Globe-ing Inc. was established in 2021. Championing the concept of “insider-outsider,” the company’s defining strength lies in its ability to become deeply embedded in a client’s operations as a consultant while retaining the perspective of an independent third party to support strategy development and execution.
The company is also actively working to build an environment where women can thrive. We spoke with Director and Executive Vice President COO Nahoko Wada and Senior Manager Saena Yano — who is making her mark at the company — about the firm’s vision, the kind of people they want to work with, and the passion they bring to their work.
Nahoko Wada
Director, Executive Vice President & COO
After working in M&A at Morgan Stanley, she spent over a decade in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group. She subsequently served as Japan Country Manager at Agoda, an international digital travel platform, and as Executive Vice President at Demae-can, a food delivery company. She then returned to consulting at McKinsey, working on business creation and digital strategy, before joining Globe-ing. Mother of one.
Saena Yano
Senior Manager
After graduating from the Faculty of Business and Commerce at Keio University, she worked as an Accenture Strategy Manager before joining her current company. She has been involved in multiple projects centered on the telecommunications and manufacturing industries, including business strategy formulation, business model design, new business strategy development and execution support, and alliance strategy development and execution support.
Three Business Pillars: Strategy Consulting, Joint Initiatives, and Cloud Products
— First, I’d like to ask Executive Vice President Wada about the company’s business. Could you walk us through what you do?
Looking ahead to 2030, we are building the company around three core businesses. The first is our consulting business, the second is our joint initiative business, and the third is our cloud product business.
The first, our consulting business, is currently our core operation and covers strategy consulting, DX consulting, and related services. The second, our joint initiative business, involves us working alongside clients in their actual operations to build businesses together. The third, our cloud product business, involves Globe-ing providing SaaS offerings.
— Could you tell us more specifically about what the SaaS offering involves?
We are looking to deliver services based on our consulting know-how through the cloud. I have built up roughly twenty years of experience as a consultant, and many of the analytical and problem-identification methodologies used in consulting have not changed dramatically in that time. By systematizing these methods and frameworks and connecting them to live data in real time, there is enormous potential to visualize the health of a company’s management and to accelerate and enhance executive decision-making. We intend to offer these capabilities as SaaS for use in management.
We are working toward 2030 with the goal of having each of these three businesses contribute roughly equal revenue.
— With consulting at the core and a broad range of businesses expanding outward, what kind of career path can a consultant build at your company?
Within the Consulting Division, there is first the standard career ladder: Consultant, Senior Consultant, Manager, Senior Manager, and Partner. Beyond that, there are real career paths that involve spending several years on secondment as a business unit leader or team member at a client organization, or working on AI and cloud product and tool development, or business development. We are actively advancing our use of AI and are developing a range of DX solutions at pace, drawing on our consulting experience. Depending on what kind of career each person wants to build and what kind of work they want to be involved in, there is considerable flexibility in the paths available.
Whatever career path someone takes, I believe our company is an environment where individuals can greatly develop their capabilities in the area of “business creation” — something that Japanese companies often lack.
We Want to Work with People Who Love to Set Their Own Questions and Think Them Through
— What kind of people do you want to work with?
We want to work with people who have insatiable curiosity, a sense of ownership and entrepreneurship, and who genuinely enjoy setting their own questions and thinking them through to the end — and I believe our company is well suited to people like that. It is partly a product of Japan’s educational culture, but Japanese people tend to excel at following predetermined procedures and applying standardized methods to get things done. On the other hand, setting your own “questions” from scratch, structuring problems independently, and building your own approaches to uncertain situations are skills that many people find difficult or uncomfortable.
— That is a point that gets raised about Japanese professionals fairly often.
Compared with the early days of consulting, as the consulting market has expanded I have the sense that even among those who aspire to become consultants, more and more people come in with the attitude of “just show me how to solve it and I can do the work.” But with AI having advanced as far as it has, we are entering an era of human-AI coexistence. The more AI evolves, the more important it becomes for people not simply to churn through standardized tasks, but to deeply observe what is in front of them, form hypotheses, map out an approach for arriving at answers, use that to mobilize organizations, and move forward with agile judgment. People who find this kind of challenge — one only a human can take on — genuinely exciting, and who will take the risk and step up of their own accord, are exactly the kind of people our company is looking for.
— Setting your own questions and thinking them through is also precisely the area where AI cannot replace humans.
No matter how far AI technology advances, there will always be things that only humans can do.
Finding the essential challenge through repeated dialogue with clients is one of them. Probing for bottlenecks through conversation, bringing people along, and rapidly executing the right moves — that entire process is, if anything, becoming more important in the age of AI. The question is whether you can use deep powers of observation to identify what is really wrong with a business, and further, whether you can find the act of raising the problem yourself and working through to its resolution genuinely enjoyable. This kind of distinctly human thoughtfulness — not just for our consultants, but for anyone trying to drive the success of the business they work on — will be increasingly required in the world ahead.
— Could you share your vision for the future?
Globe-ing is a company that has been growing at over sixty percent a year. Our membership, which was around ninety people last year, has now exceeded two hundred and twenty. But we are still only in our third year as a company. Rather than focusing solely on financial performance, we want to make sure we never neglect the work of building the foundation needed to nurture and develop our people, who are still growing.
Creating an environment where our members can work happily is something I consider extremely important. When I was a project manager at a foreign consulting firm, I had a child — but it was an era when work-style reform and remote working had not yet taken hold the way they have today, and when my child was young, I went through a genuinely difficult period trying to balance work and home life. The struggle of trying to manage both was one of the reasons I moved from consulting to a business company roughly ten years ago. It is precisely because I have lived through that experience that I feel strongly about wanting the talented young generation coming through today to build their careers and their lives in a state of genuine happiness. We intend to develop the systems and structures at our company that will make that kind of working life possible. When a society that is easier to work in takes shape, I believe we will once again see the brilliance of the Japanese companies I looked up to as a child.
From Investment Banking to Consulting — and the “Six Don’ts” That Convinced Her to Join Globe-ing
— Could you tell us about your career background, Executive Vice President Wada?
After working in the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley, I joined Boston Consulting Group in 2004. I spent over ten years in strategy consulting there, but I also had a desire to take on direct responsibility for a business rather than work purely as an advisor — so I became Japan Country Manager at Agoda, an online travel company. After that I served as Executive Vice President at Demae-can, a food delivery company, but stepped down when the company was acquired. Since I found real satisfaction in growing businesses while maintaining a strategic consulting perspective, I decided to return to consulting and joined McKinsey, where I worked on business creation and related engagements.
— You started your career at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. What made you want to move into consulting from there?
My original interest was in global M&A as a vehicle for the strategic development of Japanese companies, which is why I started my career at Morgan Stanley.
As a child I lived in Southeast Asia, and in the 1980s Japanese companies — manufacturers in particular — were growing at a remarkable rate. Witnessing the energy of Japanese companies overseas, even as a child I felt proud of them, and I began to think that one day I too wanted to be involved in their development.
But once I started working on actual M&A transactions, I came to feel keenly that M&A is ultimately just one tool among many. I saw many cases where M&A became an end in itself rather than a means. I found myself wanting to engage directly and deeply with the fundamental questions of corporate strategy — does this company truly need this M&A deal? What moves should it be making today for ten or twenty years from now? — and that is what led me to pursue a career as a strategy consultant.
— Given that background, what led you to move from McKinsey to Globe-ing?
Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey were both outstanding organizations, and I genuinely believe they shaped me enormously. But as large global organizations with thousands or tens of thousands of people, they also operate within very real constraints and entanglements. For example, taking on a direct responsibility role at a client’s site — leading sales or recruiting people — is not something compliance rules permit. In reality, you are always required to stay in the background and confine yourself to a support role.
But having experienced what it means to be a business leader, I can say that genuine business creation and growth are very difficult to achieve under that kind of engagement model. A business grows because someone acts as a protagonist — developing customers, negotiating, hiring people, building a team. I was becoming increasingly convinced that achieving those things from within a foreign consulting firm would be difficult, and it was at that point that I had the chance to speak with Globe-ing’s Wajima and Tanaka. I felt that Globe-ing was a place where I could do what I actually wanted to do, and I joined in January 2024.
— What was the deciding factor in joining Globe-ing?
The biggest factor was the “Six Don’ts” put forward by our Representative Director Wajima.
1. We do NOT draw up “X Strategy” without understanding digital, without knowing the business operations, without knowing the business itself.
2. We do NOT manufacture our own volume zone through large-scale SI or BPO in a self-serving way.
3. We do NOT hire anyone who is not a true professional.
4. We do NOT offer reusable know-how and insights as consulting services. (We industrialize them and deliver them affordably.)
5. We do NOT play along with clients who have no genuine intention of transforming their business.
6. We do NOT monopolize all service delivery in-house. (We actively collaborate with other firms and ventures that have complementary strengths.)
These are the “Six Don’ts.” They represent an articulation of the failure modes that consulting tends to fall into. As these six commitments show, Representative Director Wajima has said that companies truly willing to challenge themselves on behalf of their clients are not as common as one might hope. I found myself deeply aligned with that view, and the idea of building a company alongside colleagues at a consulting firm that engages with clients in genuine earnest drew me in — and that is what led me to join.
Because the Company Is Still Young, You Can Challenge Yourself on Your Own Terms — Free from Entanglements
— Next I’d like to speak with Senior Manager Yano, who works on the front lines. What kinds of projects is your team currently working on?
I belong to a team called IS (Industry Strategy). Currently I am working with a client in the manufacturing sector, supporting everything from the design of processes for generating new businesses to hands-on accompaniment on specific projects.
— Who are your counterparts on the client side? Could you also tell us about how the work is structured day to day?
We align on overarching direction with CxO-level executives, while day-to-day communication tends to involve department heads, section managers, and the team members actually driving the new business initiatives. We sometimes visit prospective customers for the new business together with the client as well.
In terms of how we work, there are three modes: coming into the Globe-ing office, being based at a client site, and working remotely — and my impression is that each accounts for roughly a third of the time.
— What kind of person do you think thrives at your company?
Our consulting service goes beyond external advisory work. We aim to act as a “sherpa for transformation” — serving as the client’s “insider-outsider” — accompanying them all the way to the end and generating concrete business results. To do that well, a person needs not only solid baseline consulting skills, but also a genuine passion for the client’s business and industry, and the ability to drive things forward as if they were their own.
— For those considering joining, what can they expect to gain from working here?
Large consulting firms have well-established brands and methodologies, and that is undeniably attractive. But our company is growing by redefining what consulting itself can be and taking on new challenges. So rather than adapting to something that already exists, I feel that every day brings a wealth of learning from the perspective of creating something new yourself. For anyone who has something they want to take on in the future, or who wants to stand at the front as a leader, this is a company where the work itself will give you an enormous breadth of experience.
Because the company is still young, there are no entanglements or organizational barriers. You can face the client one hundred percent, without having to spend energy on internal politics or navigating the environment — and you can bring one hundred percent of your own value to bear. Precisely because it is an environment where you can confront the work head-on, I believe the experience and knowledge you gain here are correspondingly rich.
Wanting to Build the Strength to Challenge Herself as an Individual — a Forward-Looking Choice That Brought Her to Globe-ing
— Could you tell us about your career background?
I joined Accenture straight out of university and stayed until I reached manager level. After that, I joined Globe-ing.
Globe-ing was founded in March 2021, and two months later, in May 2021, I left Accenture and joined. I remember that when I joined, there were only about ten employees and the company didn’t even have an office yet.
— Despite having risen to manager at Accenture, moving to a company that had just been founded was a significant leap, wasn’t it?
I did hesitate at the prospect of jumping into an environment without even an office. But Globe-ing, despite being a startup, already had a large number of highly strategic engagements — so I believed I could make use of the consulting skills I had developed while also taking on new challenges. I think companies that combine the best of both a startup and a major consulting firm are genuinely rare.
The fact that I personally had a desire to take on some kind of challenge also helped push me toward the decision. I thought that by joining a venture company, I could add more value as an individual in my own right, rather than being one of many employees at a large corporation — and that conviction led me to join Globe-ing.
— You joined Globe-ing in 2021 and are now, roughly three years on, a Senior Manager. Like Executive Vice President Wada, you give the impression of a company where women are thriving.
Management has been working to build an environment where women can thrive since the company was founded. The reality is that women working in the consulting industry are still very much in the minority. We want to do our part to change that, and we are working to become a company where talented women can build long and flourishing careers.
— Finally, could you tell us about your vision for the future?
Looking further ahead, I want to be involved in shaping the culture of an era or a society. I would be truly happy if a culture I helped create became a place of belonging — somewhere that saved or sustained someone in some way.
To make that happen, I believe it’s important to be surrounded by a flow of diverse passions from deeply professional people. This company brings together professionals with expertise across a wide range of fields, and I hope to learn here while walking step by step toward my future aspirations.
【Post-Interview Note】
I was impressed by the stance of seriously pursuing the philosophy “Sparking moments for richer lives” not only for customers but also for employees. What’s surprising is that diverse career paths—not just honing expertise as a consultant but launching businesses as CXOs or transforming into investors—are established as systems.
Through the interview, I felt the heat of the “Second Founding Period” where they continue updating themselves rather than settling for the status quo. With flextime without core hours, they maximally respect employee discretion while placing well-being organization building at the core of management. For those greedy people who want to tackle social issues as professionals while making their own lives colorful and rich, this is the best platform to give shape to their dreams. Won’t you share the joy of illuminating the future together and making society better as “ignition points” of innovation here?
ConsulNext / Senior Consultant
Masahito Tsukada
Globe-ing Inc. — Company Information
| Company Name | Globe-ing Inc. |
|---|---|
| URL | https://www.globe-ing.com/ |
| Representative Directors | Representative Director: Sosuke Wajima Representative Director & President: Kohei Tanaka |
| Capital | ¥90,000,000 |
| Employees | 200 *Approximate figure as of end of February 2024, including subsidiary employees |
| Locations | [Tokyo Midtown Roppongi 39s Office] Midtown Tower 39F, 9-7-1 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-6239 [Gaienmae 3rd Office] 3rd MINAMI AOYAMA 11F, 3-1-34 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062 |
| Business Activities | ・Digital service delivery (Octagon Service) ・Strategy consulting ・DX consulting ・Digital Analytics / Data Services |
