Before Catalys

I joined Accenture from university and worked on large system integration projects. An interest in business and management then led me to move to KPMG Consulting, where I worked on business strategy and PMO support, mainly for telecoms clients. While at KPMG I felt the gap in my knowledge and experience of management, and enrolled at Waseda Business School. Meeting classmates working across many different fields made me think about where my career should go. Out of that came the wish to move my centre of gravity towards strategy and to become someone who raises a company’s value side by side with its leaders. Before joining Catalys I was weighing up whether that was best done at a consulting firm, a private equity fund or an operating company.

Why I joined

Two things decided it. The first is that this is not just a consulting firm: it acquires businesses and takes on the challenge of being a principal. Working at a consulting firm, the feeling had been growing in me that as AI develops the value of only offering opinions will fade, and that a firm which goes over to running businesses and accumulates practical knowledge will be very strong.

The second, above all, was being drawn to the character of the CEOs and to what the company stands for. Talking with Tanaka and Abe, the co-founders, I found myself strongly in agreement with a culture built around Cortisol Management. If a company thinks seriously about its people’s happiness and turns that into actual policies and actions, I thought, then you can concentrate on performing at a high level without worry.

Growth and results

I feel myself growing every day. Honestly, compared with before I joined, I reflect often on how much less I used to push a thought all the way through, and how much weaker my insistence on quality was. The biggest change is that the amount and the quality of thinking have both risen sharply. That applies everywhere, from the broad shape of a strategy down to small corrections in a deck, but above all I feel I am being trained thoroughly in thinking about the client. An environment where everyone debates what actually matters regardless of rank is stimulating, and I take new insights from it every day.

Balancing graduate school

As I mentioned, I have spent the second year of my master’s at Catalys. I was worried at first about whether I could manage both, but my manager and the team have been very understanding, making room when I have to leave for class and accommodating a flexible way of working, and I am grateful for it. It is demanding at times, but doing both is worth a great deal. At graduate school I enjoy debating with classmates and professors on a level footing rather than as a consultant, and it is a fresh kind of stimulus. Looking again at a business problem in front of me through what I have learned in class sometimes shifts my perspective unexpectedly. The two feeding each other is accelerating how fast I grow.

What I want to achieve at Catalys

I want to build experience and take on value creation. Until now my work has mostly been solving a single, fairly well-defined problem carved out by the client. Value creation asks for something closer to mixed martial arts: finding and solving the many different problems tied to the measure of enterprise value. I want the ability to stand back and see a whole business, and to design and deliver the measures that genuinely create value, not just depth in one area, so that I can work on value creation as a right hand to the people running the company. In time I would like to be involved in running a company we have acquired ourselves. For now, I want to build practical experience one project at a time.

* Roles and details are as they were at the time of the interview.