Critical situations test a leader’s true worth, according to the Director of Sasin Japan Center (SJC), Professor Takamasa Fujioka. He was featured in ArayZ, a Bangkok-based Japanese magazine, on the topic, “From Competition to Collaboration, and Co-creation of Value”. Professor Fujioka’s article takes a brief look at the state of the world during the pandemic in the last three years. “Corporate management is always about responding to changes in the environment. At a business school, you mainly learn how to respond to these changes in management strategy classes,” Professor Fujioka said. Management strategy identifies the environment of future companies, shows the pattern of interaction with the environment in the future, and provides guidelines for creating and acquiring value for society and customers. It is comparable to a route that effectively utilizes limited management resources. Leaders in crisis are called upon to have an entrepreneurial spirit, to find opportunities, and to trigger transformation. With discontinuous changes, it is not enough to solely improve the efficiency of corporate management. In Thailand and the Mekong region, open innovation and collaboration have been some of the most frequently used words in the last ten years. The development of information technology ensures that we have entered an era of new ideas, regardless of the size of a company. Attracting talented and creative human resources and creating an internal environment suitable for innovation is inadequate in keeping up with the current speed of business. We need business producers who know how to envision a collaborative network and know how to bring that network into practice. It is crucial for managers to present a vision and to think about what they want to know instead of making predictions on what the company should know. Thus, the realization of the creation of value is through maintaining the attitude and determination to pursue what will be the absolute axis: If the role of managers is to create new value for society, what kind of society should we aim for, and for whom is it creating value? Click here to read the article in Japanese on ArayZ