Just back from Japan

Spent last week in Tokyo where my book on Harvard Business School recently came out. Its Japanese title is “Harvard Business School: A Factory for Unhappy People”, a fact I didn’t realize until it was explained to me by the publisher, Nikkei. I’m told it will appeal to a miserable streak in Japanese readers. And it seems to be, as the book is selling well and around 300 people showed up to two talks I did in the city, at Globis, an English-language business school, and Maruzen, a huge bookstore close the central train station. I also had the chance to do some research on my next book, which will be about the nature of salespeople. My host was an HBS classmate, Daisuke Iwase, who turned down every high-dollar, financial offer going in 2006 to help set up Japan’s first online life insurance firm, Lifenet. It’s a remarkable story, which I’ll tell in another post.