Dear readers,
I hope May is treating you well wherever you are reading this. I'm writing to you fresh off a quiet Golden Week road trip to Shizuoka. The tea farms were impossibly green, the waterfalls fed by spring melt, and the pace of life so slow that I almost forgot to check my phone.
One afternoon, I spent the better part of an hour talking with a retired farmer who tends a small plot by a stream. He pulls his vegetables straight from the soil and eats them on the spot. When I asked how he spends his days, he told me he's content packing a lunch and watching the water. No passport, no bucket list, no second act. Just enough.
That conversation has stayed with me, and not only because it was quiet. It is the exact opposite of the world the rest of this issue describes — a world that Sebastian Chen calls BANI: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. Oracle and TCS each cut twelve thousand jobs in a single quarter. The US is pouring capital into AI infrastructure. Europe is legislating its way through the transition. And Japan, the subject of this issue's special feature on The Hardest Market in the World, is being asked to reframe its talent system from a sourcing problem into a participation system shaped by trust, relationships, and decision-making.
For business professionals and leaders in the corporate world, the temptation is to read all this as a crisis. I think it's something else. It's an invitation. As my favorite mug reminds me each morning: stay calm and carry on. The global economy is still turning. The US and Japanese stock markets are at all-time highs. The US dollar hasn't crashed. That is the calm. The case for carrying on is what fills the rest of this issue — Jonathan Stewart on why AI is moving us from passive users of systems to active creators of solutions, and Jody Ono on training the leaders we actually need, not just the managers we end up with.
So while my farmer in Shizuoka may never read this magazine, his question is the one I keep coming back to: what is enough, and what is worth chasing? I hope this issue helps you answer it, in your own way.
Warm thanks to Jody, Sebastian and Jonathan for their generous contributions, and to all of you for reading.
Warm regards,
Yan Sen Lu Editor, Makana 2.0
