The first experience took place while studying leadership theory at Kauai High School on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. One day, the teacher began to explain that there are two types of responsibility: “responsibility for outcomes” and “responsibility for process.”
For me, having grown up in Japan where “responsibility” was synonymous with “delivering results,” this explanation was a revelation. It meant that even if a desired outcome isn’t achieved, responsibility can still be fulfilled if the process leading to it was fair and executed with the utmost effort. It was the moment I first theoretically understood the multifaceted nature of responsibility.
This lesson remained at the core of my thinking.
The second experience occurred at the Faculty of Law in a Japanese university. In the very first class, the professor stated, “The ultimate goal of law is to realize justice, but there are two major schools of thought on justice: ‘Substantive Justice’ and ‘Procedural Justice’.”
The moment I heard this explanation—of Substantive Justice, which aims to achieve an absolute “rightness,” and Procedural Justice, which emphasizes the “fairness of the procedures” to reach a conclusion—my experience in Hawaii vividly overlapped in my mind.
It was then that the prototype for NBI’s core management philosophy was firmly born within me: it is a fair process that creates lasting trust and true value.