
If you’re interested in joining the first Leadership Dojo event on July 2nd in Munich, we invite you to register your interest. As the program is held in a small, curated setting, participation is by invitation. We will get back to you as soon as your seat is confirmed.
